Like many of you, we were appalled by photos that have surfaced showing a visibly terrified monkey crudely strapped into a restraint device in which he was reportedly launched into space by the Iranian Space Agency (ISA). Back in 2011, our friends at PETA U.K. urged agency head Dr. Hamid Fazeli to ground the misguided mission, pointing out that nonhuman primates are no longer sent into space by the American or European space agencies.

It appears that Iran is repeating the wasteful and cruel mistakes that marked the darkest days of the space race. Monkeys are smart and sensitive animals who not only are traumatized by the violence and noise of a launch and landing but also suffer when caged in a laboratory before and after a flight—if they survive.

NASA ended the use of primates in space radiation experiments in the early 1990s, following protests by PETA. In 2010, NASA's plans to restart the program were canceled after PETA and others voiced strong ethical and scientific objections to the ill-advised plan.

Similarly, the European Space Agency (ESA) has a very active space exploration program and has publicly stated that it "declines any interest in monkey research and does not consider any need or use for such results." The ESA instead employs modern technology such as state-of-the-art simulators to assess health risks for astronauts.

Whether it happens in Iran or Ireland, in an underground laboratory or in outer space, cruelly exploiting animals for specious science is indefensible. We've reached out to the ISA once again to ask it to stop shooting monkeys into space. Learn how you can help stop experimentation on all animals. 

Animal advocates, it's time to break out the bubbly. After pressure from PETA and tens of thousands of our members and supporters, NBC has pulled the plug on its cruel show, Animal Practice. Here's the celebration in progress at PETA's Bob Barker Building in L.A.:

The only thing funny about this "sitcom" was its laughable ratings. By not tuning in, viewers told NBC that they weren't interested in watching animals dressed up and made to perform cheap tricks—animals who had been torn away from their mothers as babies and subjected to cruel training methods and unnatural living conditions.

Even before the first episode aired, PETA showed NBC that if the network wanted to broadcast cruelty, it was going to have a rocky road ahead of it. We wrote to NBC and the show's producers and explained how wild animals suffer in the entertainment industry. We kept the heat on by asking advertisers to pull their support, organizing demonstrations, sending an urgent action alert to our members and supporters, and enlisting primate experts to speak out about how the portrayal of monkeys as "pets" leads irresponsible people to acquire them on a whim. And it worked.

NBC will air the three remaining episodes of Animal Practice that have already been filmed. Then viewers can rest assured that cruelty to animals won't be part of the Wednesday night TV lineup.

Cheers!

When a baby monkey fell off an electric pole high above a highway in Sangli, India, and plummeted to the road below, she was knocked unconscious and one eye was left swollen and bloody. Someone saw the monkey fall and alerted officials. Knowing the superb rehabilitation work that PETA's friends at Animal Rahat ("rahat" means "relief" in Hindi) do, forest officials asked them to go to the scene immediately.

Animal Rahat took the injured animal to its rehabilitation facility, where workers gently flushed her eyes and gave her antibiotic eyedrops for a few days. It was delicate work helping the monkey to heal while handling her as little as possible so as not to cause her stress, which can lead monkeys to mutilate themselves. 

A week later, with her health improving, it was safe to give the tiny monkey the freedom and space that she craved, so she was taken to the Katraj wildlife rescue center, where she could enjoy a forest-like setting while continuing to heal.

The monkey relished her freedom and continued to improve while she built a trusting relationship with her caretakers. But life in captivity is not what nature intended for monkeys, and after two months there, her rescue team bid her a tearful goodbye and released her back into the forest. Animal Rahat workers still visit the forest from time to time to see if they can spot her and even managed to get one last picture of the now fully recovered monkey doing what monkeys do best.

When we told you that Air France was planning to ship 60 monkeys to the notorious Shin Nippon Biomedical Laboratories (SNBL) this week, you came through with tens of thousands of e-mails, Facebook posts, tweets, and phone calls—and thanks to your quick action, Air France has now confirmed that the shipment has been canceled!

Just Say Non to Shipping Primates to Labs

Immediately upon learning that the monkeys were to be shipped from a Bioculture-owned monkey farm on the African island of Mauritius to Paris and then on to Chicago, where they'd be loaded onto a truck bound for a facility operated by SNBL, PETA got in touch with key executives at Air France urging them to cancel the shipment.

But with so little time to persuade Air France to do the right thing, PETA swiftly appealed to members and supporters to make sure that the airline got the message. And did it ever—so many of you contacted Air France that the company stopped accepting public comments on two of its high-profile Facebook pages and shut down its corporate phone lines!

While Air France's decision to cancel this shipment is great news, PETA is now encouraging the French flag carrier to join the majority of leading airlines in putting formal policies in place prohibiting all future shipments of primates to laboratories.

How You Can Help Keep Primates Out of Labs

Please join PETA in urging the airline industry to stop transporting primates destined for cruel experiment.

In a dreadful experiment that sounds like a cross between Frankenstein and Rise of the Planet of the Apes, stem cells from multiple embryos were fused to create so-called "chimera" monkeys containing genetic material from all the embryos used. Vivisectors at the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC) cut into dozens of female rhesus monkeys to impregnate them, allowed their fetuses to develop, and then cut them open to kill the unborn monkeys and dissect them. Only two of the female monkeys were allowed to carry the babies to full term and give birth. Like their mothers, these babies now will serve a life sentence at this monkey prison, where two PETA undercover investigations have exposed the horrific abuse of primates.

ONPRC is touting the births of the three genetically manipulated rhesus monkeys, but one has to wonder what the primates used in these experiments have been forced to endure in a facility with a long history of abuse. During a 2007 undercover investigation at ONPRC, PETA documented monkeys in constant fear and so traumatized by miserable laboratory conditions, including confinement to small, barren cages, that they paced ceaselessly and pulled out their own hair. And that's not even including the horrors intentionally inflicted on the animals during the experiments themselves.

