We've told you before how cats and ferrets suffer in archaic training courses at Washington University in St. Louis. Now, we've obtained a photo of the miserable living conditions for a monkey named George, who is also confined to this facility:

Information on who is experimenting on George was not released, but we wonder if it might have been Dora Angelaki, who has been crowned Vivisector of the Month for the month of June. Angelaki, who recently left Washington University to become chair of the neuroscience department at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, drills screws into monkeys' skulls and implants a "head ring," which attaches to an apparatus to control the animals' heads. She also implants coils into their eyes and electrodes into their ears before strapping the monkeys to a chair designed to immobilize their bodies as they are spun and shaken so that Angelaki can observe their ability to track a target. In some cases, she damages parts of the monkeys' brains first. Angelaki has received more than $18 million in federal tax money for her primate experiments.

How You Can Help Animals in Laboratories

While Angelaki has left Washington University, there are still animals there who need your help. Please urge the school to end the use of animals in cruel and archaic intubation training exercises and replace them with modern, effective teaching methods.

Here is some of the hideous handiwork of April's Vivisector of the Month, Janet Neisewander of Arizona State University, who has been conducting wasteful and cruel addiction experiments on animals since 1984.

Using nearly $3 million in taxpayer money, Neisewander gets rats hooked on drugs like morphine, cocaine, and nicotine—sometimes after obliterating parts of the rats' brains with acid.

In these pictures, the rats have nicotine pumped directly into their jugular veins through tubes implanted in their heads. Later, they'll be killed and decapitated and have their brains removed.

How You Can Help Animals Killed in Nicotine Experiments

Thanks to studies in humans, we already know that smoking cigarettes can cause disease in nearly every organ of the human body. Please tell the National Institutes of Health to stop funding nicotine experiments on animals and use tax money for prevention, education, and human-based research instead.

After three decades in captivity, a group of 38 chimpanzees who had been abused in painful hepatitis and HIV experiments in an Austrian laboratory were finally released to a sanctuary, where they can spend the rest of their lives in peaceful retirement. A television camera operator captured the awe-inspiring moment when the chimpanzees cautiously stepped out of their enclosures and into daylight for the first time in 30 years, embracing one another to celebrate their newfound freedom.

These chimpanzees have not been used in experiments for more than 10 years, but their future was in limbo when the Austrian safari park where they were living went bankrupt. It was believed that the group would be split up and sent to zoos around Europe. But animal advocates around the world, including PETA and our members and supporters, wrote to the drug company that sent the chimpanzees to the park and implored it to ensure that the chimpanzees would be sent to a sanctuary and not be separated from one another. Thanks to those of you who spoke out, the chimpanzees are now living together happily at an animal sanctuary where they can feel the grass under their feet and the wind on their faces for the first time in decades!

While it's wonderful that these chimpanzees now have a safe haven, chimpanzees in the U.S. continue to be locked up and abused in laboratories, as PETA spelled out in a column in today's issue of the influential D.C. newspaper The Hill. You can help give their story a happy ending, too, by asking your congressional representatives to support the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act (H.R. 1513/S. 810), which will permanently end invasive experiments on all great apes in the U.S. and retire hundreds of chimpanzees to sanctuaries. Can't wait to see those videos!

Written by Jeff Mackey

Chimpanzees used in laboratory experiments have been a hot topic this summer, from the film Rise of the Planet of the Apes to the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine hearings on the use of chimpanzees for experimentation. Now, Unsaid, a new novel by Neil Abramson, movingly explores the ways in which animals—including a chimpanzee, Cindy, who communicates with sign language—impact the lives of the humans who care for and about them.

The novel takes us on the journey of David Colden, an attorney who is mourning his wife's death while defending sign-language researcher Dr. Cassidy, who has raised Cindy from infancy and who will do anything—including breaking the law—to prevent the young chimpanzee from being sent to a laboratory.

I wanted to cheer when Colden told the court: "There was a crime committed here—but it wasn't by Dr. Cassidy. The crime is by those who would torture a thinking, feeling, caring, intelligent creature and expect others to sit idle amid the torrent of blood and screams."

In some ways, Dr. Cassidy's story mirrors the real life work of Dr. Roger Fouts, who has spent decades teaching sign language to chimpanzees. Because he doesn't "own" all the apes he works with, some of them have been sold to laboratories over the years, including Booee, whom Fouts, trailed by a 20/20 film crew, visited in a laboratory years later with heartbreaking results. The ensuing public outcry resulted in Booee being sent to a sanctuary.

Unsaid: A Novel is available from Amazon.

Written by Michelle Sherrow