Massive Art Installation from PETA Magnifies Monkey Misery in Labs
For Immediate Release:
May 6, 2025
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
PETA’s new multimedia sculpture gives the public an eye-opening view inside secretive primate centers across the country, where monkeys are tormented and killed in wasteful experiments that are off-limits to the public.
Titled “How the Other Half Lives,” the touring protest art piece was conceptualized by PETA and fabricated by Britten, Inc., a Traverse City, Michigan-based creative design firm. It features a 7.5-foot-tall, three-dimensional pair of binoculars made from high-density foam, wood, and acrylic, with juxtaposing footage in each lens, revealing the startling contrast between macaques who thrive peacefully with their families in their natural habitats and those who live alone in fear in laboratories, awaiting the next painful procedure at the hands of experimenters.
PETA’s large-scale installation is popping up in high-traffic locations near all seven National Primate Research Centers—federally funded facilities around the country that have killed hundreds of thousands of monkeys while siphoning billions of taxpayer dollars for cruel, ineffective, and deadly experiments that have failed to deliver promised vaccines or cures for human diseases.
The giant binoculars debuted in Seattle, WA and have already been viewed by thousands at the University of Washington and the Space Needle, as well as in Portland, OR at Oregon Health & Science University and the Tom McCall Waterfront Park. They are currently on display at the University of California, Davis, and will visit the California State Capitol Building in Sacramento later this week.
PETA’s “How the Other Half Lives” exhibit.
“Through these lenses, viewers will get a rare look at what the nation’s primate centers desperately want to obscure: monkeys trapped in barren cages, used and killed in pointless experiments while their wild kin thrive in rich forests, surrounded by family,” says PETA Senior Science Advisor on Primate Issues Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel. “PETA urges the public to join our call to end this cruelty, shut down these failed primate centers, and shift to modern, animal-free research methods.”
PETA hopes “How the Other Half” Lives inspires change just as the installation’s namesake—an 1890 study exposing poverty in the New York tenements—did.
Macaques live in complex, matriarchal societies in their natural habitat, forging lifelong bonds, raising their young, and roaming miles daily. They gather in “sleeping trees” at night, huddling close for warmth, safety, and companionship. But this rich existence is being wiped out. Macaque populations are plummeting, in part due to the primate experimentation industry that snatches them from the wild to feed a business filled with cruelty, disease, and death.
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 PETA on X, Facebook, or Instagram
