PETA Global 2023 Issue 2

Now, a monumental victory! After PETA and thousands of our supporters urged the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to stop monkeys from being violently abducted from their forest homes and shipped to laboratories, the agency has done exactly that. The FWS now requires a DNA test to prove that any monkeys bound for US laboratories were not taken from nature. Since this test doesn’t exist and developing it will take years, the FWS has stopped all monkey imports to US laboratories . PETA is now pushing for laboratories that have already received illegally imported monkeys to transfer them to sanctuaries and pay for their lifetime care. Endangering Monkeys and Public Health The race to obtain government funding by experimenting on monkeys has pushed long-tailed macaques to the brink of extinction: They are now officially listed as endangered. The demand for monkeys is also fueling smuggling: Some top Cambodian government officials were recently indicted for conspiracy to supply US laboratories with macaques falsely identified as having been born in captivity, when, in reality, they had been abducted from their forest homes. Wild monkeys are known to carry pathogens transmissible to humans, including herpes B, dengue, simian hemorrhagic fever, and deadly Ebola-like viruses; salmonella, campylobacter, and

The final stop was a laboratory, where they may be cut open, electroshocked, irradiated, infected with diseases ...

Map background: © iStock.com/pop_jop

shigella bacteria; the bacteria that cause tuberculosis and leprosy; antimicrobial-resistant bacteria; and malaria-transmitting parasites.

How PETA Cut Off International Monkey Shipments

After the Pennsylvania truck crash (see cover story), the good Samaritan who stopped to help had to undergo rabies and antiviral treatments when a scared monkey spat into her eye. But monkeys who escaped

When Quebedeaux’s refused to undergo a safety audit, the Department of Transportation canceled its license. Within a year of PETA’s complaints, Quebedeaux’s was out of business. And after PETA’s vigorous challenge, Chinese company JOINN Biologics dropped plans to build a massive monkey quarantine facility in Florida. PETA asked thousands of Florida residents to call on Gov. Ron DeSantis, who spoke out against the facility, to stop it from being built. Modernizing to Save Monkeys Using monkeys as test subjects puts public health at extreme risk and doesn’t lead to the elusive breakthroughs that the industry promises: The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) admits that 95% of all new drugs that test safe and effective in animals end up being either unsafe or ineffective in humans . PETA is urging the experimentation industry to put the US on the vanguard of human-relevant research by using PETA scientists’ Research Modernization Deal, which shows state-of-the-art, non-animal replacements for animal use. Take Action Now US readers, please visit PETA.org/RMD to urge your members of Congress to mandate that NIH stop throwing away taxpayer money on cruel, useless animal experiments and instead focus on modern, non-animal research methods.

during the crash fared far worse: Authorities, recognizing the disease risk, shot them dead. PETA has obtained damning information revealing that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) knows – but isn’t telling the public – that many pathogens, including bacteria classified as a bioterrorism agent because they cause a respiratory disease that kills up to 50% of those infected, have entered the US in imported monkey shipments. Closing Primate Prisons Following the Pennsylvania truck crash, PETA learned that Quebedeaux’s Transport illegally moved hundreds of long-tailed macaques and violated the Animal Welfare Act. PETA’s formal complaints to federal agencies alerted officials to the owner’s plan to warehouse monkeys in a decrepit prison. Authorities yanked the licenses, and the project was nixed.

A bystander took this photo of a monkey who escaped from a crate that fell off a truck in Pennsylvania and was later presumed to be shot.

IMMENSE CRUELTY, BUT NO CURES

© Action for Primates

Y ou can imagine how it happens. A mother is nursing her baby. She is surrounded by trees, listening to birdsong, feeling happy. But suddenly, a net drops over her, and before she can find a way to escape, a man has seized her by the neck and torn her baby out of her arms. She’s shoved into a rickety crate, and the door slams shut. All she can do is watch through the wooden slats, terrified, panicked, as her baby is thrown into a sack. It will be the last time she ever sees him. And her own suffering has just begun. This is how many long-tailed macaques went from climbing, playing, and swimming with their troops in the Cambodian forests to finding themselves trapped

in a cramped metal cage in a barren, white room, far from their families and homes. Others are bred in filthy, disease-ridden monkey factory farms. These sensitive beings were forced to sit in their own waste in travel crates during long journeys and endured temperature extremes, frightening noises, and inexplicable movement inside a cargo hold. Next, they were trucked, sometimes for hundreds of miles, to a quarantine site and held there, along with hundreds of other terrified monkeys. The final stop was a laboratory, where they would be cut open, electroshocked, irradiated, infected with diseases, addicted to drugs or alcohol, kept in solitary confinement, or subjected to other horrors.

This mother, holding her baby tight, was abducted from her home in Indonesia.

Global

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MONKEY LAUNDERING

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