At a laboratory at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in Baltimore, experimenter Shreesh Mysore cuts open barn owls’ skulls, screws metal devices onto their heads, restrains the birds, and bombards them for hours with noises and lights. PETA is waging a campaign to end these cruel and deadly experiments—and you can help.

On the first day of spring semester classes at Johns Hopkins University (JHU), a parliament of PETA protesters wearing owl masks came in for a (socially distanced) landing on campus to protest university experimenter Shreesh Mysore’s appallingly cruel, admittedly worthless, and apparently illegal brain experiments on barn owls.

Funded by Johns Hopkins and taxpayers through the National Institutes of Health to the tune of more than $2.5 million, Mysore intends to use 50 to 60 barn owls in just the current set of painful experiments. He claims that his experiments could aid in understanding ADHD, but decades of experiments on barn owls have contributed nothing to treatments for humans.

Barn owls are sentient, remarkably intelligent birds who play an important role in their ecosystem. Their populations are increasingly threatened by urban and suburban development, loss of grasslands and suitable nesting sites, pesticides, rodenticides, and motor vehicles. They need to be protected, not experimented on.