PETA Celebrates NIH Decision to Cut Funding for Experiments on Chimpanzees

PETA Celebrates NIH Decision to Cut Funding for Experiments on Chimpanzees, Retire 300-Plus to Sanctuary

For Immediate Release:
June 26, 2013

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Norfolk, Va. –– PETA is popping champagne corks at its Norfolk, Va., headquarters today to celebrate the news that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has brought the U.S. one step closer to ending a shameful 90-year history of treating chimpanzees as disposable laboratory tools and ignoring the apes’ profound psychological and physical needs.

Today’s historic announcement that the NIH will cut funding for most invasive biomedical experiments on chimpanzees and grant sanctuary to at least 310 of the 360 federally owned chimpanzees currently imprisoned in laboratories is an acknowledgment of what PETA has said since it began fighting this practice more than a quarter of a century ago: It is wrong to torment living beings whom we know suffer greatly from physical, behavioral, and psychological deprivation in laboratories.

The NIH decision and the process that led to this point are the result of intense public outrage that the U.S. is the last country in the industrialized world that still conducts painful experiments on chimpanzees.

PETA will now push hard for the release of the remaining chimpanzees still held prisoner in laboratories, where, as the NIH acknowledged today, they can still be crammed into 5-foot-by-5-foot steel boxes and used in invasive experiments. However, a recent U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposal to categorize chimpanzees in laboratories as “endangered”—as their wild counterparts already are—would effectively prohibit their use in any invasive experiments.

You can find more information about chimpanzees in laboratories here and here.