PETA Obtains Documents That Reveal Extreme Suffering in NIH Lab
A government experimenter wanted to keep the atrocities secret, but PETA said, “We’ll see you in court” first—and now we know what officials were trying to keep quiet.
PETA has received the last of the veterinary records for 73 monkeys long imprisoned and tortured in Elisabeth Murray’s laboratory—some for more than a decade—after suing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute of Mental Health three years ago to obtain public records related to her experiments.
The records reveal shocking health conditions, often chronic, including the following:
- Metal headposts were surgically embedded in the skulls of nearly 74% of the monkeys. (Headposts allow experimenters to lock monkeys’ heads in place for hours-long experiments while they’re strapped into restraint devices.) Many of these monkeys suffered from infections or bleeding where the implants had been screwed into the bone.
- 85% of the monkeys suffered from hair loss, a condition that can indicate extreme psychological distress. More than half of the animals—57%—experienced significant hair loss on most of their bodies. One of these monkeys had lost up to 100% of her hair.
- Nearly 18% suffered from diarrhea or loose stool.
- Nearly two-thirds, 64%, were subjected to fluid deprivation, and 48% were deprived of food.
- 29% suffered from lack of appetite, which can indicate severe depression.
- 45% were injured.
- The teeth of 57% of the monkeys were filed down, which can cause the animals to experience pain and discomfort and impair their ability to eat properly.
- 64% were overweight, a condition that can occur when an individual’s only comfort in life is food, and 19% were underweight (another sign of stress).
A monkey named Cersei, apparently after a character on Game of Thrones, has suffered from health and psychological issues for years. A titanium headpost was screwed into her skull, which bled repeatedly and later became infected. She has suffered from a bloody nose, an injured arm, and an umbilical hernia, which required surgery to repair. She’s been deliberately kept thirsty so that she would cooperate with experimenters for a sip of fluid. She has been underweight and has lost hair on most of her body. If this lab isn’t shut down, Cersei and others like her face another decade or more of this miserable existence.
Some of the monkeys have suffered for up to 16 years this way—used in one experiment after another. Many monkeys in this laboratory are housed singly, including one monkey who has lived by himself in a small steel cage for 14 years. Think about it: This is the same length of time a human spends in preschool through their senior year of high school.
All these monkeys should be released from this hellhole now.
What You Can Do
Murray has spent 40 years cutting into monkeys’ heads, drilling holes into their skulls, and inflicting permanent brain damage in these animals. She then locked some of them in black boxes and terrified them with realistic-looking snakes and spiders. All those years and all that fear, torment, and death produced exactly nothing to help human patients.
Please TAKE ACTION and tell NIH you won’t tolerate having your tax money pay for the torment of monkeys:
