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.

After thousands of e-mails, hundreds of phone calls, and a PETA "monkey" paying a visit to China Southern Airlines' L.A. office, the airline—which is the largest in China—has made the compassionate decision to cancel its plans to ship 80 monkeys from China to the U.S., where they were going to end up in the hands of Shin Nippon Biomedical Laboratories (SNBL) and Harlan Laboratories and be tormented in cruel experiments.

RedCoat/CC BY-SA 2.5

Now, we're urging China Southern Airlines officials to join with many other major airlines, including Delta, American, United, British Airways, and Virgin Atlantic, and refuse to transport primates to laboratories ever again. You can also write to them here. We'll keep you posted! 

Written by Michelle Sherrow