Iggy Pop donates his song "Free" to help end cruel experimentation on monkeys
Iggy Pop has lent his song “Free” to PETA to be used in the animal rights organization’s new video that raises awareness on monkey experimentation. “Anyone can see the pain and terror in these monkeys’ eyes. No one should have to suffer like this,” says Iggy Pop. The atmospheric track is from his 2019 album, and has Pop solemnly saying “I want to be free” atop ambient trumpet, eerily underscore the disturbing footage in the video.
“As soon as PETA heard Iggy Pop’s song ‘Free,’ we knew it was perfect for highlighting the suffering of monkeys held captive and tormented in laboratories,” PETA spokesperson Moira Colley told Billboard. “Luckily, Iggy is as kind as he is charismatic, and he immediately agreed to let us use it after seeing our disturbing footage of traumatized monkeys.”
You can watch the video, and learn more about it, below.
Iggy Pop is a longtime animal rights activist.
The new video features footage from PETA’s investigations into National Institutes of Health (NIH) experimenter Elisabeth Murray’s painful, invasive, and deadly “monkey fright” tests, in which she inflicts permanent and traumatic brain damage in monkeys and then terrorizes them with fake snakes and spiders.
University of Massachusetts–Amherst experimenter Melinda Novak’s solitary confinement experiments and NIH experimenter Stephen Suomi’s maternal deprivation experiments, in which distraught monkeys were driven insane inside small, barren cages and baby monkeys were torn away from their mothers, respectively, are also featured in the video, as are tests by notorious multibillion-dollar “laboratory-for-hire” Covance.
Numerous published studies have shown that animal experimentation wastes resources and lives, as more than 90% of highly promising results from basic scientific research—much of it involving animal testing—fail to lead to treatments for humans. And 95% of new medications that are found to be safe and effective in animals fail in human clinical trials.
