For Immediate Release:
December 20, 2022
Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382
Dulles, Va. – To reach legislators traveling home for the holidays at the end of the congressional session and prompted by reports that AELF FlightService’s Maleth Aero airline has flown thousands of long-tailed macaques from Cambodia and Vietnam into Dulles International Airport, PETA supporters armed with signs reading, “Congress: No More Monkey Business! Stop Primate Imports!” will descend on Dulles on Thursday. The monkeys were reportedly bound for facilities owned by the infamous Inotiv and Charles River Laboratories. PETA’s primate defenders will expose this shameful monkey importation pipeline and pressure legislators to direct the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to end all shipments of monkeys to U.S. laboratories.
When: Thursday, December 22, 3:30 p.m.
Where: Dulles International Airport (departures entrance), 1 Saarinen Cir., Dulles, Virginia
The demonstration follows the U.S. Department of Justice indictments of those involved in an alleged monkey-smuggling ring that supplied U.S. laboratories with long-tailed macaques abducted from their forest homes in Cambodia and falsely identified as captive-born. The International Union for Conservation of Nature recently declared long-tailed macaques an endangered species, and their population decline is due in large part to voracious demand from the U.S. animal experimentation industry.
“Terrified, endangered monkeys are being torn from their forest homes and sent to their inevitable deaths in stark laboratories, and every player involved in this process is complicit,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA is urging lawmakers to crack down on this stream of suffering before we wipe this species off the planet entirely.”
PETA has confirmed that United Airlines, American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, and Delta Air Lines are among the many major companies that do not fly monkeys or other primates destined for laboratories or laboratory suppliers.
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 or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
