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In a huge victory for vervet monkeys, U.S. military officials have confirmed that the Army is ending cruel and archaic monthly training exercises at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in which monkeys are poisoned with a drug overdose that makes them suffer from violent seizures in a crude demonstration of the effects of nerve-agent exposure. Instead of abusing terrified monkeys, Aberdeen—the only Army base in the country that uses animals for this training—will now use human patient simulators, just as every other military facility already does. The move follows months of vigorous campaigning by PETA.

PETA's campaign against the barbaric chemical casualty training exercises included a series of protests this week outside the annual meeting of the Association of the United States Army. Supporters of this effort included veterans, physicians, active service members, and actor Woody Harrelson, who sent a letter on PETA's behalf to Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno. Many others have also been protesting at Army recruitment centers, flooding the offices of Army officials with e-mails and phone calls, and even gathering outside the homes of Army officials affiliated with the monkey lab. One PETA member even disrupted a speaking event last week by Aberdeen's commanding general, Nick Justice.

Please send an e-mail to Maj. Gen. Nick Justice to thank him for this compassionate decision and ask that he ensure that the transition to simulators be made immediately.

Written by Heather Faraid Drennan

Victory: As a result of PETA's campaign, the Army announced that it is ending its cruel use of monkeys in chemical attack training exercises and will instead use advanced human simulators!

Monkey #V357 was born on the island of St. Kitts, where he was either captured in the wild or born in captivity. If he was abducted from his home in the wild, he likely watched trappers shoot his mother out of a tree with a dart gun, and then was ripped from her arms. If he was born into a breeding facility, he was forcibly—and permanently—torn from his screaming mother, probably within days of birth.

He was then crammed into a tiny crate and flown to Miami, Florida, in a plane’s dark, loud and terrifying cargo hold. There, he was piled onto a truck like luggage and driven up the eastern seaboard to the U.S. Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.

#V357, the only “name” the Army gave him in its laboratory, spent the next three years of his life locked in a steel cage and being used over-and-over as a target for nerve-agent attack training. Every eight weeks, experimenters injected him with a massive drug overdose to crudely mimic a chemical attack  and trainees looked on as he twitched uncontrollably, sweated profusely, violently convulsed, and struggled to breathe. The psychological distress that this constant physical abuse and confinement caused led #V357 and the other monkeys imprisoned at Aberdeen to fight each other, and he suffered gaping lacerations, a torn lip, and bitten or torn off fingers. The injuries did not stop the training exercises. 

After three years of being tormented in this cruel training course, the Army began punishing his small body in a different experiment. They injected him with a chemical agent that severely restricted blood flow to his brain. After one final injection and several hours of suffering, he died at night, alone in his cold, barren cage.

It is too late for #V357, but it’s not too late for the rest of the monkeys the Army is still tormenting in these cruel and ineffective training courses. Please help stop this by signing this White House petition to replace the monkeys with modern, superior human simulators.

Written by Michelle Sherrow

Victory: As a result of PETA's campaign, the Army announced that it is ending its cruel use of monkeys in chemical attack training exercises and will instead use advanced human simulators!

Woody Harrelson was nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of an Army captain in The Messenger, and now the actor is sending a real-life message to the Army's new chief of staff regarding the cruel chemical agent poisoning of monkeys at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. The star of the hotly anticipated Hunger Games film sent a letter  to Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, describing how the monkeys who endure a forced overdose "suffer the wretched symptoms of chemical poisoning, including seizures, breathing difficulties, loss of bowel control, and convulsions," and asking the general to "stop this crude exercise at Aberdeen"  and replace it with superior non-animal methods of simulating nerve agent attacks.

Woody's letter follows a PETA protest outside Army Secretary John McHugh's home and as thousands of compassionate people's responses to PETA's action alert—which I must ask you to respond to also and to pass on to everyone you know (get the whole office to sign—the whole neighborhood!).

Please join Woody in sending Army officials the message that not only is the image of America's armed forces tarnished by conducting crude warfare experiments on monkeys—who are snatched from their Caribbean homes and families and who endure frightening shipping conditions—these cruel procedures also violate military policies requiring the use of non-animal methods when available and prohibiting harming primates for training exercises.

Written by Jeff Mackey

Victory: As a result of PETA's campaign, the Army announced that it is ending its cruel use of monkeys in chemical attack training exercises and will instead use advanced human simulators!

As the U.S. Army is poised to begin poisoning African vervet monkeys at Maryland's Aberdeen Proving Ground, PETA's "monkeys" descended on Secretary of the Army John McHugh's home to demand that he stop the cruelty.

If McHugh was a little uncomfortable that we were on his front doorstep, perhaps he should think about how uncomfortable the Army makes its primate prisoners, injecting the monkeys with a drug overdose in a crude and cruel attempt to replicate the effects of a nerve agent attack. The drug overdose causes the monkeys to suffer from violent seizures and vomiting, and some even stop breathing. The monkeys are subjected to this abuse every few months for as long as three years.

Military and civilian training programs around the world use sophisticated human patient simulators that can be programmed to mimic the human response to a nerve agent attack, which is very different from a monkey's. Not only are the Army's monkey experiments cruel and inefficient, they also violate Department of Defense policies prohibiting the harming of primates in training exercises and requiring that non-animal methods be used whenever they are available.

We brought the message home today for McHugh. Now you can help stop the U.S. Army from poisoning monkeys by calling Maj. Gen. Nick Justice, commanding general of Aberdeen Proving Ground, at 410-278-0833 and urging his facility to switch to non-animal training methods.

Written by Michelle Sherrow

Victory: As a result of PETA's campaign, the Army announced that it is ending its cruel use of monkeys in chemical attack training exercises and will instead use advanced human simulators!

Next week, the U.S. Army plans to start poisoning African vervet monkeys with massive chemical overdoses as part of a crude and cruel "show and tell" training exercise at Maryland's Aberdeen Proving Ground in order to demonstrate the effects of a nerve-agent attack. The overdoses will cause the monkeys to suffer from uncontrollable twitching, seizures, and vomiting, and some will even stop breathing. In a laboratory worksheet that PETA obtained from Aberdeen, one trainee compared a monkey's violent reaction during the exercise to "a chiwawa [sic] sh*tting razor blades."

This is one more example of shortchanging our military and pointlessly abusing animals for some elementary exercise that already exists on film! Other military and civilian training programs around the world are using sophisticated human patient simulators that can be programmed to mimic the human response to a nerve-agent attack, which is very different from a vervet monkey's response. And not only are the Army's monkey laboratories cruel and inefficient, they violate Department of Defense policies that prohibit the harming of primates in training exercises and require that non-animal training methods be used when available.

Please, help stop this by contacting Major General Nick Justice, the commanding general of Aberdeen, right now and asking him to live up to his name and save monkeys from this cruelty by switching this very second to modern, effective medical training methods.

Written by Michelle Sherrow