To encourage empathy for animals suffering in university laboratories, peta2—part of PETA’s youth division—is visiting the University of Central Florida (UCF) today and tomorrow with Abduction, an award-winning virtual reality experience landing on college campuses across the country. In this eerie experience, visitors will enter a mysterious truck containing a mobile virtual reality studio. The students will seemingly find themselves stranded in the desert with a couple of fellow humans, abducted by aliens, taken aboard a spaceship, and subjected to a shocking experience, similar to what animals endure in laboratories. They’ll watch as their friends are subjected to painful tests—knowing that they’ll be next.

When:    Wednesday, February 21, and Thursday, February 22, 11 a.m.–5 p.m.

Where:    Memory Mall (near the Student Union), University of Central Florida

Watch the trailer here. Broadcast-quality footage of the Abduction virtual reality experience is available upon request.

At UCF, experimenters have purposely bred rats to have neurodegenerative disease, leaving them to suffer with limb paralysis and atrophy of their skeletal muscles for more than nine months before killing them and cutting up their spinal cords. Experimenters have also killed mice after infecting them with Lyme disease and irradiated mice to death before taking bone marrow from them. Other mice have been infected with a virus that caused them to experience weight loss, a hunched posture, ruffled fur, and a lack of movement before experimenters killed them by breaking their necks.

“Many students don’t know that on their own college campuses, frightened and confused animals are being psychologically tormented, mutilated, and killed in laboratories, with no way to escape or even understand what’s happening to them,” says peta2 Senior Director Rachelle Owen. “peta2 is on a mission to open young people’s eyes to this cruelty, help students understand what it feels like, and motivate them to join our call for a switch to superior, non-animal research.”

Studies show that 90% of all basic research—most of which involves animals—fails to lead to treatments for humans, which is why peta2 is pushing universities to pivot to sophisticated, human-relevant research methods.

Abduction—which was filmed in VR180 with assistance from the immersive content creation studio Prosper XR—has stopped at nearly 50 other college campuses over the past year, including Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California–Los Angeles, and the University of Texas at Austin. Abduction has won Gold and Audience honors from the 2023 Shorty Impact Awards.

peta2—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to abuse in any way”—helps young people make meaningful changes for animals in their everyday lives. For more information, please visit peta2.org or follow the group on TikTok or Instagram.