Breaking: UMass Cited by Feds; PETA Supporters Throw Chancellor’s Speech Into Chaos

For Immediate Release:
August 16, 2024

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

PETA supporters holding signs reading, “UMass: Stop Torturing Marmosets” have just interrupted University of Massachusetts–Amherst (UMass) Chancellor Javier Reyes’ keynote speech at a popular alumni gathering. The monkey allies crashed the UMass Seaside Celebration at The Sea View on Chase Avenue today to plead with the chancellor to end the school’s horrific menopause experiments on marmosets. The demonstrators were roughly thrown out by security. They were grabbed by their necks and shoved. Photos and video footage of the disruption are available here.

In addition, PETA just uncovered that monkey tormenter Agnès Lacreuse’s laboratory at UMass has racked up more violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act, this time for incidents in which staff slammed the tail of a marmoset in a cage door and confined two marmosets to a cage that didn’t even meet bare-minimum space requirements. Multiple marmosets have already been injured or burned by incompetent staffers in the lab, which has had the majority of animal welfare violations among all the university’s laboratories in the past decade.

“While Chancellor Reyes hobnobs in Cape Cod, fragile marmosets are being caged, cut open, and killed by ghoulish experimenters on his payroll. They can’t even keep monkeys safe, as the Animal Welfare Act violations show,” says PETA Chief Scientist Dr. Katherine Roe. “This lab should be shut down now, and Lacreuse and her coworkers should never be allowed anywhere near marmosets ever again.”

Led by Lacreuse, experimenters at the university screw electrodes onto monkeys’ skulls, surgically remove their ovaries, pump them full of hormones, and heat their bodies with hand warmers to mimic hot flashes in a bizarre attempt to study menopause—which marmosets don’t naturally experience. Experimenters also cut into their necks, deprive them of water, restrain them for hours at a time, and torment them in various other ways before killing them.

PETA has been contacted by numerous UMass alums and donors concerned about the school’s animal welfare violations. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has cited the university for severely burning a marmoset with hand warmers as he was recovering from surgery, failing to alert an attending veterinarian to sick animals, and permitting several monkeys to escape and sustain injuries.

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.