USDA Issues Official Warning to Repeat Offender EVMS for Animal Welfare Violations

For Immediate Release:
April 7, 2025

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Norfolk, Va. –

Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS) was just issued an official warning by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for repeated violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act that resulted in the prolonged and unabated suffering and deaths of chinchillas and monkeys. The warning was publicly posted on Friday.

The USDA rarely issues official warnings, reserving them for truly egregious offenders and violations. The move follows citations the USDA issued against the school for three separate incidents that resulted in prolonged suffering and the deaths of a monkey and a mother baboon. The warning includes the following violations:

In a study in which insulin was intravenously administered to anesthetized monkeys, experimenters violated their own approved protocol by using individuals older than the maximum permitted age of 23 years and others who weighed less than the required minimum of 17.6 pounds. Experimenters then failed to monitor “multiple rhesus macaques [who] experienced severe[ly] low blood sugar and prolonged anesthesia recovery time” following the procedure. One monkey was paralyzed and “barely responsive,” but still went without emergency medical attention for seven hours before being killed. Eleven others “received no monitoring of their blood glucose or medical interventions for low blood sugar” and “took an excessive amount of time to recover from their anesthesia, some over 5 hours.”
Chinchillas lost up to 30 percent of their body weight —past the specified limit of 20 percent—because experimenters used them in a test for 21 months instead of the approved 21 weeks.
Experimenters drew blood too frequently—sometimes daily —from a 17-year-old baboon named Alissa and a 16-year-old baboon named Jemma, who was also given an experimental drug in the third incident. Jemma was found unresponsive in her cage, but there was no indication she received any veterinary treatment as required.

“Anyone not wearing a lab coat would face criminal cruelty to animals charges for starving chinchillas for months on end, ignoring a paralyzed monkey barely clinging to life or using baboons as bleeding pin cushions,” says PETA Senior Vice President Daphna Nachminovitch. “Taxpayers should not foot the bill for this deeply troubling pattern of mistreatment of animals, and PETA calls on the National Institutes of Health to cut funding immediately.”

*A baboon in a cage at EVMS rocks back and forth in psychological distress. Image obtained from* *this video* *by PETA through the Virginia Public Records Act*

This is not the first time Eastern Virginia Medical School has received an Official Warning from the USDA. In 2021, the USDA issued an official warning to the school for illegally performing multiple cesarean sections on female baboons without scientific justification or approval.

Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin recently signed into law Senate Bill 907, which requires publicly funded institutions to consider releasing primates to accredited sanctuaries instead of killing them when experiments end. EVMS is the only publicly funded university in Virginia to still use primates in experiments. EVMS was also alone in opposing SB907 as originally introduced.

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.