Mobile Video Billboard Will Provide First-Ever Look Inside the UW Primate Center

PETA Is Launching an Ad Blitz Alerting Seattleites to the Medieval Conditions and Worthless Scientific Experiments in UW’s Primate Lab

For Immediate Release:
November 25, 2020

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

While Black Friday shoppers search for bargains on flat screen television sets and try to locate the elusive PlayStation 5, the monkeys in the University of Washington’s (UW) primate center have a simpler desire: freedom. In a bid to encourage UW President Ana Mari Cauce to close the secretive and shameful Washington National Primate Research Center (WaNPRC), PETA is launching an ad blitz alerting Seattleites to the cruelty, dysfunction, and animal suffering in the laboratory. A mobile billboard playing the first released video footage from inside the WaNPRC will circle Seattle’s main shopping centers—University Village, Westlake Center, Pacific Place, and Pike Place Market—for approximately eight hours.

PETA is flooding local media with ads running on The Daily of the University of Washington‘s website and in its Game Day edition, in The Stranger, and in The Seattle Times. PETA ads also appeared on gas station toppers near the UW campus.

“The Washington National Primate Research Center has wasted nearly six decades, tens of thousands of monkeys’ lives, and hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA is kicking off a no-holds-barred push to banish this place to the annals of history.”

Monkeys at the WaNPRC have died from strangulation, starvation, dehydration, veterinary error, and choking on their own vomit. The facility is currently under investigation by two federal agencies for allowing numerous monkeys to escape. It has laid off multiple staff members, including those who take care of the monkeys, and has had five directors in 10 years. There are also concerns pertaining to conflicts of interest: UW’s animal experimentation oversight committee includes the director of a pro–animal experimentation organization that receives significant donations from UW.

Harvard University shut down its New England National Primate Research Center in 2013 after looking critically at its multiple animal welfare violations, the difficulty of providing monkeys in laboratories with even a modicum of humane treatment, and the future of its research priorities—and PETA is calling on UW to do the same.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.