PETA Files NIH Complaint After Monkey Escapes at Legacy Health, Breaking Leg

For Immediate Release:
July 11, 2023

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Portland, Ore. –

Please see the following statement from PETA Vice President Dr. Alka Chandna regarding the critical violation of federal animal welfare regulations posted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture against research institute Legacy Health after a monkey escaped from an enclosure and sustained a broken leg:

Legacy Health laboratory staff are apparently unable to complete even a routine procedure without causing pain and suffering to the animals they imprison. PETA has filed a complaint with the National Institutes of Health, calling on it to turn off the money spigot to the facility after staff failed to safely transfer a rhesus macaque from one enclosure to another. The monkey escaped and climbed behind and on top of other cages, causing other caged, stressed monkeys to try to fight with her. During the escape, one of her legs was so badly broken that pieces of her left tibia and fibula bones pierced her skin in four places, according to a just-published report from the USDA.

This incompetence is unacceptable. If experimenters at Legacy Health can’t even provide the basic protections afforded by the federal Animal Welfare Act, they certainly do not deserve taxpayer money. Legacy Health should redirect its resources toward modern, non-animal research methods that will actually help humans, and we urge officials there to adopt PETA’s Research Modernization Deal.

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