Laboratory That Supplies Monkeys to Harvard’s Sarah Fortune Cited for Deaths: PETA Statement

For Immediate Release:
April 23, 2025

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Please see the following statement from PETA Vice President Dr. Alka Chandna regarding just-posted citations issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture against Valley Biosystems, a West Sacramento supplier of monkeys for laboratory experiments, for two critical violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act in which two monkeys died in separate incidents. Valley Biosystems supplies monkeys to Harvard’s Sarah Fortune, who recently made headlines claiming she would have to euthanize the monkeys in her experiments if her funding was cut by the Trump administration—never mentioning she kills all the monkeys she experiments on:

These two monkeys, who were always marked for death, didn’t even make it to the likes of one of Valley Biosystem’s customers, Harvard experimenter Sarah Fortune, before meeting their deaths from apparently incompetent and poorly trained staff. Fortune, who represents the next step on a one-way road to monkey death, recently lamented that federal cutbacks would force her to kill monkeys before she had a chance to torment them in pointless tests—a bald-faced attempt to garner sympathy and keep the federal tax dollars flowing. Valley Biosystem’s incompetence and Fortune’s cruelty bookend the need to stop pointless experiments on animals and implement superior, animal-free methods, which are outlined in PETA scientists’ practical roadmap, Research Modernization Now.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits for people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow PETA on X, Facebook, or Instagram.