Thousands of Lab-Bound Monkeys Shipped to JFK Airport; PETA Rallies Supporters to Object

For Immediate Release:
June 16, 2022

Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382

PETA is calling on its millions of supporters to flood EGYPTAIR Cargo phone lines to urge it to stop shipping monkeys to their deaths in laboratories, following reports that a shipment of macaques from Cambodia arrived via the airline at John F. Kennedy (JFK) International Airport this morning.

In just three months, the airline has reportedly flown more than 4,000 monkeys into JFK, posing a grave, potentially fatal public health risk and causing immense suffering to the monkeys, who were either captured in nature or bred on disease-ridden farms.

Monkeys who survive these conditions are packed into small wooden crates and locked inside EGYPTAIR’s cargo holds on the first part of their grueling journey to their final destination: laboratories in which they’ll be mutilated and killed in experiments that rarely translate to cures or treatments for humans.

“Cramming monkeys into dark cargo holds terrorizes these intelligent animals and risks deadly outbreaks of disease,” says PETA primate scientist Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel. “PETA is calling on EGYPTAIR to follow the example set by its competitors and stop doing favors for the animal experimentation industry.”

PETA notes that nearly every major airline in the world has stopped transporting monkeys to laboratories and that Kenya Airways committed to ending the practice earlier this year following an appeal from the group. The monkeys whose crates spilled out onto a Pennsylvania highway as a result of a truck crash in January were flown on one of its planes that had landed in JFK earlier that day.

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