‘Murder’ Ads Blast UC-Davis Monkey Experiments
PETA Pulls University’s Taxpayer-Funded Experiments on Primates Out of the Shadows
For Immediate Release:
April 10, 2019
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
“If You Call It ‘Medical Research,’ You Can Get Away With Murder.” That’s the message on new PETA ads now appearing on top of gas pumps at a Chevron gas station near the University of California–Davis (UC-Davis). PETA is targeting the school’s California National Primate Research Center (CNPRC), where more than 4,500 monkeys are imprisoned for breeding or use in cruel and worthless experiments. In February, PETA filed an open-records lawsuit against the school seeking to obtain video footage of experiments on young monkeys that have occurred at CNPRC.
PETA’s ads are located at the Chevron station at 1601 Research Park Dr., at the intersection with Richards Boulevard.
“Burning, poisoning, crippling, and blinding animals would be considered criminal cruelty anywhere except in a laboratory, where no experiment—no matter how painful—is prohibited by law,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA is calling on UC-Davis to stop wasting taxpayer dollars on cruel experiments and begin relinquishing the thousands of suffering monkeys in its laboratory to reputable sanctuaries, as it’s already done with chimpanzees.”
Since 2013, UC-Davis has been cited for at least 24 violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act—one of the worst track records in the nation—including for multiple incidents in which monkeys escaped from enclosures and died from subsequent injuries as well as for failing to provide animals with basic veterinary care. California offers broad exemptions from state cruelty charges if the acts of abuse are associated with “scientific experiments or investigations performed under the authority of the faculty of a regularly incorporated medical college or university.”
The CNPRC is one of seven National Primate Research Centers that are supported by the federal National Institutes of Health (NIH). PETA has already posted its message near the primate centers in Georgia, Oregon, Texas, and Wisconsin and is targeting the remainder with ads in Seattle and New Orleans. The group—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on” and which opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview—notes that UC-Davis received more than $238 million in 2018 in taxpayer-funded grants from NIH, approximately half of which were directed toward cruel and archaic experiments on monkeys and other animals.
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