PETA Statement: Monkeys Caged With Dead Rats and Poison at Tulane Primate Center

For Immediate Release:
October 6, 2023

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Please see the following statement from PETA primate scientist Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel regarding the citations, including one critical repeat violation, posted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture against the Tulane National Primate Research Center for its violations of federal animal welfare regulations:

Staff at the Tulane National Primate Research Center continue to make a water-tight case for shutting down this wretched facility, which flushes taxpayer money down the toilet every day and endangers the monkeys it imprisons with unchecked incompetence.

U.S. Department of Agriculture inspectors found dead rats on the ground and in the ceilings along with rat poison in outdoor primate enclosures, according to a just-posted report. The outside enclosures are littered with broken plastic barrels, fence posts, and broken panels in the overgrown weeds just outside the breeding facility, where Canada geese have nested—and staff have failed to clean up their waste. According to the report, four monkeys in just three months have gotten stuck in the webbing of the enclosures, one requiring surgery.

Tulane is among the seven national primate research centers that want $30 million more in taxpayer funding in a bill under consideration in the U.S. Senate, but they clearly don’t deserve a single penny of the money they already get. Resources should be directed toward modern, non-animal research methods, and we urge officials to adopt PETA’s Research Modernization Deal.

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 the group on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, or Instagram.