Written by Jeff Mackey
A bit of good news from the Great White North: After years of pressure from animal rights activists—and after hearing from PETA recently—Air Canada, one of only two major North American airlines that still fly primates to laboratories, is taking steps to end the shipments. The airline has requested permission from the Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA) to enact a ban on transporting primates destined for experiments, a practice that the CTA currently requires Air Canada to engage in. PETA had been in contact with Air Canada about its policy as part of an international campaign to stop airlines from transporting primates to laboratories, where they will be caged, experimented on, and killed.
Recently, PETA exposed appalling cruelty to monkeys at one of the largest importers of primates in the U.S.—Shin Nippon Biomedical Laboratories (SNBL) in Everett, Washington—after being contacted by a distraught worker there. The photos and video footage recorded by the whistleblower show sick, distressed monkeys suffering after being injected with chemicals and subjected to violent handling.
Please support the growing number of compassionate and progressive airlines—including Delta, American Airlines, and British Airways—that are saying "No" to primate abuse, and click here to ask the Canadian Transport Authority to grant Air Canada's request to ban the shipment of primates to labs.
Click here to ask the Canadian Transport Authority to grant Air Canada’s request to ban the shipment of primates to labs
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.
Written by Michelle Kretzer
After PETA released video footage sent to us by a whistleblower inside Shin Nippon Biomedical Laboratories (SNBL) in Everett, Washington, showing egregious abuse of monkeys inside the laboratory, area residents were so outraged that they decided to do something about it. More than two dozen residents, local PETA supporters, and members of Action for Animals held signs and chanted slogans outside SNBL during the morning commute, calling on the company to stop its mistreatment of animals and switch to humane, non-animal alternatives.
According to the whistleblower, monkeys at SNBL have their blood drawn so many times a day that their veins become damaged and workers dig and poke for a spot to draw blood as the monkeys scream in pain and try to jerk away. The whistleblower reported, "Eventually, many of the monkeys stop fighting and reacting … it is like the life is gone from them." Monkeys are also immobilized in restraint chairs for many hours while workers pump drugs into their bodies. They struggle to break free but sometimes collapse under the physical and emotional stress. Some of the monkeys never recover.
The protesters in Everett didn't get mad—they got active! You can, too, by clicking here to urge the airlines that are still delivering primates to SNBL and other laboratories to ground the practice.
Written by PETA
Experts are calling on director Cameron Crowe to stop using primates as props in his films, like his upcoming We Bought a Zoo:
If you see an animal in a movie, commercial, or print advertisement, please let us know info@peta.org so that we can take action.
Written by Jennifer O'Connor
Director Cameron Crowe is getting an earful from world-famous primatologist Dr. Iqbal Malik, who sent a letter on PETA's behalf to the director of the upcoming film We Bought a Zoo, asking him to stop using animals in films.
© edelmar/ iStockPhoto.com
Despite being made aware of the suffering endured behind the scenes by performing primates, Crowe has made jokes about Crystal, a capuchin monkey used in the film. But there's nothing funny about ripping primates away from their protective mothers shortly after birth so that they can be trained to perform tricks. These highly social animals suffer from debilitating loneliness and depression when isolated from other monkeys as they typically are in the entertainment industry. In the letter, Dr. Malik asks Crowe to remember that "as 'performing' monkeys grow older, become sick, or are no longer useful to their trainers, most are discarded or sold into the pet trade."
As the astonishingly realistic computer-generated primates in Rise of the Planet of the Apes prove, directors have no excuse for playing a role in subjecting animals to a life of confinement and loneliness.
Go buy a ticket to Rise of the Planet of the Apes—I promise that you'll be glued to your seat.
The skies just got friendlier for primates of the nonhuman variety. American Airlines has publicly confirmed that it will no longer transport nonhuman primates to be used in experiments. In adding cruelty to its no-fly list, American Airlines joins British Airways, United Airlines, Virgin Atlantic, Qantas, Delta Air Lines, Air China, Monarch Air Group, Amerijet, IBC Airways, and several other airlines in refusing to transport primates to facilities where they will be tormented and killed in experiments.
You may also recall that Lufthansa airlines agreed last year to stop transporting dogs and cats to laboratories after a PETA action alert generated an enormous response from concerned people.
You can help stop laboratory abuse at its source by asking the federal government to divert funding from cruel experiments on animals to modern non-animal methods and human-based clinical research.
