Tell Your Senators: No More Money for Cruel Monkey Experiments!

Update (November 2023): Good news! The $30 million “gift” a Senate committee wanted to give the national primate research centers so more monkeys could be tormented in useless experiments didn’t make it into the U.S. budget for fiscal year 2024. Thank you to everyone who let their senators know that they didn’t want their taxes used for such waste and cruelty.

We’ll be on the lookout for similar proposed handouts in the budget for fiscal year 2025. In the meantime, please urge your U.S. representative to cosponsor the bipartisan CARGO Act, a landmark bill that would prevent the National Institutes of Health from funding any experiments on animals outside the U.S.

Original post:

A budget committee of the U.S. Senate wants to give a $30 million “gift” to the cruel and corrupt monkey experimentation industry, and we’re asking for your help to stop it.

Here’s the deal: The Senate Committee on Appropriations has added provisions to a 2024 funding bill for the National Institutes of Health allocating $30 million to bolster primate experimentation infrastructure and promote the use of even more monkeys in laboratories. This terrible plan is a response to ridiculous findings from a recent government agency report that ignored both the failure of experiments on monkeys to lead to human treatments and the inherent cruelty of caging, tormenting, and killing these animals.

The language in this funding bill threatens the progress we’ve made to shift away from these pointless and deadly tests.

The Monkey Shortage Myth
Contrary to the oft-repeated but empty prattle from the national primate research centers and others that stand to benefit from the new allocations, the CEO of Charles River Laboratories, James Foster, publicly said at a recent investment webinar that the primate “supply is plentiful.”

He ought to know. His dreadful company imports monkeys and experiments on more of them than any other institution in the country.

Incompetence on a Grand Scale
The seven federally funded national primate research centers, which collectively imprison more than 27,000 monkeys, have already proved they can’t keep all the monkeys they have now alive.

Here are just a few of the most recent horrors:

• Staff at the California National Primate Research Center roasted a monkey to death in a closed van, blasting 130-degree heat into his cage for up to 90 minutes. After the monkey’s body temperature skyrocketed to 104.7 degrees, he collapsed and began having seizures before he was euthanized.
• At the Oregon National Primate Research Center, a baby monkey was crushed to death by a steel guillotine-style door in front of her wailing mother during an enclosure transfer.
• At the Washington National Primate Research Center, experimenters left needles, gauze, and other surgical equipment inside monkeys’ bodies; infant monkeys died from undiagnosed diseases and malnourishment; and days-old monkeys were mutilated and killed by other caged and stressed primates, among other horrors.
• At the Tulane National Primate Research Center, U.S. Department of Agriculture inspectors found dead rats on the ground and in the ceilings along with rat poison in outdoor primate enclosures. These enclosures are littered with broken plastic barrels, fence posts, and broken panels in the overgrown weeds just outside the breeding facility, where Canada geese have nested—and staff have failed to clean up their waste. In a recent three-month period, four monkeys got stuck in the webbing of the enclosures, one requiring surgery.