PETA’s $30,000 Exhibit Against Animal Experiments Vandalized Outside HHS
For Immediate Release:
July 25, 2025
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
PETA filed a police report late last evening after discovering extensive damage done to “How the Other Half Lives,” PETA’s 7.5-foot-tall $30,000 binocular installation set up outside the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as part of PETA’s call to close the seven federally funded National Primate Research Centers, tax boondoggles that see monkeys caged and killed in horrific ways.
PETA staff arrived and discovered that during their absence the exhibit was moved, the video screen was cracked, and the signs were torn down.
The exhibit juxtaposes macaques thriving in their natural habitats with the misery endured by those in laboratories. It has been outside HHS for almost a week, contrasting the lives of monkeys living in family groups in forests to their bleak existence in small metal cages of laboratories, deprived of freedom, friends, and scared out of their wits. It shows that most people are now against experiments on animals, and that the National Institutes of Health has announced that the future is in more sophisticated, 21st Century research methods and it is now prioritizing human-relevant research and banning funding opportunities for animal-only experiments.
PETA calls for the closure of the national regional primate centers that have wasted billions of dollars and subjected hundreds of thousands of monkeys to painful, ineffective, and deadly experiments that have failed to deliver promised vaccines or cures for human diseases. Some of the experiments are downright sadistic, involving sewing baby monkeys’ eyes shut, separating mother monkeys form their infants, electro-ejaculating restrained male monkeys, and placing electrodes into monkeys’ skulls. PETA urges the administration to stop importing monkeys to the U.S. for use in experiments.
“Emotions are running high now that the Trump administration has reduced federal funds for experimenters to torment animals,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “But this vandalism won’t stop our work to shut down these sordid primate centers and spare monkeys.”
In addition to being killed in experiments, federal reports and whistleblowers reveal that monkeys have been starved and strangled, scalded to death in high-temperature cage washers, caught behind cages and allowed to die, given the wrong experimental compounds, and more.
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.
