Victory: Juniper Communities Drops Valentine’s Day Monkey Act

PETA Had Urged Senior-Living Community to Protect Animals and Audiences by Canceling Captive Capuchin Show

For Immediate Release:
January 31, 2019

Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382

After hearing from PETA and its supporters, Juniper Communities has canceled a Valentine’s Day performance at its senior-living community Juniper Village at Mount Joy. The dropped act uses a capuchin monkey named Django. The monkey is missing her canine teeth, which were likely extracted in an effort to reduce the risk of injury to humans who handle her. Procedures to remove or grind down monkeys’ teeth have been deemed unethical by top veterinary organizations and have been prohibited by a U.S. Department of Agriculture policy since 2006.

“It is truly our honor to nurture the spirit of life in all its forms and as such pledge to keep such archaic acts from our community calendars,” a spokesperson for Juniper Communities told PETA.

“We thank Juniper Communities for its decision not to subject this monkey to a barrage of strange noises and activity and to people touching her, treatment that’s indefensible on Valentine’s Day and on every other day of the year,” says PETA Primatologist Julia Gallucci. “Juniper acted quickly and compassionately to pull the plug on this cruel act, and PETA urges everyone to skip any event that treats living beings as props.”

PETA (whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment”) notes that most monkeys used in performances are sold as infants by animal breeders and dealers, who remove the babies from their mothers prematurely—a practice that denies them the maternal care and nurturing that they need for normal development. When used for fairs and traveling exhibits, they’re often locked inside cages or shackled with chains and shipped from city to city to be displayed, used for photo ops, or forced to perform.

PETA and nearly 100,000 of its members and supporters also recently succeeded in blocking an act featuring Django from appearing at a Christmas holiday event in Chestertown, Maryland.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.