In Undercover: Inside the Bunker, now streaming on Amazon Prime, activist and protected witness Carlota Saorsa shines a piercing light into one of the darkest, most concealed corners of the animal research industry: private contract research for the biopharmaceutical, chemical, cosmetic, tobacco, and food industries.

For 544 days — the longest known infiltration of its kind — Saorsa documented what can only be described as state-sanctioned torture of primates, dogs, mini pigs, rabbits, rats, and mice. She compiled over 7,000 video files, exposing industrial-scale violence in a facility so hidden from the outside world that she named it “The Bunker”.

There were no windows.

Only long corridors, locked doors, and barren cages filled with animals “desperate” to escape.
The smell of “piss and sh*t”.
The breathing in of “fear”.
The “metallic taste of blood” on your tongue.
And, as Saorsa puts it, violence “all around you”.

The footage Saorsa captured with a hidden camera — much of which didn’t even make it into the film — is beyond harrowing:

• A rabbit screams in agony as his spine is audibly snapped by a staff member – before being dropped to the floor, where he uses all he has left to, repeatedly, try and drag himself away from his tormentors.
• A senior staff member draws a “face” on the genitals of a monkey while he’s pinned down for blood extraction.
• A rat, injected with an excruciatingly painful experimental drug, gasps for air, while a voice off-camera causally mutters: “I don’t know how this one isn’t dead.”
• A monkey is forced face-down onto a table — his arms held by one worker, his legs by another.
• A dog is left to bleed out.
• Small animals have their heads cut off with scissors. Others have their necks callously snapped and their bodies causally tossed onto heaps of the dead. Dogs are hung by their scruffs and hurled into cages. Animals scream, writhe, and flail as their bodies are shaken, swung about violently, stabbed, contorted, brutalized, and — ultimately — discarded like trash.

These horrors are not anomalies, and their perpetrators are not “bad apples”.

This is the animal research industry — an industry that rewards staff who taunt, mock, and verbally abuse animals (including those who are being killed or actively dying), while punishing those who show any hint of compassion.

Indeed, when Saorsa was suspected of treating the animals “with care”, she was handed a “test”: kill 40 puppies — all of whom she had known since their arrival — in one go.

It was a frenetic pace. They’d take a dog, sedate it, put it on the euthanization table. Then into the trash . . . They didn’t even check that they were fully sedated, you know? . . . I was a monster.

And, for bending to their will — for proving she could be a “monster” — she was welcomed into the inner circle. 

That’s how this industry works. It selects for obedience, incentivizing and demanding violence while weeding out empathy.

And, just like every other system of institutionalized violence, it protects its ringmasters at all costs.

Saorsa’s footage led to the labs’ license being suspended briefly and a criminal investigation being opened. But only the workers were charged  — not, in Saorsa’s words, “the people who are really responsible” — not the ones who built and profit the most off The Bunker. 

Because what Saorsa documented — the animal research industry’s normalized, systematic brutality — reflects far more than *just* corporate cruelty. It represents state-sanctioned violence. 

Case and point: despite Saorsa’s verified footage (which also included admissions by staff of data falsification) and after “huge public outcry”, the country’s Ministry of Science and National Research Council extended two contracts with the lab. 

The federal government itself chose to keep funding the violence (and the lies). 

Which tells us clearly that Saorsa’s story isn’t only about animals enslaved as research subjects. 

It’s also about a society that has decided who counts — and who doesn’t — and that has reserved freedom for only the former.

Let Saorsa’s courage be more than a revelation.
Let it be a reckoning.

Because what she exposed inside The Bunker wasn’t an outlier — it was the rule. The rule that says freedom is for the powerful only. Torture is for the rest. 

But we do not have to accept this. 

We can reject a society that denies justice and quashes compassion. And, we can build a society where the truth isn’t hidden and freedom isn’t reserved for the few. 

Let the light Saorsa cast into darkness ignite something within us: a refusal to look away, a refusal to obey, and a refusal to let this violence stand. 

Together, let’s confront the truth. Let’s resist the violence. And, let’s rise — until all are free.

Your call to action: Watch the film. See the truth. Join the fight.

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