Air France Won't Ship Monkeys to Cruel Lab—Thanks to You!

Because monkeys and other primates tormented in laboratories are not native to the U.S., they must be imported from parts of the world where they live naturally, including Asia, Africa, South America, and the Caribbean. Thus, convincing airlines to take the ethical step to stop transporting primates to laboratories is a key component of our work to end cruel experiments on monkeys and their primate brethren. Evidence of this comes from the animal experimenters themselves, who increasingly express their fears about this "crisis" in the international primate supply network and who have made this issue a topic for frequent discussion at conferences and meetings.

Here is an example of how the trade works: The African island of Mauritius supplies thousands of monkeys each year to laboratories in the U.S. and elsewhere. A company called Bioculture hires locals on Mauritius to rip monkeys away from their homes and families in the wild by setting up traps and shooting them with dart guns. Bioculture then locks them up, forces them to breed, and sells their babies to laboratories like Shin Nippon Biomedical Laboratories in the U.S.

Air France is one of a tiny group of airlines that still transports primates to labs, and it is the last airline servicing Mauritius that still does so. When (not if) Air France stops doing so, Bioculture will have a difficult, if not impossible, time trying to ship monkeys to experimenters. This means that fewer primates will be captured in the wild, locked away on breeding farms, and sent to cruel fates in labs.

While the international primate trade won't end overnight and while we unfortunately can't save every monkey currently imprisoned at these factory farms or in labs, with every shipment canceled and every new airline that takes a stand against this nasty practice, fewer monkeys will be captured, bred, and transported, and eventually the pipeline will dry up.