PETA Unleashes D.C. Ad Blitz Seeking the Closure of All Monkey Laboratories
For Immediate Release:
July 16, 2025
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
Nearly two dozen Washington bus shelters have been plastered today with startling PETA ads calling for the shutdown of all monkey laboratories, including the seven federally funded National Primate Research Centers (NPRCs).
The ads show Milo, a monkey held at the Oregon NPRC who was used as a breeder and rotated through female monkeys’ cages or subjected to painful electro-ejaculation.
The ads follow PETA’s release of never-before-seen video from inside the primate laboratory of Massachusetts General Hospital, a Harvard University teaching hospital, revealing what PETA undercover investigators have documented at the Oregon and Wisconsin NPRCs and other primate laboratories they have worked in: monkeys driven mad from living for years in tiny, barren cages, self-harmed monkeys with no outlet for their stress, and experiments that fail to help humans.
“I hope every person walking past the bus shelter is jolted into thinking about the hell monkeys are enduring behind laboratory doors,” says PETA Senior Science Advisor for Primate Issues Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel. “Then follow PETA’s example and take action: Call your legislator and say, ‘Shut down the monkey labs, now’.”
Monkeys in the laboratory of National Institutes of Health experimenter Elisabeth Murray, who has damaged the brains of monkeys for four decades, have suffered from diarrhea and opportunistic infections for years. Veterinary records show some have lived alone in a cage for more than a decade.
Monkeys in U.S. laboratories have died in bizarre ways through the carelessness and incompetence of staff. They have been starved and strangled, scalded to death in high-temperature cage washers, caught behind cages and allowed to die, given the wrong experimental compound, improperly anesthetized, and more.
PETA’s ads appear on 23 bus shelters around Washington, including:
- “H” St. N.W. South Side, 48 ft. west of N. Capitol St. N.W. facing east
- Pennsylvania Ave.,160 ft. west of 8th St. S.E., south side – facing east
- 7th St., 30 ft. north of H St. N.W., west side – facing east
A full list of locations is available upon request.
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.
