Giving Day for Apes is a global campaign with a mission that PETA can get behind: rehabilitating great apes and gibbons and providing them with long-term care.
Started by the Arcus Foundation—an organization dedicated to the realization of social and environmental justice—in cooperation with the American Anti-Vivisection Society and the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries, it’s raised over $2 million for more than 30 sanctuaries and rescue centers throughout Africa, Asia, and North America since it was launched six years ago.
This year, “Giving Day” will be held on October 13. The goal? To raise more than $500,000 for the cause and an additional nearly $70,000 in incentives for the groups topping the day’s giving leaderboard.
That’s where you come in!
PETA has been helping apes and monkeys since our organization began four decades ago.
In 1981, an undercover investigation of a federally funded laboratory in Silver Spring, Maryland, exposed crippling experiments on macaque monkeys and led to the first-ever police raid on a laboratory, the U.S. Supreme Court’s first animal experimentation case, and the first prosecution and conviction of an animal experimenter on cruelty-to-animals charges.
Flash forward 39 years, and PETA is still working hard to help primates around the world.
A six-month PETA undercover investigation into the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center—which keeps nearly 2,000 monkeys in barren steel cages and bleak windowless rooms—revealed that the monkeys were being driven mad by confinement, electroshocked, tormented, and killed. PETA turned our evidence over to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and now, both agencies are investigating the center. So far, more than 75,000 PETA supporters have demanded that the University of Wisconsin–Madison shut down this primate laboratory and urged NIH to stop using taxpayer money to fund experiments on monkeys.
PETA entities once again exposed the cruelty that no one else was talking about after PETA Asia visited eight farms in Thailand on which monkeys are forced to pick coconuts for coconut milk, flour, oil, and other products. The terrified young animals are trained through fear, kept in chains, and made to work long days, climbing tall trees and twisting heavy coconuts. Following the investigation, more than 25,000 stores agreed to stop purchasing coconut products made with monkey labor and more than 90,000 people have demanded that the brand Chaokoh stop sourcing its coconuts from farms that use monkeys.
Animals are not ours to abuse in any way. Captive primates deserve to have enriching lives in sanctuaries, like those supported by “Giving Day.”
Please, make a difference by supporting this special Giving Day for Apes on the 13th!
