Documents Released After Legal Wrangle Reveal Monkeys Sold to Laboratory With

Monkeys From Primate Products, Inc., Were Sold to Charles River Laboratories, Cited by Feds for the Scalding and Overheating Deaths of Monkeys

For Immediate Release:
August 18, 2016

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

After fighting to obtain public records, PETA has learned that monkeys observed during the group’s eyewitness investigation of Primate Products, Inc., (PPI) last year were sold to a laboratory with a history of egregious animal welfare violations.

PPI recently filed a lawsuit to prevent PETA from obtaining the records, but then withdrew the suit when a judge granted PETA the right to intervene in the case.

The documents subsequently released show the transfer or sale of more than 350 monkeys between February 2015 and February 2016, including seven who were noted by PETA’s eyewitness to be suffering from injuries, including lacerations, puncture wounds, and an exposed tailbone. One monkey paced repeatedly behind cage bars—a sign of extreme mental distress.

PPI sold all seven of these monkeys to contract testing corporation Charles River Laboratories in August 2015.

Like PPI, Charles River has repeatedly failed to comply with even minimal federal animal-welfare regulations. In 2009, the company was fined $10,000 after 32 monkeys baked to death at one of its Nevada facilities following a system malfunction. In 2011, it was fined $4,000 when employees at its Reno, Nevada, facility carelessly left a monkey in a cage that was put through a high-temperature cage washer, scalding him to death.

At Charles River, these monkeys will likely be used in archaic, painful, and deadly tests of experimental drugs, pesticides, herbicides, and other chemicals. These tests continue, even though nine out of every 10 drugs that pass tests on animals fail in human studies.

“PETA’s legal victory gives some insight into the lives of the monkeys who are warehoused for profit at PPI’s squalid monkey prison,” says PETA Senior Vice President of Laboratory Investigations Kathy Guillermo. “These sensitive beings are shuttled from one hellhole to another like pieces of laboratory equipment, until experimenters finally torment and kill them.”

PPI shipped other monkeys to government laboratories operated by the Food and Drug Administration in Silver Spring, Maryland, and by the National Institutes of Health in Hamilton, Montana, and Frederick, Maryland.

PPI remains under investigation by the U.S. Department of Agriculture following PETA’s exposé.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.