This Celebrity Mother Is Pleading With Harvard to End Cruelty to Baby Monkeys

Mayans M.C. actor Patricia De León is renowned for her many talents, successful businesses, and using her platforms to advocate for animals. She has previously spoken out against the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and its taxpayer-funded experiments on monkeys, and now that she’s a new mother, these experiments are even more devastating than ever for her. Watch the video below and keep reading to find out why:

Every mother’s nightmare is to have her baby snatched away from her and never see them again. And that’s exactly what Margaret Livingstone, a Harvard University experimenter, is doing.

Livingstone has spent her entire 40-year career tormenting animals, including by tearing baby monkeys away from their screaming mothers shortly after birth and imprisoning them in cold steel cages, where they might be given only a pathetic cloth “surrogate” to cling to for comfort. She has sewn some of those babies’ eyes shut, leaving them in complete darkness for up to a year, just to see how badly it damages their brain and visual development.

As Patricia mentions in her new PETA video, in July 2019 Harvard laboratory staff found a baby monkey hanging from a cloth surrogate. She had strangled to death. The infant—who may have been one of the monkeys Livingstone blinded or used in other visual deprivation procedures—had chewed a hole through the cloth and gotten her head stuck.

As a mom to a new baby, I’m more angry and heartbroken than ever that experimenters tear baby monkeys away from their mothers and use them in horrific experiments, like the ones at Harvard Medical School run by Margaret Livingstone.

—Patricia De León

Baby monkeys who are abducted from their mothers at birth are permanently damaged, both physically and mentally. They’re more fearful and aggressive, produce excess stress hormones, and frequently rank at the bottom of the social hierarchy. They repeatedly circle or pace in their cages, rock back and forth, or do nonstop backflips—behavior indicative of frustration—and experience heightened levels of stress in response to threats.

Livingstone has conducted experiments on monkeys for 40 years, and since 1998, she has collected $32 million in taxpayer funds from NIH to bankroll them. In all that time, her cruelty hasn’t produced a single cure or treatment for humans.

Join Patricia De León in helping to keep mothers and their babies together.

Please add your voice to those of more than 93,500 PETA supporters in urging the president of Harvard University to shut down Livingstone’s baby monkey laboratory and end this needless suffering paid for by your tax dollars: