PETA Blasts EGYPTAIR’s Secretive Charter Flights Transporting Monkeys From Asia to U.S. Labs

For Immediate Release:
May 10, 2022

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

PETA is calling on its millions of supporters around the world to urge EGYPTAIR to reconsider its international transport of monkeys slated to be used in laboratories. PETA and animal protection groups One Voice in France and Stop Camarles in Spain uncovered evidence that the company is involved in the monkey trade and have asked it to follow the lead of nearly every major airline in the world and end its secretive practice of cramming hundreds of monkeys into the belly of cargo planes for a one-way trip to U.S. laboratories.

EGYPTAIR appears to have begun shipping monkeys to laboratories recently, and within the past eight weeks, it has flown more than 1,500 macaques—referring to them as “pieces” in airway bills in an apparent attempt to stay under the radar—from Cambodia to New York City. The most recent shipment arrived in the U.S. on April 30.

The monkeys are either captured in nature or bred on squalid farms, where many die from injury and disease. Those who survive are packed into small wooden crates and locked inside EGYPTAIR’s dark cargo holds on the first part of their days-long journey to their final destination—laboratories where they’re mutilated, poisoned, deprived of food and water, forcibly immobilized in restraint devices, infected with painful and deadly diseases, psychologically tormented, and killed.

“EGYPTAIR has the shameful distinction of being one of the last remaining airlines to jam terrified, doomed monkeys inside its cargo holds,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA is calling on this airline to end its complicity in primate torment and ground these shipments immediately.”

In addition to being viciously cruel, importing monkeys for experimentation is a shadowy, secretive industry that poses a grave public health risk. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledges that newly imported primates “carry infectious diseases that are dangerous and sometimes fatal to humans.”

Kenya Airways, which carried monkeys from a Mauritius breeding farm to the U.S., committed to ending the practice earlier this year following an appeal from PETA. The monkeys whose crates spilled out onto a Pennsylvania highway as a result of a truck crash in January were flown on one of its planes that had landed in New York City earlier that day.

Findings from experiments on monkeys rarely translate to cures or treatments for humans. PETA scientists have developed the Research Modernization Deal, which provides a commonsense strategy for ending the use of animals and improving biomedical research. For more information on PETA’s newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.