Johns Hopkins Confines Owls to a Basement Laboratory: Take Action Now!

Since 2017, Johns Hopkins University Experiencing Shreesh Mysore has received more than $ 800,000 in tax-funded grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study how groups of neurons or nerve cells work together barn owls.

Mysore cuts into the skulls, inserts electrodes into their brains, restrains the birds in an experimental rig, and then records their neural activity while having them watch the TV monitors or exposing them to the bursts of noise through earphones. For some experiments, he's restrained fully conscious owls for up to 12 hours while recording and poking at neurons in their brains. He admits in a paper that "some birds were calm when restrained, while others were not."

In another published paper, Mysore described how to put a stop to the tube so that they would be prone-an unnatural position for them and then screwed the bolts to their skulls into a "stereotaxic device" so that they could not move their heads.

A news release from the university now claims-without evidence or rationale-that understanding neural activity in barn owls could be the way to developing therapies for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in humans. Say what?

Looking at the neural responses of trapped barn owls -whose skulls were cut open-to-the-wall. Even if it did, it's too cruel to be allowed.

In addition to its transparent cruelty, the use of animals in experimentation has proved unqualified failure. The evidence is overwhelming that data from experiments on animals can not be reliably applied to humans. NIH does not know how much it does not work for you. And a review in the prestigious medical journal The BMJ reported that more than 90 percent of "the most promising findings from animal research".

Yet each year, NIH direct more than $ 15 billion of taxpayer money to animal experiments. Johns Hopkins is at the front of the line to the government gravy train, securing hundreds of millions of dollars for experiments on animals annually.

NIH not to squander taxpayer dollars on Mysore's cruel and worthless experiments on owls and instead to redirect funds to modern, superior, non-animal research methods.

Putting your subject in your own eye and drawing attention to your e-mail.