Feds Must Not Give Johns Hopkins University Another Cent for Deadly Owl Experiments

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Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) can be extremely hard to live with. Thankfully, an experimenter at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) planned to make progress for ADD by…cutting into owls’ skulls??? 😨 Spoiler alert: He didn’t make progress.

jhu experimenter shreesh mysore has used over $3.7 million in funding to torment barn owls.

In his experiments, Mysore cut into owls’ skulls to expose their brains. Then, he screwed and glued metal devices onto their heads. The owls—who would fly huge distances in their natural habitat—were forced into plastic tubes or restraint jackets so cramped that they couldn’t move their wings while Mysore blasted them with sounds and lights and measured their brain activity. During some experiments, he poked electrodes around in fully conscious owls’ brains.

all the owls are killed at the end of the experiments.

You might be wondering…how tf is this relevant to ADD? Well, it’s not. 😑 Unlike humans, owls’ hearing and sight are specialized for target selection. Overstimulating them in a scary laboratory doesn’t help us better understand ADD in humans at all.

Scientists who realize that humans and owls have, you know, different brains, are studying ADD through top-tier neuroimaging techniques. THAT’S what paved the way for current ADD treatments—not killing owls.

help save owls

Federal funding for Mysore’s experiments reportedly ran out on May 31, 2026. We have to make sure he doesn’t get any more cash thrown his way. 💸💸💸

Please urge federal officials to deny any new money for tormenting owls!

owls’ brains exposed at johns hopkins university

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I’m writing today to implore you to deny issuing any new grants for cruel experiments on owls carried out by Johns Hopkins University experimenter Shreesh Mysore. Mysore has inserted electrodes into barn owls’ brains, restrained some of them while fully conscious for numerous hours at a time, and recorded their neural activity while they were forced to look at dots on a TV monitor or listen to bursts of noise delivered through earphones. Johns Hopkins acknowledges that owls are used for these studies because their “midbrain is organized in a way that makes it relatively easy to track the activity of specific neurons.” Their use has nothing to do with sound science and everything to do with convenience. Mysore has said that experimenting on owls whose heads are surgically fixed in place could “change the way the brain is solving problems and we might misinterpret what’s happening, or misunderstand, if we do this in head-fixed animals.” Yet he still attached bolts to owls’ skulls to hold their heads in a fixed position, rendering his data worthless. I strongly urge you to deny funding for any future such tests involving owls. Thank you for your attention to this important matter.

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