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A Courageous Monkey Helps an Immigrant Find Her Voice
By Dr. Alka Chandna
Like many other immigrant children, I felt like a fish out of water. My family looked different, wore different clothes, and spoke a different language. To say I was insecure would be putting it mildly. My insecurities followed me into adulthood. When I started working for PETA, I was surrounded by a group of people who shared my convictions, and that helped. But even then, as we were going to bat against the biggest corporations in the world, it was sometimes hard to find the courage to speak up, to stand out, to say, “This is wrong.”
Soon after I started my job, PETA began investigating Covance, a huge contract testing company that kills hundreds of thousands of animals in painful experiments every year. A PETA eyewitness got a job there feeding the monkeys, giving them water, and cleaning their cages. She recorded everything she saw with a hidden camera, and every night, she wrote detailed notes on what she had witnessed. It was the stuff of nightmares.
Every day, workers shoved thick plastic tubes up the monkeys’ nostrils and pumped a test compound through the tubes into their stomachs, causing them to scream. The workers slammed them into cages, blasted them with pressurized hoses, and slapped and choked them.
My job was to read the eyewitness’s notes, watch her footage, and identify violations of animal-welfare laws. One night, while watching that day’s video, I saw something that made me hit the pause button and lean in closer. A worker was restraining a terrified monkey – and on the right side of the screen, I could see another monkey in a cage stretching her arm out as far as she could to try to stop him.
This brave monkey knew that the man could and would hurt her. How did she find the courage to stretch her tiny arm toward him in an attempt to stop his cruelty? She had to be afraid. I watched the clip again, my hand over my mouth and my eyes brimming with tears.
As a result of PETA’s investigation, abusive workers were fired and the US government fined Covance for egregious violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act. And in every case I’ve worked on since then – especially the ones in which the odds were heavily stacked against PETA – I have thought about that monkey.
Her bravery has kept me going many times, including during one of the toughest cases I’ve ever been a part of.
An experimenter at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) named Stephen Suomi was separating baby monkeys from their mothers and putting them through disturbing tests to make them fearful, depressed, and anxious. Decades of these experiments had cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars but yielded no new insights into human mental illness. Still, NIH wouldn’t pull the plug. PETA launched a huge campaign that made national headlines and went viral on social media – even Congress got involved.
It was David vs. Goliath. NIH was powerful, and it was angry. It had scads of money, and its scientists were trying to discredit PETA. My insecurity crept back in. But that little monkey … if she could show that much courage, so can I.
Against all odds, PETA won. The monkeys won. It took 18 months of relentless campaigning, but Suomi’s experiments were stopped, and his laboratory was closed.
I’ve been fortunate to be a part of countless PETA victories since then. Recently, PETA worked with PETA Germany to get Volkswagen to stop forcing macaques to inhale diesel fumes and to end all tests on animals. PETA also persuaded Brazil to ban the use of animals in various classroom experiments. At PETA’s urging, many large international food and beverage companies – ended tests on animals. And thanks to a PETA campaign, AirBridgeCargo, which had been flying primates to their deaths in laboratories, stopped participating in this cruelty. Air France is now the only major airline that hasn’t banned such transport … yet.
All these companies were giants. But PETA won anyway.
With every victory, I remember that sweet monkey, and her courage continues to inspire me.
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Today, you have a great opportunity to help. Please make a gift to PETA’s Animals Out (of the Labs) Matching-Gift Challenge to support PETA’s critical work to end experiments on animals. Every donation will be matched dollar for dollar up to the $500,000 campaign goal, doubling your impact on PETA’s vital work to stop the suffering, imprisonment, and killing of animals in laboratories all over the world.
