Monkey Importer Faces Criminal Charge for Monkey Thrown in Dumpster
PETA has discovered that state officials filed a criminal charge against the president of the Florida monkey importation company where a just-imported, laboratory-bound monkey was tossed into a trash dumpster and remained missing for five days.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission slapped Mark Moshe Bushmitz, president of Immokalee-based BC US, with a second-degree misdemeanor charge for the escape of wildlife in the January incident. The charge carries a penalty of 60 days in jail and/or a fine of up to $500. PETA is calling on the agency to revoke the company’s wildlife permit, given that the incident endangered public health and safety and violated multiple provisions of the permit.
The incident was also a clear act of cruelty to animals. The monkey suffered without food or water for days while trapped in a biomedical waste dumpster and exposed to the cold.
The misdemeanor charge is just the latest fallout from the incident, after PETA first received whistleblower reports and immediately filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The federal agency investigated and issued BC US a critical citation for violating the federal Animal Welfare Act.
BC US also received a critical citation in January when two monkeys at its facility were found dead after staff left them in a room heated to 104 degrees overnight.
Live Monkey Thrown in Trash
The laboratory-bound monkey arrived at the BC US facility after enduring a 28-hour flight from the other side of the world in a wooden shipping crate. According to the rules of the archaic and vile animal experimentation industry, he should have been moved into a small metal cage for quarantine, mandated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But he was tossed into a biohazard trash dumpster. And no one at BC US noticed until the garbage company told them five days later, after the monkey was trucked across the state. The monkey was caught and returned to the importer’s facility. Then he was killed.
How can BC US be responsible for thousands of newly imported monkeys when they didn’t even know one was missing?
What You Can Do
Please TAKE ACTION and urge the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to shut down this monkey-abduction forest-to-laboratory pipeline.
And if you’re in the U.S., please take an additional step by supporting PETA’s Research Modernization Now, which outlines a comprehensive strategy for replacing all experiments on animals with more effective, human-relevant, non-animal methods.