In 2008, PETA obtained internal documents from ONPRC detailing further abuse and neglect, including that experimenters had accidentally performed surgery on the wrong monkey, repeatedly inflicted a painful procedure called "electro-ejaculation" on male monkeys, and refused to perform a Caesarean section on a sick monkey during a difficult labor (leading to the death of both mother and baby).

PETA's subsequent complaint to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) led the agency to cite ONPRC for three violations of the Animal Welfare Act. Since then, further USDA inspections have led to repeated citations. So why is ONPRC still being given millions of taxpayer dollars  to create chimeras and conduct other cruel and pointless experiments on these intelligent, sensitive animals?

Please click here to tell the National Institutes of Health that it's time to get out of the torture business by withdrawing funding from animal experiments at ONPRC.

A notorious experimenter and primate supplier wants the U.S.' help tormenting more monkeys in laboratories.

Frank Ervin, a vivisector from McGill University, operates the Behavioral Sciences Foundation/Primate Resources International on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, which pays trappers to remove vervet monkeys from the wild so that they can be imprisoned in laboratories. The facility crams many monkeys into wooden crates and sends them on a terrifying journey in the dark cargo holds of airplanes to the U.S. and other countries to be tortured and killed in experiments. Ervin also performs his own deadly experiments on monkeys. These disturbing photos, leaked to PETA, are allegedly of monkeys killed in Ervin's cruel experiments on fetal alcohol syndrome:

Ervin wants the U.S. to buy even more monkeys to experiment on, since, in his opinion, the monkeys are "agricultural predators" because they sometimes eat farmers' crops. We're sure that's the reason he wants the U.S. to purchase the animals, not because of the profit that he stands to make. The Animal Rights Foundation of Florida (ARFF) has launched an initiative against importing the monkeys from St. Kitts, including sharing that St. Kitts' own Ministry of Agriculture advocates for spaying and neutering and strategically placed feeding stations to control the monkey population and keep them away from crops.

One U.S. buyer of monkeys from St. Kitts is the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground, which torments the monkeys in cruel and archaic chemical casualty training exercises. You can help end these torturous exercises and prevent the government from stuffing Ervin's pockets by asking your senators and representatives to take action to end Aberdeen's monkey laboratories.

Written by Michelle Sherrow

… into Primate Products. Alert readers may recall the horrifying photos of mutilated monkeys at this facility that were leaked earlier this year. Shockingly, when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was looking for somewhere to "retire" a group of owl monkeys who had been used in experiments, it couldn't seem to think of a better place than a company that is in the business of ripping monkeys away from their homes in the wild and making restraint devices for them to be tormented in.

Yes, you may well scratch your head. Incredibly, it gets worse. According to the Animal Rights Foundation of Florida (ARFF), Primate Products—apparently after unsuccessfully looking for a buyer—callously gave the monkeys to a horrendous roadside zoo, Everglades Outpost, apparently without bothering to ascertain whether or not the zoo had the space or the know-how to properly care for the monkeys. Turns out that it doesn't seem to have either.

pelican/CC by 2.0

Owl monkeys mate for life, prefer to live in small family groups (parents and offspring), are very territorial, and can become easily stressed if their living conditions are disturbed. Any disruption can lead to high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, and even heart attacks. According to reports from U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspections—which resulted in the agency citing Everglades Outpost for multiple violations of the Animal Welfare Act—after 61 of the monkeys were delivered to Everglades Outpost and carelessly placed into group cages, 11 died within hours, and nine more died within several days. Primate Products was apparently so disinterested in whether the zoo could care for the monkeys that it transferred 31 more there a week later, and six were dead within two days.

The USDA inspection report concludes that Everglades Outpost demonstrated "a lack of knowledge and experience regarding basic housing and social needs of this species" and that "the sudden group housing … caused overt behavior stress and physical trauma."

ARFF is demanding a full investigation, and PETA has called on the CDC—which has also purchased monkeys from Primate Products for use in experiments—to follow the lead of other organizations that are horrified by Primate Products' callousness and cruelty and cut ties with this abusive facility once and for all.

Written by Alisa Mullins

solarnavigator / CC

I just got a load of this scientific report and had to giggle a bit. Are scientists just now discovering that animals can think and plan for the future? According to one scientist quoted in the article, we humans should "keep our egos in check," as animals have been noticed expressing "human abilities," such as recognizing shapes and estimating numbers of objects.

Really, Sherlock? 'Cause Ms. Koko the gorilla speaks fluent sign language and not only still laments the death of her mother 30 years later but also says she plans on teaching her children sign language. And what about Santino, the stone-stockpiling chimpanzee? He definitely makes plans well in advance.

I'm just sayin', these animals make this report look a wee-bit outta date.

Written by Missy Lane

I know, I know. I just used an almost identical subject line last week in the “Shoplifting Seagull” entry, but I couldn’t resist. Just like I couldn’t resist sharing this amazing story about a pigeon who befriended an injured baby monkey at an animal sanctuary in China. Check it out here.

I'm sure the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie is going to be pretty great and all, but do they let you choose how the story ends? I didn't think so. And it probably doesn't even have a talking British monkey in it. Fortunately, PETA has come to the rescue again, and, with the new Pirates movie coming out today, it's just in the nick of time. A few credits first—as Nicole (who did the voice of the Nugget) said she would never speak to me again if I didn't mention her. The rest of the fine voice work was done by Dale, Dan, and yours truly as the monkey. Check it out.