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Monkey Importer Charles River Laboratories CEO Retires: PETA Statement

For Immediate Release:
January 8, 2026

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Norfolk, Va. –

Please see the following statement from PETA Senior Science Advisor on Primate Experimentation, Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel, regarding the announcement that Charles River Laboratories CEO James Foster is retiring:

James Foster gets to retire, but the monkeys his company extracted from forests, laundered through supply chains, and funneled into U.S. laboratories don’t. Foster built Charles River into a global monkey-extraction machine that accelerated extinction risk and propped up a research model that has consistently failed to deliver meaningful benefits for human patients. Even when trafficked monkeys could have gone to sanctuaries, Charles River fought to keep them in the pipeline. As U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made clear, the era of animal-based science is ending. Foster may be leaving the corner office, but the reckoning for this industry is only beginning. We’ll see you in the boardroom.

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.

For Media: Contact PETA’s Media Response Team.
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“Almost all of us grew up eating meat, wearing leather, and going to circuses and zoos. We never considered the impact of these actions on the animals involved. For whatever reason, you are now asking the question: Why should animals have rights?”

— Ingrid Newkirk, PETA Founder and co-author of Animalkind

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