VICTORY! PETA Scores a Texas-Size Win Over Charles River Laboratories

It’s a huge victory for animals.

Monkey experimentation colossus Charles River Laboratories has buckled under the pressure brought by local residents and thousands of supporters like you by scrapping its plans to build the largest monkey warehouse in the Western Hemisphere, targeting land in Brazoria County, Texas.

You read that right.

Your support was crucial in kicking Charles River—the largest importer of monkeys into the country—out of the county and killing its plans to build a monkey prison capable of caging 43,000 primates.

It’s impossible to overstate the size of this victory.

The company, which is currently under federal investigation for possible violations of monkey-importation laws, planned a monkey-importation and -breeding facility four times as big as any currently operating in the U.S., targeting 500 acres of ecologically sensitive land that abuts the San Bernard National Wildlife Refuge.

Charles River’s proposal would have held more than three times as many monkeys as humans held at Rikers Island, the infamous prison in New York City. The largest similar monkey facility in the U.S., also located in Texas, currently cages about 7,000 animals.

The plan would have had nearly incalculable repercussions for already endangered monkey populations worldwide, risked spreading disease throughout the country, and spelled ecological disaster for the residents of Brazoria County—located about 50 miles south of Houston.

Last year, locals alerted PETA to the scheme, and we immediately took action to inform the residents of Brazoria County, mailing them 4,000 letters. Locals turned out in droves to object at a Brazoria County Board of Commissioners’ meeting, where the panel unanimously recommended that federal authorities axe the proposal.

PETA also ran a billboard in Brazoria, made a video explaining the dangers of the facility, and produced a pair of online action alerts—one to urge county commissioners to axe the plan and another that prompted 50,000 actions by supporters like you.

And now, the monkey prison won’t be built. It took less than a year of pressure from PETA to convince Charles River to sell off the 539 acres of the Columbia Bottomland and run away.

This is the second planned massive monkey prison that PETA has stopped in less than 20 months. In late 2022, the Chinese company JOINN canceled plans for a monkey facility in Florida.

Because of you, your kindness, and—above all—your action, a multibillion-dollar company is ditching its outrageously cruel plan to cage and profit from the misery of tens of thousands of monkeys while emptying forests around the world of already endangered species.

That’s the power of your voice.

Please use it again to help stop another proposed monkey prison, this time in Georgia.