For Immediate Release:
May 11, 2023
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
Houston – Please see the following statement from PETA Senior Science Advisor Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel regarding Charles River Laboratory’s 2023 first-quarter earnings report:
Charles River Laboratories wants investors to believe that its attempts to develop a test confirming that it only imports purpose-bred monkeys will successfully bring this monkey-selling company back to business as usual. They won’t.
First, biologic drugs can be approved without using monkeys, which have never been required, as the FDA Modernization Act now makes clear. Second, the fundamental biology of monkeys won’t change. Long-tailed macaques will continue to reproduce at a rate that simply won’t satisfy the voracious experimentation industry, which will continue to abduct them from their forest homes and decimate wild populations.
Executives also failed to disclose that an outbreak of tuberculosis was reported among monkeys at an export facility in Mauritius—a country from which Charles River imports monkeys and the second-largest exporter of monkeys to the U.S.
Charles River needs to check its hubris before long-tailed macaques are pushed to extinction. Nature has bigger parameters at play here, bringing an impending existential crisis for the company.
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