Monkey Defenders Highlight Merciless UW Primate Experimenter at Simian Collective Conference

For Immediate Release:
September 5, 2024

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

PETA supporters this morning interrupted the keynote speech of Elizabeth Buffalo, a troubled monkey tormentor from the Washington National Primate Research Center, during the Simian Collective conference held at the University Club on the University of Pittsburgh campus shouting “Elizabeth Buffalo has blood on her hands! Dorothy’s blood is on her hands!” They were tackled by police and arrested.

The event promotes experiments on monkeys, and PETA supporters urged Buffalo to end her cruel and deadly experiments on primates and instead use superior, animal-free research methods that actually produce human-relevant results. Photos and video footage are available here.

Buffalo is best known for her treatment 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 that Buffalo achieved was the merciless decline of a lonely, sick, and cancer-ridden monkey. 

“It’s Buffalo who needs to examine her morals, not monkeys,” says PETA primate scientist Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel. “PETA calls on Buffalo and her peers to stop harming primates and conduct human-relevant research.”

For more than six decades, the primate center has infected, tormented, and killed monkeys; wasted taxpayer dollars; repeatedly violated the federal Animal Welfare Act; and failed the scientific community. The thousands of primate deaths include those of monkeys who were strangled, starved, and mauled. Others choked on their own vomit, had their limbs mangled, were given the wrong drugs, or died from uncontrolled diarrheal diseases.

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.