Harvard Says Budget Cuts Will Force Mass Killing of Laboratory Animals: PETA Statement

For Immediate Release:
April 18, 2025

Contact:
Brandi Pharris 202-483-7382

Please see the following statement from PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo regarding messaging from Harvard University that stop-work orders due to sudden federal funding cuts will force their scientists to euthanize the animals caged in their laboratories:

Harvard’s Sarah Fortune and other animal experimenters are essentially holding animals hostage to keep the public dollars flowing, claiming they will have to euthanize the animals in their laboratories if their funding is cut. But these monkeys and other animals were never going to leave the laboratories alive. Experimenters are just upset they can’t torture them first before killing them.

The Department of Health and Human Services has clearly stated that all facilities should consider placing animals in homes and sanctuaries, but we see no evidence this possibility is even being explored. The aptly named Fortune has raked in millions of tax dollars to sicken monkeys and works for a university with an endowment of more than $50 billion, but she apparently can’t scrape up the money to provide a decent home for the animals she’s now using. Instead of putting together a retirement fund, she’s willing to send them to the chopper.

Experiments on animals fail to produce cures and treatments for humans, they are cruel, and there are superior human-relevant methods available. While the animals should never have been caged and experimented on in the first place, and we would prefer adoption to good, qualified homes, a humane and peaceful end is better than what they faced—death only after a lifetime of suffering and fear. This is an opportunity for animal laboratories to shut their doors forever and to explore superior, animal-free methods of research. PETA scientists are ready to help.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—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 the group on X, Facebook, or Instagram.