Charles River Laboratories Buys the Farm, Sides with Monkey Extinction: PETA Statement

For Immediate Release:
January 13, 2026

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Please see the following statement from PETA Senior Science Advisor for Primate Experimentation, Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel, regarding Charles River Laboratories’ announcement that the company is buying a monkey breeding farm in Cambodia for $510 million, while still touting its commitment to becoming a key player in using and expanding non-animal research methods:

Charles River Laboratories is once again talking out of both sides of its mouth. The official line is that Charles River wants to be a key player in validating non-animal methods in biomedical research. But it then invests half a billion dollars in acquiring a primate breeding operation that is already part of a supply chain linked to falsified origin records, weak traceability, and documented infectious disease risks. They’ve literally “bought the farm” by digging deeper into animal-dependent infrastructure at the exact moment regulatory modernization is accelerating toward human-relevant benchmarks. Using animals sourced from that system to “validate” new methods doesn’t modernize science—it hard-wires failure into the next generation of tools. Charles River’s only real commitments are to decimating the forests of long-tailed macaques and lining its own pockets, not to the future of non-animal research.