PETA Unveils Giant Binoculars to Give Students Up-Close Look at UC-Davis Monkey Torment
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
University of California-Davis (UC-Davis) students will get an eye-opening view next week when PETA unveils “How the Other Half Lives.” This installation, featuring a 7.5-foot-tall pair of binoculars, contrasts footage of macaques thriving peacefully in their natural habitats with the harrowing conditions of those trapped in laboratories, including at the school’s California National Primate Research Center (CNPRC).
PETA’s installation is traveling to 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.
“Through these lenses, the public sees what UC-Davis desperately wants to obscure: monkeys trapped in barren cages, used and discarded 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 UC-Davis to end this cruelty, shut down its failed primate center, and shift to modern, animal-free research methods.”
When & Where: Monday and Tuesday May 5 – 6 and Thursday, May 8, 10 a.m. at Memorial Union Patio, UC-Davis and Wednesday, May 7, 9 a.m., California State Capitol, 1305 10th St, Sacramento
The exhibit will be on display through Thursday, May 8. Please inquire for specific location information.
PETA’s “How the Other Half Lives” exhibit.
Why: In their natural habitat, macaques live in complex, matriarchal societies, 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.
The CNPRC imprisons more than 4,000 monkeys, traumatizes and infects them with deadly viruses and painful diseases, and kills them in vile experiments. Experimenters there have deliberately severed parts of macaques’ spinal cords, forcibly separated baby monkeys from their mothers, and cut open the skulls of monkeys and screwed in metal implants.
Records obtained by PETA show multiple serious cases of cruelty at the CNPRC, including a rhesus macaque who died after she was left unattended in a cage inside a van with the heat blasting, a monkey who was found dead after becoming entangled in a loose bungee cord, and seven infant rhesus macaques who died after they tried to nurse and ingested dye from marks made on their mothers’ bodies.
PETA hopes the installation will inspire change just as its namesake did—an 1890 study exposing poverty in the New York tenements.
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.
