Ahead of undergraduate Open Days at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) on 12 and 13 June, PETA has placed a new ad just a stone’s throw from the campus, warning prospective students that researchers at the university are tormenting mice in cruel and useless sepsis experiments that consistently fail to lead to effective treatments for humans. The appeal depicts a dead mouse alongside the message, “Septic Fail. Mice Suffer and Die in Sepsis Tests at QMUL – With No Human Benefits.”
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“What QMUL’s tours fail to divulge to students is that on campus, terrified mice are being cut open while they’re still alive and subjected to the agonising experience of sepsis, all for worthless experiments that benefit noone,” says PETA Senior Campaigns Manager Kate Werner. “PETA is urging the university to stop wasting time, resources, and animals’ lives on these cruel and ineffective experiments and adopt human-relevant research methods.”
More than 150 drugs have successfully treated sepsis in mice, yet none have been effective in treating humans. Despite the well-documented failure in using mice to model human sepsis, QMUL experimenters are cutting open terrified mice and puncturing their intestines to leak faecal matter into their bodies. During experiments, some mice experience severe sepsis, which can include major organ failure and difficulty breathing. All animals are killed at the end of these experiments. Some data from these experiments have been published in papers that were later retracted by the publisher because the animal data and conclusions were deemed ‘unreliable’.
Mice are intelligent, complex, and social individuals who experience a wide range of emotions. They become attached to each other, love their families, and easily bond with their human guardians – returning as much affection as they receive.
PETA encourages everyone to urge Queen Mary to heed the scientific evidence and join other institutions – including the University of Kent – that have committed to non-animal methods in sepsis research.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on” —points out that when it comes to the ability to feel pain, hunger, and thirst, a mouse is a dog is a boy. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk or follow PETA on Facebook, X, TikTok, or Instagram.