American Child, Dad, and One British National Still Jailed in Ethiopia for Protesting Monkey Shipments

For Immediate Release:
July 18, 2024

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

PETA Asia Senior Vice President Jason Baker; his 11-year-old son, Zelic; and PETA U.K. Campaign Leader Reuben Skeats have been imprisoned for more than 25 hours and are currently being held at the Legehar Police Station in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. They were arrested while scouting for a future demo location in that city at the Ethiopian Airlines ticket office on Churchill Road. They were planning to hold a demonstration wearing prison uniforms and monkey masks outside the company’s headquarters today to demand that it stop cramming endangered monkeys into tiny crates and shipping them halfway around the globe to be mutilated, tormented, and ultimately killed in laboratories. Their court case has just been scheduled for 9:00 a.m. EAT tomorrow. More information about Ethiopian Airlines here.

Baker sent the following statement from jail:

If this is Ethiopian justice, no wonder the airline doesn’t care about the monkeys captured in the wild, slammed into cages, and shipped to labs, all for greed.  Humans are filthy, but not as filthy as the monkeys who have to sit in a box amid their own waste for 24 hours are forced to get—that’s the true shame.

We’ve been held here more than 25 hours simply for speaking up for monkeys who are suffering because Ethiopian Airlines ships them to laboratories in the U.S. The real crime is what’s being done to these monkeys. Being detained in a cell isn’t fun, but it’s nothing compared to what the monkeys just a few miles down the road at the airport are subjected to—which will only get worse when they’re imprisoned in U.S. laboratories. I would do this again to help them.

My 11-year-old son is with me. We were on holiday in Nairobi last week, and when I learned that Ethiopian Airlines wasn’t going to stop shipping monkeys to laboratories, I cut my vacation short. It’s important to teach my son that we must speak up for animals. We had just seen monkeys living in their natural homes—as they should be—in Kenya.

Skeats sent the following statement from jail:

I’ve been held here overnight simply for speaking up for monkeys who are suffering because Ethiopian Airlines ships them to laboratories, where they may be poisoned, electrocuted, or subjected to other horrors. The real crime is what’s being done to these monkeys.

Please also see the following statement from PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo:

Sitting in prison is a miserable way to spend the night, but we know that Jason and his son and Reuben will be home soon—unlike the thousands of monkeys who are torn from their families and sent halfway around the globe to die in U.S. laboratories. Ethiopian Airlines is contributing to this misery, and it’s one of the few airlines in the entire world willing to do so. Shame on it. PETA and our supporters around the world will continue to urge the company to do the right thing.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits for people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on X, Facebook, or Instagram.