New PETA Billboard in Pike Place Market Takes Aim at UW Primate Center

Ad Calling for Better Science Follows Group’s Public Records Lawsuit

For Immediate Release:
January 27, 2021

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

As part of its campaign to persuade the University of Washington (UW) to shut down its shameful Washington National Primate Research Center (WaNPRC), PETA placed a billboard in the busy Pike Place Fish Market showing a traumatized monkey like those seen in the first-ever publicly released video taken inside the laboratory.

The billboard is located at 1426 First Ave., at the intersection with Pike Place, just 1 mile from the WaNPRC.

The ad comes just weeks after PETA filed a lawsuit against UW to compel it to turn over records as required by the state’s Public Records Act. The suit contends that UW failed to turn over documents requested by PETA, including those exposing the WaNPRC’s financial, leadership, and veterinary crises and showing how these failings led the National Institutes of Health to take the unprecedented step of restricting the center’s funding in 2018.

“The WaNPRC is better known for dead monkeys than for developing cures for human illnesses,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “UW must shut it down now and send the surviving monkeys to reputable sanctuaries.”

Despite 60 years of promises, the WaNPRC has failed to deliver on effective vaccines against AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, Zika, or any other deadly diseases. Monkeys at the facility have died from strangulation, starvation, dehydration, being mauled by other stressed monkeys, and choking on their own vomit and because of veterinary error. The facility is currently under investigation by two federal agencies for allowing numerous monkeys to escape. It has laid off multiple staff members, including those who take care of the monkeys, and has had five directors in 10 years.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—is calling on UW to follow in Harvard University’s footsteps and close its cruel primate research center.

PETA opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.