Massive Inflatable Monkeys to Confront Animal Experimentation Summit
For Immediate Release:
October 3, 2024
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
PETA’s monkey defenders will attend the Society for Neuroscience 2024 conference on Saturday at McCormick Place Convention Center, where notorious Washington National Primate Research Center experimenters Elizabeth Buffalo and Michele Basso are scheduled speakers. PETA’s protesters will inflate eye-catching 8-foot-tall “monkeys” as they urge the animal tormentors to end their cruel, scientifically flawed tests and pivot to superior, non-animal research.
“If these troubled experimenters can’t be trusted with running their labs, they shouldn’t be responsible for vulnerable monkeys,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA calls on Buffalo, Basso, and the Society for Neuroscience to stop harming and killing primates and start conducting human-relevant research instead.”
Where: McCormick Place Convention Center, 2301 S. Martin Luther King Dr. (at the intersection with McCormick Square), Chicago
When: Saturday, October 5, 12 noon
Why: Buffalo is best known for her mistreatment of a monkey named Dorothy, an elderly rhesus macaque who was confined alone to a cage and subjected to unrelenting experiments for the final two and a half years of her life. Buffalo kept Dorothy restrained and hungry, drilled a hole in her skull, and surgically implanted a titanium post. Despite Dorothy’s ongoing weight loss and obvious physical deterioration, Buffalo kept experimenting on her, supposedly to learn about the neurobiology of human aging. But all Buffalo achieved was the merciless decline of a lonely, sick, and cancer-ridden monkey.
Basso, before she was removed as director of the Washington National Primate Research Center, botched surgical implants in the skulls of monkeys and oversaw multiple violations of federal animal welfare laws and worker injuries.
Other experimenters known for their cruel experiments using monkeys—including Elisabeth Murray, Margaret Livingstone, and Agnès Lacreuse—are expected to attend this event as well.
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.
