European Space Agency Sides With Monkeys

Victory Update: Following a year of vigorous campaigning, PETA has learned that government officials have grounded plans for a cruel and ineffective radiation experiment on monkeys. Learn more about this victory for monkeys.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is light years ahead of NASA in the compassion, technology, and common-sense departments. In a recent letter to Animal Defenders International, Jean-Jacques Dordain, the ESA’s director general, stated that the ESA “declines any interest in monkey research and does not consider any need or use for such result.”

So in other words, the European equivalent of NASA is saying that experimenting on monkeys is useless! That’s pretty much exactly what PETA has been saying all along about NASA’s cruel plan to fund an experiment in which as many as 30 squirrel monkeys would be blasted with radiation and confined for the rest of their lives so that researchers could observe the devastating results. The ESA recently launched its sophisticated Mars500 project, which includes a 520-day-long experiment on six human volunteers and simulates the conditions of a trip to Mars.

We’re applauding the ESA’s staunch stance against these archaic and inhumane experiments and are keeping the pressure on NASA. Just today, PETA members dressed as Trekkies protested at the debut of NASA’s Star Trek Live stage show at the Kennedy Space Center to urge the space agency to let monkeys live long and prosper:

You can join the protest by contacting the Brookhaven National Laboratory and urging it to halt plans to irradiate monkeys for this NASA-funded experiment.

Let’s hope that this pressure from Trekkies, taxpayers, and NASA’s overseas counterpart convinces the agency to finally move out of the Dark Ages and into the Space Age by dropping cruel and crude animal experiments in favor of humane and effective modern technologies that are actually relevant to human astronauts.

Written by Lindsay Pollard-Post