It was hell on Earth for monkeys: At Covance, a mega-contract testing laboratory in Virginia, experimenters grabbed them, hit them, spat on them, and slammed them into plastic cylinders that were barely bigger than their own bodies, while the panicked animals struggled, their eyes bulging with fear. Workers strapped them down and forced thick plastic tubes up their nostrils, through their sensitive nasal cavities, and into their stomachs, then pumped them full of chemicals while the primates choked, gagged, and bled. Angry, impatient staffers roughly handled the terrified monkeys, screaming in their faces and striking them in the face when they resisted the painful procedures.
PETA campaigned relentlessly against Covance, starting with the launch of our eyewitness exposé in 2005. Demand for the laboratory’s cruel “services” dwindled so much that it closed that Virginia facility, along with another laboratory, and laid off employees elsewhere. Covance was also slapped with multiple citations and fines for animal-welfare violations, including for housing a monkey in isolation for nearly eight months, the death of a monkey who became entangled in a device in his cage, and the deaths of 13 monkeys from hyperthermia when thermostats malfunctioned.
Today, the site where PETA’s investigation revealed so much suffering has been transformed. See for yourself:
No more animals are terrorized there now or treated as living test tubes on the site where that infamous laboratory once stood—a facility that PETA President Ingrid Newkirk called “Abu Ghraib for monkeys.” But Covance remains one of the world’s largest contract animal-testing laboratories, and it still imports thousands of monkeys into the U.S. each year to be experimented on in its other facilities and breeds more dogs for experiments than any other company. PETA is determined to reach the day when no more animals—anywhere—are tormented by Covance or in any other laboratory. Will you help us?
