‘Cruelty Doesn’t Fly’: PETA Supporters to Blast Secretive Monkey Shipments Flown Into IAH

For Immediate Release:
November 18, 2022

Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382

“Cruelty Doesn’t Fly.” That’s the message PETA supporters will bring to George Bush Intercontinental Airport (IAH) amid Thanksgiving crowds on Tuesday, following reports that a shipment of 360 long-tailed macaques arrived in Houston from Cambodia in September aboard a flight by AELF FlightService and its sister company, Maleth Aero. This week, the U.S. Department of Justice issued indictments of multiple individuals allegedly involved in a monkey-laundering and -smuggling ring that supplied U.S. laboratories with long-tailed macaques captured in their forest homes in Cambodia and falsely identified as captive-born.

When:    Tuesday, November 22, 11:45 a.m.

Where:    George Bush Intercontinental Airport, Terminal A, 2800 N. Terminal Rd., Houston

The flight was among the airlines’ other reported primate shipments into the country—posing a grave, potentially fatal public health risk and causing immense suffering to the animals, who are packed into small wooden crates and locked inside cargo holds before being mutilated and psychologically tormented in experiments.

“AELF FlightService booked long-tailed macaques a one-way ticket to a gruesome death in terrifying laboratories,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “These monkeys have just been classified as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and PETA is urging AELF FlightService to join other airline industry leaders in banning the shipment of laboratory-bound primates.”

United Airlines, American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, and Delta Air Lines are among the many major companies that have confirmed to PETA that they don’t fly monkeys or other primates destined for laboratories or laboratory suppliers.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview.

For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.