PETA Sues for Footage of UC-Davis ‘Den of Horrors’ Monkey Laboratory
The University of California–Davis (UC-Davis) is refusing to release video footage of its taxpayer-funded experiments on monkeys, even though its required to by the California Public Records Act. So this morning, PETA filed a lawsuit to force the school’s hand.
According to published papers reviewed by PETA, experimenters at UC-Davis separated baby monkeys from their mothers, isolated them in cages, and subjected them to various “stressful situations.” These cruel psychological experiments have echoes of the vile baby monkey experiments at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that finally came to an end following a vigorous PETA campaign. Just like in those experiments, the people responsible for the abuse videotaped their own cruelty, and PETA is seeking copies of these tapes using California’s state open records law.
UC-Davis likely understands that if the public sees what happens to monkeys in its laboratory, it will be the beginning of the end, just as it was at NIH. Animal experimentation depends on secrecy. The school has denied PETA’s request for video recordings of these and other primate experiments, citing something it calls “researcher’s privilege”—but that term never appears in California’s open-records law. PETA first requested this video footage in November 2017. After a long delay, the university provided one small snippet and withheld the rest.
What is the school trying to hide?
UC-Davis has one of the largest primate laboratories in the United States, with more than 4,500 monkeys being exploited for breeding or experiments. Since 2013, its been cited for at least 24 violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act—one of the worst track records in the nation.
“A Den of Horrors”
Federal inspection reports describing the terrible conditions in the laboratory detail what PETA Research Associate Jeremy Beckham called a “den of horrors” for the primates kept there. Staff failed to provide animals with basic veterinary care. Workers failed to handle monkeys humanely, injuring and sometimes killing them. Monkeys escaped from their enclosures because of staff inattention and died from subsequent injuries—one died from internal bleeding that likely resulted from her being shot with a tranquilizer gun. And seven rhesus macaque monkeys baked to death in the room where they were caged.
Let’s put an end to this cruelty.
The National Institute on Aging—part of the NIH—plans to torment marmoset monkeys in order to study Alzheimer’s disease. It’s a proposition that guarantees more taxpayer-funded cruelty, and it’s absolutely doomed to fail. Please urge the National Institute on Aging not to squander taxpayer dollars on worthless experiments on marmosets—and ask it to redirect funds to modern, superior, non-animal research methods instead.
