Demolished! Old Monkey Prison Is Now a Wildlife Haven, Thanks to PETA

There is a field in Virginia where you can walk along what’s left of a cracked concrete path leading to what was once a loading dock where shipments of live monkeys arrived and dead ones were taken out with the trash. You can admire bushes alive with flowers and spot deer grazing undisturbed and rabbits bounding through the grass. What happened here?

Well, in 2004, PETA went undercover at Covance, the laboratory that dominated this site, and found impatient workers hitting terrified monkeys and screaming in their faces when they fought to resist painful procedures. We recorded how they slammed monkeys into plastic cylinders barely bigger than their own bodies and forced plastic tubes up their nostrils to pump in chemicals, causing the monkeys to gag and bleed.

After PETA made that video public, demand for Covance’s “services” dwindled so much that it closed that Virginia facility. When PETA President Ingrid Newkirk visited the site, she found Joni Mitchell’s famous song in reverse: razed buildings replaced by green fields, creating a peaceful paradise where wildlife flourished. This isn’t the only such success story, by far.

We exposed that National Institutes of Health (NIH) experimenter Stephen Suomi tore newborn monkeys from their mothers, terrorized them with loud sounds and fake snakes, addicted them to alcohol, and isolated them in tiny cages. Suomi’s laboratory closed.

We revealed that NIH had funneled millions of dollars into a ramshackle facility in Colombia, South America, that infected owl monkeys with malaria, removed their spleens, and left some to die from infected wounds. Our investigation led Colombian authorities to raid this hellhole, rescue 288 animals, and end the experiments.

Since PETA’s campaign against the global primate pipeline began, US monkey imports have plummeted by 53%. And we’re impacting the greedy companies that fuel that trade, like Charles River Laboratories, whose stock has about halved this year. After PETA teamed up with an army of outraged local residents, Charles River had to scrap plans to build a massive monkey prison in Texas. Now our sights are set on proposed monkey prisons in Florida and Georgia.

Please make sure to put PETA scientists’ Research Modernization NOW – a clear plan to end experiments on animals and transition to human-relevant science – into your representatives’ hands. We’re determined to get every last monkey – and all other animals – out of laboratories.