‘NIH, Close the Monkey Labs!’ Demands New Times Square Ad
For Immediate Release:
October 7, 2025
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner – 202-483-7382
PETA’s new billboard is showing the crowds of Times Square how monkeys live inside federally funded laboratories and calling for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to shut down the seven national primate research centers.
Billboard location: At the intersection of W. 40th St. and 8th Ave. (south corner).
PETA is also running an audio ad on streaming platforms and smart speakers through October 13 in Washington, D.C., and the cities that house the seven national primate research centers, spotlighting their cruelty and failed science.
Monkeys at the national primate research centers, established in the 1960s, are torn from their distraught mothers as infants and kept—sometimes for decades—in metal-barred cages barely bigger than them. They are infected with deadly diseases, cut open in painful surgeries, injected with toxic substances, addicted to drugs, killed in “junk food” experiments, frightened with snakes, and more. Yet experiments on them have failed to produce marketable vaccines, treatments, or cures for human disease.
“These monkey laboratories have delivered decades of terror, pain, and death to monkeys, but no cures for humans,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “NIH must stop pouring hundreds of millions into this failed experiment and support animal-free, human-relevant research instead.”
The laboratories have racked up dozens of violations of animal protection regulations. Monkeys have died from starvation, dehydration, strangulation, and surgical errors, and have even been scalded to death in high-temperature cage washers.
PETA has conducted two undercover investigations at the Oregon National Primate Research Center and released video from inside the Wisconsin primate center in 2020.
On October 22, a Species Unite documentary chronicling the efforts of PETA and activists in Bainbridge, Ga., to prevent construction of a massive import-and-breeding monkey warehouse supplying monkeys to laboratories will show at the Bedford Playhouse in Bedford, N.Y. Beginning November 1, the documentary will be available for free on the Species Unite website and YouTube.
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
