Charles River Laboratories’ Secretive Land Grab for Monkey Facility Prompts Pushback From PETA

For Immediate Release:
November 2, 2023

Contact:
Kendall Davis 202-483-7382

PETA is urging Brazoria County commissioners to intervene and prohibit Charles River Laboratories from building a massive monkey-importation and breeding warehouse on more than 500 acres of ecologically sensitive land. The international animal testing and monkey-importation corporation purchased the property in March—but not under its own name. Instead, the buyer was Kandurt LLC, which was incorporated in March. Kandurt’s president is Shannon Parisotto, a corporate executive vice president of Charles River.

Residents of the county recently contacted PETA to express concern about placing hundreds of monkeys on a property with old-growth forest that is impacted by floods and hurricanes. The property borders land owned and protected by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, The Nature Conservancy, and the San Bernard National Wildlife Refuge.

An endangered long-tailed macaque monkey. Photo: PETA

“Charles River is secretly planning to build a facility that could devastate ecologically sensitive land and endanger human health with disease and waste,” says PETA primate scientist Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel. “Brazoria County officials should shut this plan down now.”

Charles River is currently under civil and criminal investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice for violations of the Endangered Species Act and the Lacey Act. The company also recently acknowledged that it is under investigation by the Enforcement Division of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission related to its sourcing of monkeys from Asia.

In the 1970s, Charles River placed hundreds of monkeys into the fragile ecosystem of the Florida Keys. The monkeys’ waste polluted the waters and damaged protected coastal mangroves, resulting in an eroded shoreline. It took years of lawsuits for Charles River to remove the monkeys and return the land—now dead—back to the state.

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.