Oscar Winner Says It's Time to Stop Tearing Chimpanzees and Orangutans Away From Their Mothers and Training Them Through Beatings

For Immediate Release:
September 18, 2008

Contact:
Kristie Phelps 757-622-7382

Norfolk, Va. -- On behalf of PETA, Academy-award winning actor Anjelica Huston has sent an urgent letter to three major advertising agencies that have designed commercials featuring great apes--JTW (for client CDW), Kuhn & Wittenborn (for KCI), and Kaplan Thaler Group (for Aflac). Huston urges the companies to contact PETA to learn about the severe mistreatment of chimpanzees and orangutans who are torn away from their mothers and used as "actors" in ads, TV shows, and movies. Huston suggests that the agencies switch to state-of-the-art animatronics and other lifelike alternatives to live animals.

"I am writing about an issue that has troubled me since I visited the set of my father's production of The Bible: the use of wild animals in film," writes Huston, who has starred in dozens of films and won an Oscar for her performance in Prizzi's Honor. "[W]hat's … troubling is how these animals are procured, trained, and disposed of away from the set."

Huston informs the agencies that trainers must trick, sedate, or restrain mother chimpanzees in order to take away their babies, which results in emotional trauma for mothers and babies. Trainers beat chimpanzees who are as young as 2 years old. Huston explains that one primatologist who worked undercover at the training facility that provided chimpanzee "actors" for Evan Almighty and many television commercials reported "sickening acts of emotional, psychological, and physical abuse every single day on the job." By age 8, chimpanzees usually become too strong for trainers to control--they are often "retired" to squalid cages in roadside zoos, where they are denied their most basic needs.

Huston continues, "Young chimpanzees are playful and curious by nature, but such attributes don't translate well to a set, where we know that a botched take means wasted time and money. Trainers, therefore, want the animals to know who is boss and that 'misbehavior' will result in pain and punishment." She reminds the agencies that animal-free campaigns such as Geico's celebrated computer-animated gecko spots and Comcast's award-winning "The Slowskys" ad series, which also don't use live animals, have been praised for their ingenious use of technology.

Anjelica Huston's letter is available upon request. For more information, please visit PETA.org.