CITES Can’t Clear Cambodia’s Monkey Trade of Fraud, PETA Urges RFK Jr. to Shut Down Imports to U.S. Laboratories

A bombshell new report from the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the international body that oversees the global trade in endangered and threatened wildlife, says it cannot rule out fraud and corruption in Cambodia’s monkey-export pipeline, prompting PETA, in a letter sent today, to urge U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to immediately halt imports of Cambodian monkeys destined for U.S. laboratories.

PETA warns that thousands of monkeys continue to pour into the U.S. from an industry at the center of an international monkey-laundering scandal and one that poses serious public health risks.

The newly released CITES findings suggest Cambodia has yet to clean up problems exposed by a sweeping five-year U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service investigation. That probe uncovered an alleged scheme in which wild monkeys were captured, falsely labeled as captive-bred, and funneled into laboratories in the U.S. and elsewhere, resulting in federal indictments against eight people tied to Cambodia’s monkey-export trade.

CITES says that Cambodian exporters failed to comply with its requirements and are still:

• Capturing free-living monkeys from temples, cities, and parks and funneling them into breeding farms while claiming the animals aren’t “wild.” CITES flatly rejected that interpretation, clarifying that a free-living monkey is wild whether the animal is captured in a forest, a temple complex, or a city.

• Refusing to destroy metal identification tags that the U.S. investigation showed were removed from dead monkeys and placed on wild-caught monkeys, falsely giving them a new identity.
• Failing to provide consistent, complete, and plausible breeding records. U.S. investigators found that reported production at five of six Cambodian breeding facilities exceeded the biological capacity of the species, yet CITES reports that just one facility provided a detailed explanation for the extraordinary reproduction rates.

 “After years of investigations, the world’s top wildlife-trade authority still can’t verify that monkeys exported from Cambodia are being legally sourced,” says PETA’s Chief Science Advisor on Primate Experimentation Issues Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel. “PETA strongly urges Secretary Kennedy to suspend importing monkeys from an industry clouded by wildlife-trafficking concerns, questionable records, and dangerous zoonotic disease risks.”

Cambodian exporters are also delivering more than laundered monkeys. Cambodian-origin monkeys have arrived in the U.S. carrying deadly pathogens, including Burkholderia pseudomallei, a Tier 1 Select Agent so feared that it is listed alongside Ebola and Anthrax as bioterrorism weapons.

Growing concern in Congress over biosecurity and wildlife trafficking risks posed by the monkey trade spurred the Preventing Risky Importation of Monkeys to Avoid Toxic Exposures (PRIMATE) Act, introduced by Reps. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) and Dina Titus (D-Nev.). The bipartisan bill would prohibit importing monkeys for use in laboratories.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on or abuse in any other way”—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.