VICTORY! After Uproar From PETA, Plans Scrapped for Huge Monkey Warehouse in Florida
Victory! There won’t be any monkey warehouse in Levy County, Florida, thanks to our warnings and the good sense of residents and officials there.
Chinese company JOINN Biologics had bought land on which to build a massive facility in the county, southwest of Gainesville, to import, quarantine, and warehouse monkeys, effectively establishing the Levy County area as another link in the dangerous and deadly wildlife-trade chain.
But the company just confirmed to PETA that the plan has been scrapped, following our urgent warnings to Gov. Ron DeSantis and thousands of area residents, along with pushes for county commissioners not to give in to any requests from the company for zoning changes.
The monkeys would have been sold and trucked to laboratories across the U.S. for use in junk-science experiments.
PETA celebrates this massive blow to the monkey-importation pipeline as a huge victory for animals. We’re grateful to the Florida residents and officials who joined us in saying ‘no’ to greedy importers and experimenters who harm and kill monkeys.
—PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo
The land JOINN purchased—according to reports, one of the biggest recent Chinese acquisitions of U.S. land—isn’t zoned for quarantining imported animals, but the company sought zoning changes to allow it.
That’s why PETA sent more than 4,000 Florida residents an urgent letter asking them to call on DeSantis, who has spoken out against the facility, to stop it from being built.
PETA’s letter notes that monkeys in the wildlife trade are often stressed, injured, and exposed to pathogens that can spread to humans. These pathogens can go undetected during quarantine screening, and some don’t show up until months or years later.
New, unidentified viruses with pandemic-causing potential are a risk, too.
JOINN’s facility, which would have housed thousands of monkeys a year, could have introduced the animals’ urine, feces, and other bodily secretions into the environment, where other animal species would be affected.
Some of the monkeys might have even escaped, as has happened at similar facilities. In 2022, a truck transporting monkeys to a quarantine facility crashed in Pennsylvania, and the animals who escaped were shot out of fear that they could be carrying dangerous pathogens.
Long-tailed macaques, one of the species JOINN would most likely import, are now recognized as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. This is in large part due to their capture and exploitation as part of the international wildlife trade to U.S. laboratories, where they’re mutilated, poisoned, deprived of food and water, forcibly immobilized in restraint devices, infected with painful and deadly diseases, psychologically tormented, and killed.
Tell the CDC to Shut Down the Monkey-Abduction Pipeline
Despite decades of promises and hundreds of thousands of dead monkeys, experiments using animals haven’t resulted in effective vaccines for HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, or other dreaded human illnesses.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has admitted that the importation of monkeys poses a danger to the public, yet it continues to allow the experimentation industry to bring them into the country.
Help end this barbaric and deadly trade.
