Victory! PETA Campaign Shuts Down Cruel Marmoset Laboratory at UMass
VICTORY! In another major win for animals, years of sustained pressure from PETA has closed the University of Massachusetts—Amherst laboratory of Agnès Lacreuse, ending more than a decade of cruel and deadly experiments on marmosets.
At UMass, Lacreuse spent more than ten years and more than $6 million in federal money performing scientifically flawed menopause experiments on marmosets, a condition the monkeys cannot naturally experience. A message on the laboratory’s website announced its closure.
PETA exposed the experiments in 2021 and, since then, waged an active campaign with more than 160,000 supporters who wrote, cajoled, protested, leafleted, and demanded an end to Lacreuse’s scientifically bereft and cruel experiments. In all, UMass received nearly 1.4 million letters from PETA supporters calling for the end of Lacreuse’s experiments. Local advocates with Western Massachusetts Animal Rights Advocates and Compassionate Alliance for Nonhumans helped keep the pressure on.
Actors Daisy Ridley, Cassandra Peterson (aka Elvira, Mistress of the Dark), and Kate del Castillo called for the lab to close. Actor and Massachusetts native Casey Affleck and his mother Chris Anne Boldt led a news conference exposing the pointlessness of the experiments and calling for their end.
A Perversion of Science
No meaningful results were ever produced by Lacreuse’s lab. Experimenters performed invasive surgeries on female marmosets, implanted electrodes in holes that they drilled into the animals’ skulls, cut into their necks, and threaded electrodes from their scalp and neck through their abdomen.
Some marmosets were zip-tied into a restraining device to immobilize them, shoved into a plastic cylinder that’s screwed in place, and subjected to the noise of an MRI machine. It’s a frightening and confusing experience.
In some tests, these sensitive, social monkeys are left in solitary confinement—which United Nations officials have compared to torture when it’s done to humans—just to see how they react.
But since marmosets cannot naturally experience menopause, Lacreuse had to pretend they did. To mimic hot flashes, she attached hand warmers to them.
Hand warmers.
What took place in Lacreuse’s laboratory was not science. It wouldn’t even win a blue ribbon at a fifth-grade science fair.
It was simply an obscenity. And now it’s over.
What You Can Do
The ground continues to shift under cruel and archaic animal experimentation. If you’re in the U.S., please use this momentum and TAKE ACTION to urge your members of Congress to close the seven failed national primate research centers.
And everyone, no matter where they live, can urge the University of Washington to shut down its primate center.
