PETA Statement: Conviction of Primate Importer for Lying to Feds

For Immediate Release:
August 6, 2021

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Please see the following statement from PETA Vice President Dr. Alka Chandna regarding the felony conviction of Texas-based monkey importer and U.S. laboratory supplier Gary Tucker of Orient BioResource Center for lying to federal agents during their investigation into monkey trafficking:

PETA applauds the federal agents investigating monkey trafficking into U.S. laboratories. PETA has long suspected wrongdoing by these shady import companies and has documented the misery of monkeys stuffed into small wooden boxes, stacked in the cargo holds of planes, and shipped around the world in fear, sometimes dying on the way. These animals can harbor deadly pathogens that kill humans—an experimenter in China recently died after being infected with the Monkey B virus—and the horrors that these primates face as experimental subjects should be (and one day will be) illegal. It’s time to shut down the trade in monkeys and modernize research, something technology now allows us to do.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on or abuse in any other way”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.