Update: The Israeli attorney general has decreed that the High Court must permanently halt this shipment of monkeys, citing that it is illegal to transport monkeys captured in the wild for experiments and that Israeli authorities had not approved the use of the animals for the type of experiments that Shin Nippon Biomedical Laboratories sought to perform.

Thanks to the efforts of the Israeli animal-protection organizations Behind Closed Doors and Let the Animals Live, with assistance from PETA, a shipment of 90 monkeys destined for a laboratory has been halted, at least temporarily. The monkeys were to be shipped from Mazor Farm, an infamous monkey-breeding facility in Israel, to Shin Nippon Biomedical Laboratories (SNBL), a testing laboratory and primate supplier in the United States.

Crude, Cruel, and Illegal

Armed with information supplied by PETA, Let the Animals Live presented evidence to the High Court of Justice in Israel demonstrating how SNBL torments animals and repeatedly violated U.S. animal welfare laws. Israeli officials also reviewed scientific data showing that primates make poor models of human disease and for predicting drug response in humans. Additionally, Israeli law does not allow the export of wild-caught monkeys, and we pointed out to Israeli authorities that 70 of these 90 monkeys were torn away from their families in the wild.

In response to these compelling arguments, the Israeli attorney general decreed that this shipment is legally problematic, and the High Court has halted the shipment, demanding that SNBL produce its own evidence showing how it plans to use the monkeys in experiments.

Making Sure Cruelty Won't Fly

PETA also contacted the airline that had been prepared to accept this shipment and urged it to join the growing number of airlines that refuse to transport primates to laboratories.

Stay tuned—if the Israeli government does ultimately allow the shipment to proceed, we may ask you to contact this airline and demand that it stop delivering primates to be tortured in experiments.

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.

Once upon a more barbaric time, the U.S. space program forced terrified primates to be "astronauts," sending them into space, where some were roasted to death in their capsules. Although most countries with active space exploration programs have relegated cruel tests on primates to the dustbin of history, Iran recently announced plans to send a live monkey into space this summer. The disturbing news prompted PETA U.K. to blast off a letter to the head of Iran's space program urging him to ground its primate experimentation program and instead use more humane and effective options such as the state-of-the-art human simulator already in use at the International Space Station. 
  

 
In the letter, PETA U.K. points out that cruel tests on nonhuman primates do not produce relevant results for human astronauts and that the prestigious European Space Agency has stated that it "declines any interest in monkey research and does not consider any need or use for such result."

Last year, PETA convinced NASA to scrap plans to fund experiments on monkeys after the misguided program was widely condemned by scientists, physicians, NASA engineers, and the public.

Let's hope that Iran's space agency will join the 21^st century and make its monkey experimentation program history.

 
Written by Heather Faraid Drennan