If you travel on Madison Metro Buses, you may have seen the ads with pictures of cats with surgical plates on their heads, or undergoing optical surgery. The ads are the work of the People for Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, which has targeted the University of Wisconsin’s Neuroscience lab for what it claims are egregious incidents of animal abuse. PETA recently sued the University of Wisconsin under the state’s Open Records Law for failure to release photos and other documents of the experiments on cats used to evaluate how brains process auditory signals. In a settlement agreement, the UW released photos that became the basis for PETA’s ad campaign. On March 17, Jeremy Beckham, Laboratory Campaign Manager for the People for Ethical Treatment of Animals and attorney Leslie Hamilton talked about the campaign on the Monday Buzz.
More WORT coverage on this story:
The University of Wisconsin’s response to PETA’s charges.