Victory! Feds Finally Take a Stand Against Monkey-Abduction Pipeline

Update (March 2, 2023): Victory! The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has taken a monumental action, putting a swift end to the importation of monkeys captured in their forest homes around the world and destined for U.S. laboratories. This move shows the power of PETA and our supporters, who, en masse, urged the FWS to do exactly what it has done today to protect sensitive animals from being pushed to extinction by a greedy industry that prioritizes its own profits over sound, sustainable, and ethical science.

Monkeys around the world are safe from being violently abducted for U.S. laboratories, because the FWS now requires a DNA test that has yet to be developed—and could take up to two years to be created—to prove that any monkeys bound for torment and death in U.S. laboratories were bred in captivity. This is what more than 58,000 PETA supporters pushed for after the U.S. Department of Justice’s November indictments of numerous individuals involved in a worldwide monkey-laundering scheme.

The FWS has stood up for monkeys who are crammed into small wooden crates and loaded onto planes by the hundreds for a dark, terrifying flight to their deaths in U.S. labs. And the agency has protected the public from the threat of the potential spread of deadly pathogens carried by stressed and immunocompromised monkeys.

We urge the experimentation industry to seize this extraordinary opportunity to retool and reimagine laboratory testing and put the U.S. on the vanguard of non-animal, human-relevant testing models by using PETA scientists’ Research Modernization Deal.

Original post:

After a five-year investigation, the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) recently announced indictments of multiple individuals—including Cambodian government officials—allegedly involved in a monkey-laundering and -smuggling ring that supplied U.S. laboratories with long-tailed macaques captured in their forest homes in Cambodia and falsely identified as captive-born.

Following the indictments, shipments of monkeys from Cambodia were suspended—but now they’re coming into the U.S. again. We must stop them.

The exploitation of long-tailed macaques has been so catastrophic that their conservation status was recently elevated to “endangered” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The alleged false labeling of these monkeys as “captive-bred” is a crime that appears to be enabled by greedy American animal experimenters who refuse to admit that their studies are killing monkeys, failing to help humans, and decimating wild populations.