Written by Michelle Sherrow
In his new movie Project Nim, which opens today in New York City and Chicago, Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker James Marsh explores the tragic life of a chimpanzee, Nim Chimpsky, and the people who exploited him for their own selfish ends.
Born in a laboratory in the 1970s, Nim was taught American Sign Language as part of a project to show that it could be done. But that was just the beginning of Nim's odyssey. He was shuffled between homes, kept segregated from his own species, often caged and tethered, and eventually dumped onto a series of laboratories. Animal rights advocates fought to have him retired to a sanctuary and, for those of you who plan to see the movie, here's a spoiler alert: They were ultimately successful.
While Nim did learn sign language, the truly important lesson that he taught us is that nonhuman primates, like all other animals, desire and deserve the same freedom that human primates enjoy and that depriving them of it is devastating. Why, 30 years later, have we still not learned that lesson?
Update: On October 11, the Puerto Rico Senate approved Senate Resolution 1514 to "[e]xpress the most forceful objection" to Bioculture’s plans, and will now officially "request that the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Fish and Wildlife Services (FWS) deny any and all permit requests by Bioculture Mauritus, any of its subsidiaries or Bioculture Puerto Rico, Inc. with the purpose of importing macaca fascicularis [macaque monkeys] into Puerto Rico."
Bioculture—a company that sells nonhuman primates to laboratories—has been dealt a massive blow after the municipality of Guayama, Puerto Rico, and its mayor, Glorimari Jaime Rodríguez, unanimously approved two landmark ordinances banning the import, export, breeding, and use of monkeys in experiments. Bioculture must now terminate its plans to capture more than 4,000 wild monkeys, confine them to cages, breed them in Guayama, and sell their offspring to laboratories for use in painful and deadly tests. Bioculture's client list included hideous labs such as Shin Nippon Biomedical Laboratories, Charles River Laboratories, Pfizer, and Covance, among others.
PETA, other organizations, world-renowned primatologist Jane Goodall, leading Indian politician Maneka Gandhi, and Puerto Rico–born actor Benicio del Toro have campaigned hard to get Bioculture's cruel plan stopped. We protested the company and joined Guayama residents in filing a lawsuit, which prompted a Superior Court judge in Puerto Rico to temporarily halt construction of the facility because of Bioculture's flagrant violation of local laws.
In case Bioculture has ideas about setting up shop elsewhere in Puerto Rico, we have also worked with Sen. Melinda Romero Donnelly, who sponsored Senate Resolution 1514 to formally urge the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture not to grant any licenses or permits to Bioculture for the importation and breeding of animals in Puerto Rico.
We know that chimpanzees have keen intelligence and advanced cognitive skills, so it's no surprise that scientists observing wild chimpanzees in Guinea watched them deliberately set off snare traps designed to catch and kill them (and any other passing animal)—while avoiding harming themselves. The researchers believe that this lifesaving skill has been passed down from one generation to the next.
Just like us, non-human animals of all species want to live in freedom, avoid pain, and seek out comfort. Like us, more than anything, they want to live.
But life skills and ingenuity can't save animals who are deliberately bred for laboratory experiments. Please help us stop a plan to breed monkeys for vivisection in Puerto Rico.
In a news item that dates back to late August but was just reported on in Sunday's Boston Herald, a half dozen staff and students at Harvard Medical School became ill after they drank coffee from a vending machine that had been laced with sodium azide, a preservative that is commonly used in laboratories. The story reported that all the afflicted worked in a laboratory where they torment mice in immune system experiments.
While we would never wish poisoning upon any living being (talk about a painful way to go) it does have us wondering if karma might be at work again.
Recent publications from Harvard Medical School faculty members included experiments in which mice had 25 percent of their skin burned off by placing them in 190-plus-degree water and were then injected with increasingly large doses of E. coli to see at which point 50 percent of the animals would die. In another experiment, mice were injected with cancerous cells to induce the growth of colorectal tumors and then injected with a herpes virus to see how it affected the cancer. At the end of the experiment, the animals who didn't die during the study were killed and dissected.
It does look like some of the animal torturers experimenters at Harvard have gotten a taste of their own medicine—literally. Let this be a lesson to you, Harvard: Never underestimate the fury of a mouse scorned.
Written by Alisa Mullins
If you have a general question for PETA and would like a response, please e-mail Info@peta.org. If you need to report cruelty to an animal, please click here. If you are reporting an animal in imminent danger and know where to find the animal and if the abuse is taking place right now, please call your local police department. If the police are unresponsive, please call PETA immediately at 757-622-7382 and press 2.
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