Victory - Yale Cancels Vivisector's Lecture for Kids!

[Guest guest]

We're never going away and we always win! Victory - Yale Cancels Vivisector's Lecture for Kids Thanks to IDA supporters in Connecticut for helping change university's plans Yale University is holding a series of Science Saturday presentations to remind "kids of all ages" that "science is fun." But they abruptly cancelled a lecture scheduled for Saturday, April 5th by researcher Marina Picciotto after animal advocates protested that she tortures and kills defenseless animals in cruel addiction studies. IDA joined the Yale Affiliates Animal Rights Network

(YAARN) and other groups in calling on university officials to pull the plug on Picciotto, who deliberately gets mice and rats addicted to drugs and kills them to analyze their brains. In federally-funded experiments, Picciotto has hung mice by their tails attached to paper clips to observe the effects of nicotine on their physical activity. She has also given cocaine to pregnant rats to induce brain damage in their babies, and placed the pups in cages with electrified floors in order to shock them repeatedly. The press release for Picciotto's presentation included a photo of her playfully holding a mouse in one hand -- a deceptive whitewashing of the gruesome realities behind animal experimentation. Yale announced the cancellation of Picciotto's lecture after

receiving numerous letters, emails, and phone calls from IDA supporters and other concerned citizens, and perhaps because animal advocates were planning to hold a protest at the presentation. In place of a lecture on torturing and killing animals for "fun," kids enjoyed an intriguing presentation by a mechanical engineer on the Segway Human Transporter. IDA would like to commend all those who helped show Yale that it is inappropriate for an institution of learning to promote animal abuse, especially in the name of science. We expect that the remaining presentations in their Science Saturdays series will promote a more humane message to budding scientists. Write a polite email to Patricia Wooding, Coordinator of Science Saturdays, thanking her for canceling Picciotto's presentation, and asking that she bar animal experimentation lectures from the series.