PETA, Primate Experts File Legal Petitions to New Administration to Protect Monkeys, Not Profits

For Immediate Release:
January 27, 2025

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

PETA and more than two dozen primate experts submitted to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service two new formal listing petitions today, seeking protections for long-tailed and southern pig-tailed macaques under the Endangered Species Act before the animal experimentation industry drives them to extinction.

With this filing, PETA hopes the incoming Trump administration will pick up the ball dropped under the last administration and end the trafficking of illegally wild-caught monkeys and sales of international captive-bred monkeys now decimating the species. It was under the previous Trump administration that the Fish & Wildlife Service initiated a sweeping investigation into a worldwide monkey laundering operation based in Cambodia. Referencing the investigation, the CITES Secretariat recently recommended a suspension of trade on long-tailed macaques from Cambodia. 

The petitions are available here and here.

PETA submitted previous petitions in April 2023 under the Biden administration and has since obtained documents revealing that current and former Fish & Wildlife Service employees, including former Principal Deputy Director Margaret Everson and members of an animal experimentation lobbying group, attempted to inappropriately influence the review process by submitting comments to the agency and seeking to coordinate a meeting with the agency in an apparent effort to persuade it to rely on outside information provided by the experimentation industry.

The agency was supposed to take no more than 90 days to review the petitions, but dragged its feet for more than 500 before rejecting it, despite irrefutable evidence of the species’ decline.  

The new long-tailed macaque petition cites additional recent evidence, including a Science Advances publication showing that the species’ populations in Asia are 80% smaller than expected and a population variability analysis showing that removing female long-tailed macaques, the favored monkey in the experimentation trade, leads to plummeting populations. 

It also cites a population estimate from the Wildlife Conservation Society Cambodia showing that the long-tailed macaque population in the country’s protected Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary has declined by at least 49%—nearly half—since 2010.

“Endangered Species Act protections are meant to prevent the extinction of species, not be withheld to prop up profits for the experimentation industry,” says PETA primate scientist Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel. “PETA calls on the Fish and Wildlife Service to acknowledge the data, and fulfill its mandate to protect animals, rather than cater to the humans responsible for wiping them out.”

Prominent primate scientists, including Jane Goodall and Birutė Galdikas, and more than 30 wildlife and scientific organizations from around the world with decades of expertise in the wildlife trade, monkey ecology, and conservation, joined PETA in submitting the petitions.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature has maintained the endangered status of long-tailed and southern pig-tailed macaques, despite facing pressure from animal experimentation lobbyists.

In nature, macaques live in large groups, with an intense focus on social relationships. Infant macaques are adored, and female macaques remain in their birth group for life. These family-oriented animals are captured from the wild in staggering numbers and funneled into the international wildlife trade, where they end up in U.S. laboratories for pointless, painful, and deadly experiments.

Evidence from the March 2024 trial of Cambodian government official and alleged monkey smuggler Masphal Kry exposed that Cambodian monkey farm Vanny Bio Research received more than 55,000 wild-caught monkeys and sent 30,000 of them to the U.S. for experimentation under false “captive-bred” labels.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org, listen to The PETA Podcast, or follow PETA on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.