Monkeys Scared Awake on Your Dime: Take Action to Balance the Books
Update (July 31, 2025): VICTORY! After a relentless PETA campaign, the University of Massachusetts—Amherst marmoset laboratory of Agnès Lacreuse has closed, ending more than ten years of cruel and deadly experiments on marmosets. A message on the laboratory’s website announced its closure. UMass received nearly 1.4 million messages from PETA supporters calling for the end of Lacreuse’s cruel experiments. Local advocates with Western Massachusetts Animal Rights Advocates and Compassionate Alliance for Nonhumans helped keep the pressure on. Read more about this tremendous victory here, then, if you’re in the U.S., urge your lawmakers in Congress to shut down the failed seven national primate research centers.
And everyone, no matter where they live, can urge the University of Washington to shut down its primate center.
Original post:
University of Massachusetts–Amherst experimenter Agnès Lacreuse asked the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for more than $400,000 in taxpayer money to conduct a pointless and cruel sleep deprivation experiment on tiny marmosets. She got it.
Her experiment was farmed out to the University of Wisconsin–Madison at the last minute and then delayed for years—its scope all but abandoned, under pressure from PETA. The experiment should never have been approved in the first place, and after PETA and our supporters bombarded the university with complaints, it was shut down after only one night.
But Lacreuse kept most of the money anyway.
PETA is demanding that taxpayers get a refund.
Bait and Switch
The original design of the experiment involved blasting up to a dozen monkeys with sounds as loud as a lawn mower to prevent them from sleeping for up to 24 nights—a scientifically flawed scheme with no relevance to human health.
But records obtained by PETA show that, ultimately, only six monkeys were used and the pointless test ended after just one night of torment.
It was one expensive night for taxpayers, though.
Lacreuse somehow still burned through hundreds of thousands of tax dollars. She had accepted $438,625 from NIH but failed to complete any of the goals listed in her proposal. Despite this, she returned only $98,660, or about 22%, of the cash taxpayers gave her.
Balancing the Books
PETA is now asking three government agencies—the National Institute on Aging, the Center for Scientific Review, and the Office of Research Integrity—to investigate Lacreuse for misuse of funding and research misconduct, to force her to return the remaining $340,000 of the tax money, and to bar her from receiving any more in the future.
