Monkey’s Death at Harvard Prompts PETA to Ask if Boston Has a New ‘Strangler’
For Immediate Release:
February 16, 2023
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
Does Harvard Medical School employ the new Boston Strangler? PETA is raising the question with posters plastered all over town as well as an advertisement in the Boston Herald today, prompted by the strangulation death of a young monkey in the laboratory of notorious monkey experimenter Margaret Livingstone.
The infant was taken from her mother soon after birth and put alone in a cage with a cloth-covered object—the only “mother” the baby monkeys in Livingstone’s laboratory can cling to for comfort. No one in the lab noticed that the baby had ripped a hole in the cloth, got it caught around her neck, and strangled to death.
“This infant monkey was so poorly protected that Margaret Livingstone might as well have strangled her with her bare hands,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA demands that Harvard pull the plug on Livingstone’s twisted experiments immediately and retire these primates to reputable sanctuaries before the death toll rises.”
Although Livingstone is known for separating healthy newborn monkeys from their mothers and sewing their eyelids shut, it’s unclear whether the baby who strangled to death was one of the monkeys she had blinded or used in other visual deprivation procedures. But federal records obtained by PETA show a pattern of negligence in her laboratory: One monkey’s finger had to be amputated after they fought with an improperly caged, stressed macaque. Livingstone herself was turned in by her own veterinary staff for failing to wear personal protective equipment at the height of the pandemic while experimenting on a restrained monkey, a violation of federal guidelines.
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, listen to The PETA Podcast, or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
