‘Murder’ Billboard Blasts Monkey Experimentation Facility

PETA Ad Pulls OHSU’s Cruel Primate Experiments Out of the Shadows

For Immediate Release:
December 11, 2018

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

“If You Call It ‘Medical Research,’ You Can Get Away With Murder.” That’s the message on a new PETA billboard targeting the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC), where more than 5,000 nonhuman primates are imprisoned for use in cruel and worthless experiments, including ones in which infant monkeys are separated from their mothers to induce psychological damage, monkeys are forced to eat lard, and they’re addicted to nicotine and alcohol. The ONPRC, affiliated with Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), is located in Beaverton, where the sign outside the facility euphemistically describes it only as OHSU’s “West Campus.”

The billboard is located at 314 S.W. Fourth Ave. (at the intersection with S.W. Harvey Milk Street) and will stay up for a month.

“Sensitive, highly intelligent monkeys are caged, cut up, and killed inside this laboratory, and taxpayers are footing the bill,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA is calling on this facility to relinquish these suffering animals to reputable sanctuaries and urging the National Institutes of Health to stop bankrolling dead-end animal experiments and divert research funds to superior, non-animal methods.”

A PETA video exposé of the ONPRC in 2007 revealed that monkeys were terrorized by staff, denied veterinary care and pain relief, and driven insane by confinement to tiny, barren cages. PETA handed video evidence over to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which fined OHSU nearly $12,000 for other violations in 2012, issued an official warning to the facility in 2014 for death and injury resulting from failures in veterinary oversight, and issued another warning in 2016 following a monkey’s death after becoming entangled in a chain. And just this year, federal documents revealed that a young monkey had to be euthanized after becoming trapped in PVC pipes in an enclosure.

The ONPRC is one of seven National Primate Research Centers around the country that are funded by the federal National Institutes of Health (NIH). PETA has already posted its message on billboards near the primate centers in Wisconsin and Georgia, and it plans to target the remainder with its ad campaign, too. The group—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—notes that OHSU received more than $218 million in 2017 in taxpayer-funded grants from NIH, approximately half of which were directed toward cruel and archaic experiments on monkeys and other animals.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.