PETA’s ‘Monkey Graveyard’ to Haunt COP 15 Conference

For Immediate Release:
December 14, 2022

Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382

PETA supporters will set up a “monkey graveyard” outside the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP 15) on Friday to memorialize the more than half-million long-tailed macaques who have been torn from their forest homes and sent to be tormented and killed halfway around the world in North American laboratories.

When:    Friday, December 16, 2–3:30 p.m.

Where:    Palais des Congrès de Montréal, 1001 Pl. Jean-Paul-Riopelle (at the northeast corner of Avenue Viger Ouest and Rue de Bleury), Montréal (See the Google Maps link here.)

PETA is urging world leaders to end the trade in these vulnerable animals that supplies the voracious and cruel animal experimentation industry and fuels biodiversity decline. Long-tailed macaques are on the brink of extinction, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and PETA is calling out the insatiable industry for the deadly damage it wreaks.

“The animal experimentation industry is driving long-tailed macaques to extinction, plain and simple,” says PETA Senior Science Advisor and primate expert Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel. “The only way to save the species from collapse is to end all monkey exports to laboratories and shift to modern, non-animal research methods.”

Last month, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) indicted government officials and nationals in Cambodia and cited unnamed U.S. co-conspirators in an alleged illegal monkey-trafficking scheme. The DOJ alleges that the accused passed off monkeys who had been illegally abducted from their forest homes as captive-bred and then imported them to U.S. laboratories in felony violations of both the Lacey Act and the Endangered Species Act.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview.

For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.