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There's good news today in a case we told you about in May 2010: The U.S. Department of Agriculture has hit the Texas Biomedical Research Institute—formerly the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research—with a fine of more than $25,000 over serious violations of the Animal Welfare Act. The facility has repeatedly allowed primates to escape from their cages and injure themselves and others, including humans.

The stiff fine comes after PETA filed a formal complaint with the agency in 2010 after two baboons imprisoned at Texas Biomed escaped from their cages, injuring an employee in the process. The fine also covers an incident from 2009 in which a juvenile rhesus macaque monkey escaped from a cage and then spent the night in below-freezing temperatures. He suffered from hypothermia and had to be euthanized. 

But quite apart from the satisfaction of seeing these primate torturers pay at least a small price for their misdeeds, these penalties are an important reminder to heartless experimenters everywhere that abusing animals can cost them more than karma points. 

But since karma is on our side, let's keep the momentum going. Texas Biomed is notorious for being one of the last laboratories in the world that still torments chimpanzees in cruel and invasive experiments.

You can do your part to help protect primates—just click here to ask your congressional representatives to cosponsor and support the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act today, which would end experiments on chimpanzees at Texas Biomed and elsewhere.  

Update: Eighteen people with homes near the Yerkes National Primate Research Center have filed a complaint with city and county officials demanding that the facility be shut down. The female rhesus monkey still has not been found.
 

It shouldn't come as any surprise that the 4,000 intelligent, sensitive nonhuman primates at Emory University's Yerkes National Primate Research Center would want to flee their misery and deadly fate. But a brave monkey who escaped her captors at Yerkes this week is now loose in a foreign and frightening environment, and she faces injury, starvation, and possibly worse, thanks to the facility's failure to maintain safe and secure enclosures. PETA is calling on the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to investigate the laboratory for possible violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act.
 

 
Yerkes, which is also one of the last facilities in the world to conduct invasive experiments on chimpanzees, has a sordid history of violations of federal animal welfare laws, including 10 violations in just the last two years and a $15,000 fine in 2007. It has been cited for scalding a monkey to death by allowing her to go through a boiling hot automated cage washer, restraining conscious primates with duct tape, and negligently causing the deaths of chimpanzees. We are urging USDA inspectors to file civil charges and levy substantial fines to let Yerkes know that it means business and that experimenters cannot violate the law with impunity.

You can help our fellow primates imprisoned at Yerkes by asking Congress to end to all invasive experiments on great apes.
 

Written by Heather Faraid Drennan

The year was 1989. Grandpa Bush moved into the White House. Actor/dolphin protector Hayden Panettiere was born. And most Americans had never even heard of the Internet.

That same year, experiments were initiated at the University of Wisconsin in which rhesus monkeys were crammed into tiny, barren metal cages, slated to spend their entire lives as experiments in order to study the effects of diet on aging.

Fast-forward to 2009: These highly social animals are still isolated in cages—they've been there for two decades. One half of the population of 76 monkeys has been deliberately underfed for the past 20 years. All of them have been unable to take more than a step or two in any direction since arriving at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and—if researchers have their way—all these monkeys will continue to suffer until they die, which could take another 15 years.

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The results of this experiment: After years of starvation, the "calorie-restricted" animals looked "less wrinkled and flabby."

The senior author of this grossly inhumane study, University of Wisconsin-Madison's Richard Weindruch, is blatantly ignoring the positive effects of exercise on the human heart, bone health, and body weight. And dozens of highly social, active animals have been condemned to a lifetime of isolation, without even the simplest yet meaningful benefit of cagemates, because of it. So, we've filed a complaint with the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture stating that the positive health effects of caloric restriction have already been confirmed in short-term human trials and that the suffering endured by these monkeys is not justified by the perceived benefit of the experiment.

Written by Karin Bennett

Photo © Rommel Manuel

Since 1981, Sisi had been incarcerated at the Manila Zoo. Although orangutans are tree-dwelling animals, Sisi was forced to live much of her life in a tiny, litter-filled concrete-and-steel enclosure. She was on display continually in a cage that was surrounded by noisy souvenir stands and food vendors, and she was provided with nothing to hold her interest, help her pass the time, or stimulate her keen senses.

Sisi's death, reportedly from cancer, is just one indication of how animals have been left in deteriorating health without veterinary care at this atrocious zoo. Because PETA Asia-Pacific remains concerned about the well-being of the surviving animals at the Manila Zoo, who all lack the space, exercise, privacy, and mental stimulation that they require, the organization has decided to send a funeral wreath to the zoo in Sisi's honor. The wreath includes a ribbon emblazoned with the message "Sisi: Suffered in Life, Peace in Death" and will be accompanied by a card calling on zoo officials to close the facility's doors.

Written by Shawna Flavell