This Friday the 13^th , read about the scariest villains working today. They aren’t monsters from movies or books, they’re real-life animal abusers profiting from the cruelty they put animals through in the name of junk science.

“Monkeys are just pests,” boasted James Foster, CEO of the horrifying Charles River Laboratories. Regarding animal experimentation, few rival the disturbing company he leads. It’s the second-largest importer of nonhuman primates, funneling in hundreds of thousands of monkeys.

These monkeys may have been kidnapped from their natural homes, and Charles River is under federal investigation for suspected violations of importation laws. The company imprisons animals in barren metal cages and force-feeds them compounds, smears chemicals onto their shaved skin, sells monkeys to other laboratories, and has even baked monkeys to death in a facility where the air conditioning failed!

National Institutes of Health experimenter Elisabeth Murray is one of the most notorious villains. Her work includes sawing open her victims’ skulls and pumping toxic acid into their brains. She intentionally provokes the monkeys, scaring them with fake spiders and snakes after damaging their brains. When Murray finishes with the animals, she kills them or “recycles” them into other experiments. She has never allowed even one of her victims to be retired to a sanctuary. It’s either death or more experiments for them.

Then there’s Margaret Livingstone, an experimenter at Harvard Medical School. She targets only baby monkeys, taking them away from their loving mothers and forcing them to endure her inhumane experiments. She has sewn monkeys’ eyes closed and implanted steel posts in the heads of others, or she will force them to wear vision distorting goggles for the entire first year of their lives. After she’s done with them, she kills them and dissects their brains.

With her track record, it may surprise you that she had the nerve to say, “[I]t is a privilege to work with macaques. We take great care to treat them well.”

This month, PETA is hosting a “Stop Animal Testing” Challenge to make animal-free research methods the norm. Until October 31, we’re offering a match for all donations. If we succeed in meeting our campaign goal, we’ll have $1 million to dedicate toward our work to cut off funds for experimenters, shut down more laboratories, and promote modern, non-animal research methods.