Monkey #V357: Behind the Walls of a Lab
Victory: As a result of PETA’s campaign, the Army announced that it is ending its cruel use of monkeys in chemical attack training exercises and will instead use advanced human simulators!
Monkey #V357 was born on the island of St. Kitts, where he was either captured in the wild or born in captivity. If he was abducted from his home in the wild, he likely watched trappers shoot his mother out of a tree with a dart gun, and then was ripped from her arms. If he was born into a breeding facility, he was forcibly—and permanently—torn from his screaming mother, probably within days of birth.
He was then crammed into a tiny crate and flown to Miami, Florida, in a plane’s dark, loud and terrifying cargo hold. There, he was piled onto a truck like luggage and driven up the eastern seaboard to the U.S. Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.
#V357, the only “name” the Army gave him in its laboratory, spent the next three years of his life locked in a steel cage and being used over-and-over as a target for nerve-agent attack training. Every eight weeks, experimenters injected him with a massive drug overdose to crudely mimic a chemical attack and trainees looked on as he twitched uncontrollably, sweated profusely, violently convulsed, and struggled to breathe. The psychological distress that this constant physical abuse and confinement caused led #V357 and the other monkeys imprisoned at Aberdeen to fight each other, and he suffered gaping lacerations, a torn lip, and bitten or torn off fingers. The injuries did not stop the training exercises.
After three years of being tormented in this cruel training course, the Army began punishing his small body in a different experiment. They injected him with a chemical agent that severely restricted blood flow to his brain. After one final injection and several hours of suffering, he died at night, alone in his cold, barren cage.
It is too late for #V357, but it’s not too late for the rest of the monkeys the Army is still tormenting in these cruel and ineffective training courses. Please help stop this by signing this White House petition to replace the monkeys with modern, superior human simulators.
Written by Michelle Sherrow
