Update: We have an exciting development to report! Invasive experiments on chimpanzees and other great apes are closer to being history in the United States now that the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has voted to advance the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act to the full Senate. 

We want to thank everyone who responded to PETA's call to urge senators on the committee to pass the bill. Now let's make sure that this lifesaving measure becomes law—please contact your U.S. legislators and encourage them to support the great-ape bill when it comes up for a vote!

Originally published April 23, 2012:

In advance of the April 24 U.S. Senate hearing on the historic Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act (GAPCSA), PETA sent members of Congress a print of a painting along with a photo of and a letter about the artist—a chimpanzee named Jamie, who was rescued from a laboratory.

Photo: Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest

From Experiments to Expressionism

Jamie, now 34 years old, spent more than 20 years alone in a cage in the windowless basement of a Pennsylvania laboratory, where she was used in hepatitis experiments. In 2008, she—along with six other chimpanzees from the same laboratory—was rescued with PETA's help by Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest. Jamie now spends her days relaxing, playing outdoors with her friends, and expressing herself through art, including pen drawings and finger paintings. You can watch her creativity in action here.

GAPCSA would ban invasive experiments on chimpanzees, retire more than 600 federally owned chimpanzees to sanctuaries, and save taxpayers millions of dollars a year. PETA hopes Jamie's artwork and photo will help legislators put a face to this lifesaving bill at a critical moment.

How You Can Help Great Apes Like Jamie

Please contact your U.S. representative and senators and urge them to cosponsor and support the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act.

Hip cosmetics company Urban Decay has earned PETA's Courage in Commerce Award for putting animals ahead of market share and reversing its decision to sell in China, where animals are harmed and killed in product tests. The company's decision followed talks with PETA and thousands of e-mails from disappointed consumers. While many companies have shed their cruelty-free policies as easily as last year's fashion for a share of the profits from China, Urban Decay officials have decided that the cost was too high. They're corporate champs in our book, and the company is going back on PETA's cruelty-free list. 

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Change is afoot in China, too. PETA is financially supporting scientists from the Institute for In Vitro Sciences, who are working with the Chinese government to replace cruel and archaic animal tests with superior non-animal methods, and already, we are seeing huge progress. Until the day when product tests on animals are a thing of the past, we hope other companies eyeing the Chinese and other markets where cruel tests are required will follow Urban Decay's example and put ethics first.

The movement to end vivisection is gaining more allies every year as groups like PETA continue to find creative new ways to expose the cruelty that millions of mice, rats, dogs, primates, and other animals are forced to endure in laboratories. The proof is in the numbers!

PETA, along with researchers from the University of Alabama–Birmingham and Manhattanville College, studied the results of independent Gallup polls conducted from 2001 to 2011, in each of which approximately 1,000 Americans were asked whether they found "medical testing on animals" to be "morally acceptable" or "morally wrong." The results are heartening: Opposition to animal testing increased overall, across all age groups and political affiliations and both genders.

According to the surveys, the majority of adults ages 18 to 29 and the majority of women are opposed to animal testing. And nearly half of all adults don't approve of the fact that animals are burned, poisoned, and hacked apart in laboratories. 

The study (which is just one of the many that PETA's team of scientists has published in peer-reviewed journals) makes one thing abundantly clear: The tide is turning in favor of getting animals out of laboratories.

Help us make sure that public policies evolve with society's growing compassion for animals. Please e-mail your senators and representatives and ask them to stand with their constituents and stop funneling taxpayer money into cruel experiments on animals.

Just six months after PETA announced that it had purchased stock in BIOQUAL—the company formerly known as "SEMA"—to urge it to phase out the use of chimpanzees in experiments, the Washington Post reports that the company is doing just that.

BIOQUAL's announcement comes 25 years after Jane Goodall called for the closure of SEMA after undercover video footage released by PETA revealed abysmal conditions in the lab. Baby chimpanzees were locked inside tiny steel boxes in complete isolation and exhibited signs of insanity, rocking incessantly in their dark cages. The misery of the SEMA chimpanzees is documented in PETA President Ingrid E. Newkirk's landmark book Free the Animals. 

Until this development, little but its name seemed to have changed at BIOQUAL. PETA recently used the Freedom of Information Act to secure descriptions of BIOQUAL's experiments on chimpanzees. We learned that in one experiment, six infant chimpanzees—some as young as 9 months of age—were taken from their mothers, caged individually, exposed to a virus, and subjected to months of painful liver, bone marrow, lymph node, and intestinal biopsies. This April, we pointed out in official comments submitted to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that these and other experiments on chimpanzees at BIOQUAL were considered unnecessary by the Institute of Medicine in its landmark report on the scientific validity of experiments on chimpanzees, and we called on the NIH to discontinue its funding. 

What You Can Do

Chimpanzees are our closest relatives, with psychological and physical needs that are strikingly similar to our own. They are intelligent, have unique personalities, and are capable of experiencing profound suffering. However, this has not saved them from being imprisoned, stripped of their autonomy, and used in invasive and sometimes painful experiments. The U.S. is the only developed country that continues to use chimpanzees in invasive experiments, but the pending Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act would ban invasive experiments on chimpanzees and retire more than 600 federally owned chimpanzees.

Please tell your congressional representatives that all chimpanzees in U.S. laboratories should be sent to reputable sanctuaries and allowed to live out their remaining years in peace.

Update: As another indicator of the decline in the demand for its cruel services, just one month after Covance announced that it would be closing its animal-testing laboratory in Chandler, Arizona, the company has announced that it will also be laying off 50 employees at its facility in Madison, Wisconsin, where thousands of primates and other animals endure painful and lethal tests every year.

