PETA Media Blitz Slams UMass-Amherst Monkey Menopause Tests

For Immediate Release:
April 27, 2023

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

PETA is bombarding local newspapers with a vivid infographic detailing University of Massachusetts–Amherst (UMass) experimenter Agnès Lacreuse’s torment and killing of marmoset monkeys to study menopause—which marmosets don’t even experience.

PETA is also releasing a 30-second video spot that will air on TV streaming services showing footage of the terrified animals imprisoned in tiny, barren cages, cowering and screaming as a voiceover describes the suffering they endure in Lacreuse’s laboratory.

The infographic ads are running today in The Reminder and the Daily Hampshire Gazette and tomorrow in the Amherst Bulletin.

In experiments costing taxpayers more than $5 million so far, Lacreuse zip-ties monkeys into restraining devices for hours at a time, drills holes into their skulls, threads electrode leads through their abdomens, surgically removes the females’ ovaries and uteruses, and overheats them with hand warmers to simulate “hot flashes.” Once she’s done with them, she kills them.

“Marmosets’ gentle, cooperative nature is easy to exploit, a fact that Agnès Lacreuse knows far too well,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA is calling on UMass to shut down this shameful laboratory before another marmoset is mutilated and killed in these cruel, curiosity-driven experiments.”

The laboratory’s history of animal welfare violations includes severely burning a marmoset with hand warmers as he was recovering from surgery, failing to alert an attending veterinarian to sick animals, and permitting a monkey to escape and injuring their tail during recapture.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on” and which opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview—notes that Pew Research found that the majority of American adults oppose the use of animals in scientific research, and studies show that a staggering 90% of basic research, most of which involves animals, fails to lead to treatments for humans.

For more information about PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org, listen to The PETA Podcast, or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.