PETA Calls Out Monkey Lab Behemoths’ Dangerous Violations in Shareholder Resolutions

For Immediate Release:
November 28, 2022

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

This week, PETA is filing shareholder resolutions with notorious animal testing giants Charles River Laboratories and Laboratory Corporation of America (Labcorp)—which owns Covance—requesting transparency concerning the companies’ roles in the voracious primate experimentation industry.

PETA’s resolution calls on both Boston-based Charles River and Burlington, North Carolina–based Labcorp to report to shareholders annually on their efforts to prevent transporting monkeys without proper veterinary exams. Both companies move thousands of monkeys every year on U.S. highways, often over thousands of miles. Federal law requires that a veterinarian examine monkeys transported across state lines within 10 days prior to shipment—but both Charles River and Labcorp have been cited for violating this law in response to complaints filed by PETA. The companies’ failure to conduct timely veterinary inspections jeopardizes public health and safety, as monkeys can carry tuberculosis, deadly diarrheal pathogens, West Nile virus, malaria, Chagas disease, herpes B, and other diseases and infectious agents that are transmissible to humans.

PETA also calls on Charles River to report on the species, country of origin (including wild-caught or captive-bred, omitting proprietary information), and numbers of monkeys imported by the company into the U.S. as well as to report any measures the company is taking to mitigate its impact on monkeys’ dwindling wild populations.

“PETA is calling on Charles River and Labcorp to be accountable to shareholders about their sloppy practices and above-the-law mentality,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “They should stop tormenting monkeys altogether, but at a minimum they must abide by the law.”

Charles River is one of the largest importers of monkeys into the U.S., bringing in thousands of monkeys each year from Southeast Asia and Mauritius. The majority of these primates are long-tailed macaques, which the International Union for Conservation of Nature classifies as “endangered.” The international trade in long-tailed macaques is steeped in violence, and widespread laundering of wild-caught animals as captive-bred is evident in recent indictments brought by the U.S. Department of Justice.

During fiscal years 2019 to 2021, 407 shipments brought 92,430 monkeys to the U.S. from other countries, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Charles River and Covance have the dubious distinction of topping PETA’s “Dirty Dozen,” which names the 12 worst CEOs for animals in laboratories.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on” and which opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview—notes that monkeys are still being used in pharmaceutical studies, even though the U.S. Food and Drug Administration admits that 95% of all new drugs that test safe and effective in animals are either unsafe or ineffective in humans. PETA scientists’ Research Modernization Deal provides a strategy for replacing animals with modern, human-relevant research methods.

PETA shareholder questions are available upon request. For more information on PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.