Each year in the U.S. alone, more than 111 million animals—including mice, rats, frogs, dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters, guinea pigs, monkeys, fish, and birds—are killed for biology lessons, medical training, curiosity-driven experimentation, and testing for chemicals, drugs, food, and cosmetics. As PETA works to end cruel, ineffective, and archaic experiments on animals, we’ve received crucial help from some major celebrities in the fields of music, film, television, and sports.
From taking on Elisabeth Murray, an experimenter at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) who spends her days sawing open monkeys’ skulls and pumping toxins into their brains, to calling out Texas A&M University for experimenting on dogs deliberately bred to suffer from canine muscular dystrophy (MD) and urging customers to shop cruelty-free, these 16 influential figures have joined forces with PETA to help end testing on animals:

Davey Havok
Davey Havok—longtime vegan and passionate advocate for animals—teamed up with PETA and his new friend Wee Man to spread an important message. The musician says that his choice of costar came down to the speciesism of which rats are often the victim. Despite these animals’ caring nature and intelligence, experimenters kill millions of rats like Wee Man each year in cruel and useless experiments that waste taxpayer dollars. In U.S. laboratories, they’re even denied the meager protections of the federal Animal Welfare Act.

In his campaign, Davey explains the horrors of the “forced swim test.” In this widely discredited test, experimenters drop mice, rats, guinea pigs, hamsters, or gerbils in inescapable containers filled with water. The panicked animals try to escape by attempting to climb up the sides of the beakers or even diving underwater in search of an exit. They paddle furiously, desperately trying to keep their heads above water. Eventually, they’ll start to float. Experimenters say this test tells us something about the effectiveness of antidepressants, but a study has shown that it’s no more predictive than a coin toss.

Sir Paul McCartney
Sir Paul McCartney has been a strong advocate for the Save Cruelty-Free Cosmetics European Citizens’ Initiative. Across Europe, millions of animals each year are used in experiments that inflict often severe suffering and overwhelmingly fail to deliver on their main promise, which is to improve human health. The victims include mice, fish, rats, guinea pigs, rabbits, cats, dogs, and monkeys.