Feds Slap Harvard Med With Official Warning for Violating Animal Welfare Law: PETA Statement

For Immediate Release:
November 4, 2024

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Please see the following statement from PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo regarding an official warning posted against Harvard Medical School by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Investigative and Enforcement Service regarding a critical federal violation that led to the fracturing of a monkey’s tail and “a laceration to the skin beneath the tail base”:

An official warning from the U.S. Department of Agriculture is a rarity, and this latest incident, in which a monkey’s tail was fractured, follows Harvard Medical School’s previous violations in the laboratory of Margaret Livingstone, who steals infant monkeys from their mothers and subjects them to distortions of vision, including by putting strobe-effect goggles on them for more than a year. The feds cited Livingstone’s lab after a young monkey strangled to death, again after another one escaped from a cage and fought with another stressed animal, and yet again after Livingstone’s own veterinary staff reported her for failing to wear protective equipment at the height of the pandemic while experimenting on a restrained monkey. Harvard Medical School needs to shift to animal-free research methods that would actually help humans and close down the monkey and all other animal laboratories.

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.