PETA Wants Answers: Did Maryland Schools Break State Cruelty Laws in Baboon Deaths?
We know animals are purposely tormented and killed in laboratories in cruel experiments. But they’re dying in other ways, too—likely in violation of state law.
PETA is urging police to investigate after a baboon slowly bled to death over the course of four hours and another one became tangled in a water supply line and strangled to death in separate incidents at two Maryland universities.
In letters to University of Maryland–Baltimore Police and Public Safety and the Baltimore Police Department, PETA urges each agency to prosecute if state laws against cruelty to animals were violated.
In the first incident, a baboon used for experiments at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore pulled an attached IV line into the enclosure and bit it at around 3:30 a.m. on October 26, 2023. The primate slowly bled to death over the next four hours. Staff didn’t even notice until 7:30 a.m., according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspection report.
The agency took a rare step of fining the university nearly $9,000 in connection with this incident and other violations.
In the second incident, a Johns Hopkins University laboratory worker found a young baboon “unconscious and entangled” in a line that supplied drinking water. The primate had pulled the line into the cage and become entangled in it. The animal was euthanized. No safeguards were in place to prevent the baboon from pulling on the line, according to the USDA report.
And that’s not all. Federal documents show that as many as 40 baboons used by the University of Maryland–Baltimore apparently were not provided with their daily ration of primate biscuits from March 30 to 31, 2024, because their feeder was simply “not present.” As if being caged for life weren’t bad enough.
What You Can Do
Experimenters at Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS), funded by the University of Maryland–Baltimore, have spent decades impregnating sensitive, social olive baboons; injecting them full of various hormones; and then cutting out and killing the fetuses—subjecting each baboon to up to six cesarean sections. Nothing from this horror show has ever helped humans, but that hasn’t stopped the experiments.
Please take action to pressure EVMS to end these pointless and cruel experiments:
