‘A Flight to Death’: PETA Media Blitz Slams Canadian Officials Over Monkey Imports
For Immediate Release:
September 20, 2023
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
A stark new message from PETA has popped up on local bus shelters and in newspapers, calling out Canadian officials for enabling the deadly Cambodian monkey-importation industry—even after the U.S. halted such imports and indicted Cambodian government officials for passing off wild-caught monkeys as “captive-bred.”
According to reports, Canadian officials have allowed the importation of monkeys worth more than CA$45 million from Cambodia, likely by Charles River Laboratories, for use in animal experimentation after the U.S. indictments were announced and despite the fact that Charles River is under federal, civil, and criminal investigation for possible violations of U.S. monkey-importation laws.
“Canada is ignoring the U.S. federal investigations, which alleged violations of international law in the monkey-trafficking trade,” says PETA primate scientist Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel. “PETA is calling on Canadian officials to stop enabling this gruesome and corrupt industry and shut down monkey imports now.”
Long-tailed macaques have been driven to the brink of extinction in large part due to the voracious experimentation industry’s incessant demand. Importing monkeys also poses a grave and potentially fatal public health risk. Monkeys infected with tuberculosis, a highly infectious disease that’s readily transmitted to humans, have already been imported to North American labs, and monkeys from Cambodia have arrived infected with a bacterium so deadly that the U.S. classifies it as a bioterrorism agent.
PETA’s message appears on 33 bus shelters throughout Montréal and was published in Le Devoir on September 18, and in The Suburban and the Montreal Gazette today.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information on PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org, listen to The PETA Podcast, or follow the group on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, or Instagram.
