PETA AU Global 2021 Issue 2

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Undercover Exposé

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Some infants were put in a basement with only a stuffed animal for comfort.

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Photo frame: © iStock.com/subjug

N Help Us Close the National Primate Torture Centers • A P E T A I N V E S T I G

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C ornelius has spent his entire life in a laboratory. Taken from his mother, who was herself likely stressed and deprived of nurturing, he was raised without love. Now, he stays constantly locked in a small steel cage inside a windowless room, with nothing to do or see. He sleeps, if he can, on metal bars – without even a blanket for comfort. With no control over anything in his life, he’s at the mercy of merciless people. If Cornelius were in his natural home, he’d be living in a large, loving family group and have forests to wander. But he has never felt the earth beneath his feet. Although 10 years old, he doesn’t even know what a tree is. What he does know is never-ending isolation, human callousness, and pain. At one point, he was used as “a semen donor” – a deliberate misnomer. He was strapped into a crude restraint chair, and experimenters electroshocked his penis until he ejaculated. Monkeys continue to endure this terrifying practice. Cornelius Has Given Up A decade of horrific procedures and mostly solitary confinement – a form of torture that the United Nations considers as cruel as waterboarding – has broken Cornelius’ spirit. He has suffered from extensive stress-related hair loss. When PETA’s undercover investigator met him last year at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center (WNPRC), he sat slumped over and looking down, with his head against the cage door. He had simply lost the will to live. Our investigator got permission to give Cornelius a simple cardboard tube filled with shredded paper to occupy his mind for a while, but the supervisor said, “Just know that when you’re not in there, it’s probably not gonna happen.” PETA also carefully documented other monkeys driven insane by extreme confinement. Panic-stricken mothers and infants cry and cling to one another as workers pry them apart. Monkeys circle in their prison cages, rock back and forth, tear out their own hair

Monkeys have to give birth in barren wire-floored cages.

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Cocoa: Attacked by a severely stressed adult monkey, she suffered deep, painful cuts to her face.

HELP SAVE CORNELIUS!

until they’re nearly bald, and mutilate themselves – all signs of severe psychological distress. One frustrated monkey maimed his own leg down to the muscle and compulsively picked at the open wound. That was the only control he had over his own body and life. It’s what institutionalized humans used to do, too, when confined to notoriously cruel insane asylums. No Escape From the Grim Keepers How PETA wishes this were the only research center where monkeys suffer! But WNPRC is one of seven federally funded so-called “pork barrel project” national primate research centers (NPRCs) across the US. PETA has repeatedly exposed such facilities, including the Oregon NPRC, which starves monkeys to make them “voluntarily” consume alcohol and then kills them to record the effects on their organs. At the Washington NPRC, experimenters cut holes in

monkeys’ skulls, insert electrodes into their brains, and surgically implant wire coils in their eyes in neuroscience “tests.” The NPRCs rack up dozens of animal welfare law violations and are repeatedly fined. Monkeys have died of strangulation, starvation, dehydration, choking on their own vomit, blood loss, veterinary errors, and even being boiled alive in high temperature cage washers. National Institutes of Hell “Overseen” by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), NPRCs were created to develop vaccines for HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, Zika, and other diseases. In six decades, experiments on monkeys have failed to produce any effective vaccines or treatments for humans, yet NIH still squanders hundreds of millions

of dollars each year warehousing and conducting cruel and pointless tests on primates. Tens of thousands of monkeys have been killed in NIH-funded experiments. This senseless cruelty must stop. PETA is calling on NIH to shut down every NPRC and send all the monkeys in the facilities to accredited sanctuaries, starting with Cornelius – who would no doubt find life worth living again if he could finally have some friends and freedom. Help PETA help him. Please. Take Action Now One down, seven to go! In 2015, the New England NPRC – embroiled in controversy over monkey abuse – closed down. Let’s put the remaining NPRCs out of the monkey business, too: Visit PETAAU.vg/WNPRC and PETAAU.vg/EndExperiments to demand change.

Most animals were known only by their tattoo numbers.

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PRIMATE PURGATORY