This article was originally published in PETA’s Augustus Club newsletter. PETA’s Augustus Club is a complimentary club honoring those who are leaving a legacy for animals through a planned gift to PETA. If you have made a planned gift to PETA, please let us know so that we can thank you! If you have not yet left a legacy for animals but would like information on how to do so, please contact us.
Thanks to the wonderful members who have made legacy gifts to PETA, our dynamic campaign to shut down the seven remaining national primate research centers in the U.S. is making steady progress.
These so-called “flagship centers” breed and experiment on thousands of monkeys each year, spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars provided by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
But to what end? Despite the suffering caused by these institutions, they are not contributing to scientific progress. For example, PETA released never-before-seen video footage taken inside the Washington National Primate Research Center at the University of Washington showing profoundly distressed monkeys pacing endlessly and crammed into barren steel cages in dark and mostly underground rooms. Experimenters at the primate center have killed nearly 10,000 monkeys over almost 60 years, yet they’ve failed to produce a single marketable vaccine for HIV, tuberculosis, Zika, malaria, or any other human diseases, as they had promised.
Experimenters in these centers are desperate to hide the horrors that they perpetrate on animals and the lack of any human-relevant data resulting from them, for fear that the taxpayer gravy train will come to a screeching halt.
That’s why PETA is blowing the lid off this appalling situation through undercover investigations, public records requests, and lawsuits.
For example, last year, PETA’s undercover investigation into the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center revealed that highly intelligent monkeys have been imprisoned every day and every night, staring through steel bars for years or even decades on end. This constant captivity causes them extreme psychological distress, leading them to pace back and forth, rock from side to side, and pull out their own hair.
PETA’s two undercover investigations into the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC) exposed misery at every turn—macaques forcibly bred over and over again to supply new victims for experimenters and baby macaques frightened and alone, curled up into balls and trying in vain to comfort themselves.
Meanwhile, our public-records lawsuits have resulted in the disclosure of secret video footage of taxpayer-funded experiments that involve deliberately terrifying monkeys and intentionally causing them mental trauma. Laboratory directors are squirming under the resulting media spotlight, and one lead experimenter at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst stopped tormenting monkeys and retired after we filed our lawsuit against the school. The ONPRC fought hard to conceal its animal abuse, but it was forced to turn over to PETA 74 videos of experiments—including those in which infant monkeys were separated from their mothers and then terrorized—after the court ruled in our favor.
With your help, we’ll succeed in shutting these facilities down, as we did with Harvard University’s New England Primate Research Center, which closed in 2015 after more than three decades of PETA protests. Thank you for helping us close the door on these archaic institutions and push science into the 21st century.
