Experimenter Cries ‘Monkey Shortage!’ While Killing 10 Monkeys in a Month
There’s a monkey shortage, says University of Massachusetts–Amherst experimenter Agnès Lacreuse—as the corpses pile up in her lab.
PETA has obtained documents showing that Lacreuse, who has complained about an entirely fictional shortage of marmoset monkeys available for torment in pointless experiments, killed ten marmosets in her laboratory in one recent month alone.
Census numbers show that this massacre took the lives of nearly half the monkeys she was imprisoning at the time. Lacreuse had 23 monkeys on July 11. By August 12, she had just 13.
Why Lacreuse killed these monkeys—and why she killed so many of them in such a short period— we don’t know. We do know that instead of killing them, Lacreuse could have sent them to a sanctuary, where they could have lived out the remainder of their lives in peace.
That apparently wasn’t a consideration.
The killings are a shocking move, even for Lacreuse, who has spent over 20 years draining taxpayer coffers. She performs invasive surgeries on marmosets, implanting electrodes in holes drilled into their skulls. She also cuts into their necks and threads electrode leads from their scalp and neck through their abdomen.
The marmosets in her laboratory are zip-tied into a restraining device to immobilize them. Then they are shoved into a plastic cylinder that’s screwed in place and are subjected to the noise of an MRI machine.
The killing spree is also puzzling. Recently, Lacreuse used a made-up “shortage” of marmosets to justify to her funders why she had to outsource a patently ridiculous sleep study to the equally incompetent Wisconsin National Primate Center (WNPRC), run by the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
“First, as a result of the national shortage of marmosets, we had great difficulty locating suitable marmosets for the project and for this reason requested to transfer the project to the WNPRC,” she wrote.
Months later, she killed ten monkeys, including Noel, Jolly, and Xena, whom Lacreuse previously tormented in pointless experiments.
Ice Her Out and Shut it Down
PETA urges the University of Massachusetts–Amherst to shut down Lacreuse’s laboratory immediately. The remaining 13 monkeys should be sent to an appropriate sanctuary while Lacreuse lives out her days unsupported by taxpayer dollars—no new grants or renewals.
Please TAKE ACTION and demand that UMass end the torment of sensitive monkeys in Lacreuse’s laboratory today!
