Multiple Violations, Monkeys Injured and Killed at UW-Madison: PETA Statement

For Immediate Release:
September 27, 2024

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Please see the following statement from PETA Vice President Dr. Alka Chandna regarding a just-posted U.S. Department of Agriculture inspection report documenting citations—four of them critical—against the University of Wisconsin–Madison for violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act. Due to failures by experimenters and other staff, a monkey had to be euthanized after a botched blood draw, two others were burned by heat lamps, and a marmoset sustained a serious injury after a cage door—deemed too heavy for workers to control—slammed on the animal’s hand. Two monkeys were subjected to whole-body perfusion—a process in which a fixative is pumped through an animal’s blood vessels to displace the blood and preserve tissues—although this measure hadn’t been approved. Several monkeys endured 13 injections into the eye—more than double the permitted limit of six. Some monkeys underwent two large bowel biopsies with insufficient recovery time between procedures, increasing their suffering. In five separate incidents, stressed monkeys were able to access other monkeys in neighboring cages due to human error or faulty equipment, resulting in altercations that left them with injuries requiring sutures.

Experiments on animals must be suspended at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Wisconsin National Primate Research Center; the institutional animal care and use committee, which is failing its mandate to ensure compliance with the law, should be fired; and the rogue experimenters who ignored their own protocols should be permanently barred from having contact with animals. PETA is calling on the National Institutes of Health, which dumps tens of millions of dollars into this facility every year, to cancel the primate center’s permission to receive government funds for experiments on animals. There’s no excuse for the suffering that incompetent, careless staff have caused, and they must be stopped right now.

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.