Just three years after it opened following a long battle with PETA and local citizens, a laboratory owned by a notorious animal testing company, Covance, in Chandler, Arizona, is closing because of lack of demand for its cruel and deadly services.  

Shutting Down Cruelty …

When plans to build the Chandler facility were uncovered in 2005, PETA worked with outraged local residents to try to stop it and managed to delay its construction. The world's largest contract testing laboratory, Covance subjects animals to painful and deadly tests of cosmetics ingredients, personal and household products, food additives, industrial chemicals, and drugs. Covance is also the world's largest breeder of dogs and the largest U.S. importer of primates to be tormented and killed in experiments.

Despite media censorship, word clearly got around about the horrendous cruelty found inside Covance's laboratories, including physical and psychological abuse of primates and lack of veterinary care for sick and injured animals.  

The shutdown of the Arizona facility follows the 2010 closure of a Covance lab in Virginia, where shocking abuse of animals was exposed by a PETA undercover investigation. Around that same time, Covance scrapped plans to build a massive facility elsewhere in Virginia that PETA had urged officials to reject.

… But Keeping Up the Pressure

These closures will save countless monkeys, dogs, rabbits, mice, rats, and other animals from suffering, but Covance is still in business, so PETA's work goes on, including a recent protest at the company's annual meeting, where PETA also presented a resolution calling on the company to make animal welfare improvements.

Ready to help animals in laboratories? Learn how—and be sure to follow PETA on Twitter to learn about more opportunities to get active.

The U.S. Army's plans to use animals in trauma training are enough to make a goat faint. The army is in the market to buy up to 3,600 goats to torment and kill in exercises like those seen in this shocking undercover video, which PETA released last month. The video, sent to us by a brave whistleblower, shows instructors as they saw off live goats' limbs with tree trimmers and crudely cut open the animals' abdomens and yank out their organs. Goats moan loudly and kick during the procedures.

Goats are intelligent, inquisitive, social animals who can quickly learn to open latches on farm gates and let themselves out. Moms and kids share a strong bond and have been known to recognize each other even if they have been separated for years.

The Army plans to mutilate thousands of goats even though high-tech human simulators are readily available and offer soldiers superior training in how to treat wounds in the field.

You can help: Send PETA's two goat images included here to the Army and urge it to save thousands of goats from suffering and dying in cruel trauma training exercises by using modern simulators instead. The Army is accepting bids only until June 11, so please act now!

Note: Please do not use the words "goat" or "goats" in your e-mail to the Army because it seems to be blocking e-mails with those words in them.

PETA has been on pharmaceutical company Amgen's case for years over the company's stubborn refusal to more actively implement alternatives to animal experiments, among other things. But we're riding high this week after pulling a fast one at Amgen's Tour of California Bike Race.

Amgen sponsored the massive race and had its branding everywhere, but so did we:

PETA got the last laugh near the finish line. As the racers flew by and the news cameras flashed, two stealthily placed staffers whipped out signs about Amgen's animal abuse and held them high for the crowd to see:

It's time for Amgen to join in the race to replace animal tests with modern science.

PETA protesters wearing monkey masks and holding signs reading, "Deplane Monkeys," recently held demonstrations outside the Chicago headquarters of United Airlines and the U.S. headquarters of Air France in New York. PETA is urging the airlines to commit to a ban on shipping primates to laboratories, as almost every airline in the world already has, including Delta, American, US Air, and China Airlines.

No-Fly Zone

PETA demonstrators also dropped a banner from a busy overpass next to United HQ, generating a lot of views and picture-taking:

United Airlines, which recently acquired Continental Airlines, is now the last U.S. air carrier without a policy prohibiting the transportation of primates to be abused and killed in crude, painful, and archaic experiments in laboratories.

Think Flying Coach Is Tough?

The cruelty involved in laboratory experiments on primates and other animals should be self-evident: After hearing from PETA about the horrors that cats and dogs endure in labs, for instance, Nippon Cargo Airlines, which had been shipping dogs and cats from the United States to Japanese labs, implemented a worldwide policy against shipping any animals to labs.

When primates are shipped to laboratories, they're first separated from their families and locked inside dark, terrifying cargo holds for as long as 30 hours. Then they're delivered to facilities that will poison them, cut them up, and kill them. Many monkeys who are shipped to laboratories were first ripped from their homes in the wild.

Help Stop Primates From Being Shipped to Laboratories

Please join PETA in telling airlines that still transport monkeys to U.S. laboratories to adopt a policy against the transportation of nonhuman primates for use in experiments.

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.

Navy veteran Bob Barker was appalled at what he saw in undercover video footage of U.S. Coast Guard trauma training leaked to PETA. In the video, live goats are stabbed, have their internal organs pulled out, and have their limbs cut off with tree trimmers. The goats moan loudly and kick while they are being mutilated, a sign that they were not sufficiently anesthetized, while an instructor cheerfully whistles and a soldier jokes about writing songs about mutilating the animals.

As a proud vet, Bob wants members of the armed forces to have the best possible training—and that means replacing archaic and cruel animal exercises  with superior lifelike human simulators that can bleed, breathe, have their bones broken, and even "die." The simulators are already in use at many military facilities, and military regulations even require that non-animal methods be used when available. But the policy isn't being enforced.

Bob wrote to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano on PETA's behalf to urge them to improve military trauma training by mandating that all programs use only advanced human simulators.

What You Can Do

Join Bob in asking Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security officials to comply with federal regulations and replace all use of animals with human simulators.