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In the triumphant finale to a long, hard legal struggle over a suit filed by PETA and citizens of Guayama, Puerto Rico, the Puerto Rican Supreme Court upheld the decisions of the lower courts that the monkey-breeding facility built in Guayama by Bioculture, Inc., was constructed illegally and therefore cannot be opened for business!

The court also denied Bioculture's motion to reconsider the ruling. So, as Kathy Guillermo, PETA's vice president of laboratory investigations, put it, "The final nail is now in Bioculture's coffin, and the 4,000 monkeys and generations of their offspring who would have suffered and died for the company's profit have been officially spared."

Muchas gracias to everyone who helped put a stop to Bioculture's plan to capture monkeys from their homes in the wild, imprison them in cages, and then sell their offspring for use in painful and deadly experiments at notorious facilities such as Shin Nippon Biomedical Laboratories, Charles River Laboratories, and Covance. 

Now, let's put another nail in the nasty monkey-pimping-and-torture coffin. Click here to urge airlines that still transport nonhuman primates to U.S. laboratories for cruel experiments to cut out the monkey business.

Every year, more than 124,000 primates are tormented and killed in U.S. laboratories. Have you ever wondered how these intelligent and sensitive animals wind up in these hellholes in the first place?

Some primates are born in laboratories, forced to exist from cradle to grave as living "tools" exploited by experimenters who perform painful, invasive procedures on the animals, and then they're tossed out like so much trash when the experimenters are done with them.

For tens of thousands of other primates, the journey begins thousands of miles away in Asia and Africa, where—at the behest of global animal testing multinationals like Charles River Laboratories and Covance—they are bred in cramped, squalid breeding mills or are trapped or netted in the wild. Ripped away from their families, the traumatized primates are shoved into cramped wooden crates and shipped in the noisy and terrifying cargo holds of planes, often with unsuspecting passengers just a few feet above them.

One of the worst drivers of the miserable primate trade is animal testing conglomerate Shin Nippon Biomedical Laboratories (SNBL), which brings nearly 3,000 primates into the U.S. each year for use in experimentation. Recent photos and video footage leaked to PETA by a whistleblower at an SNBL laboratory in Everett, Washington, show sick, distraught monkeys imprisoned in barren steel cages. The whistleblower reports that monkeys suffered untreated wounds from being stabbed repeatedly with needles to have blood drawn multiple times a day, and that workers handling the monkeys were so rough that they bloodied the animals' noses and broke their fingers and toes.

Nearly every major airline—including Delta Airlines, Qantas, American Airlines, British Airways, Aer Lingus, Cathay Pacific, and dozens of others—have agreed not to transport primates to laboratories, but some, including Air Canada, Air China, Air France, China Eastern Airlines, China Southern Airlines, Philippine Airlines, and Vietnam Airlines—continue to profit off shipping primates to their deaths.

You can help primates by clicking here and telling these airlines that cruelty doesn't fly with you and that it shouldn't fly with them either.

If rats, mice, dogs, and monkeys were choosing public enemy number one, they would probably go with Charles River Laboratories (CRL), which breeds and sells millions of animals every year to laboratories around the world, supplying half of all the animals used in experiments. CRL is the second largest U.S. importer of nonhuman primates sold into experimentation slavery, importing more than 7,000 monkeys in 2010 alone.
 

A PETA "mouse" and "monkey" protest CRL's animal abuse at the company's annual meeting.

 
CRL also performs torture-for-hire for other companies, in which dogs, monkeys, rabbits, rats, and other animals are force-fed poisonous compounds, have their skin burned off with chemicals, and are forced to inhale toxic substances. The animals may endure severe abdominal pain, convulsions, paralysis, and bleeding from their orifices before they die or are killed.

With a sordid history of violating the regulations of the Animal Welfare Act, CRL has failed to do even the bare minimum for animals in its laboratories. Shoddy surgical methods resulted in the protracted misery and eventual death of a dog, and sick and injured animals are routinely denied veterinary care, including rabbits with skin lesions that were more than 4 inches deep. CRL workers sent a cage—with a monkey inside—through a high-temperature cage washer, which boiled the monkey alive, and CRL cooked 32 monkeys to death as a result of negligence.

To help animals abused by CRL and other laboratories, see PETA's tips on fighting animal experimentation.

 
Written by Michelle Sherrow