UMass Chancellor, Retire the Marmoset Lab on Your Way Out, Says PETA
For Immediate Release:
June 30, 2022
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
Following the announcement that University of Massachusetts–Amherst (UMass) Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy will retire next June, PETA today urged him to retire the school’s shameful marmoset monkey laboratory, too, and release the monkeys to reputable sanctuaries. The laboratory has purchased dozens of marmosets from notorious corporations such as Worldwide Primates, which crams monkeys from its breeding compound in South Africa into tiny crates and ships them on planes to the U.S. At UMass, they are caged, their skulls are cut open, and eventually they’re killed, all to study menopause, a condition that the animals don’t even experience.
University experimenters zip-tie the frightened monkeys into restraining devices, drill into their skulls and implant electrodes, cut open their necks to expose muscle, and thread electrode leads from the scalp and neck to the abdomen. To mimic “hot flashes” in the marmosets, experimenters cut out their ovaries and heat the animals’ bodies with hand warmers. In another UMass experiment, castrated male marmosets were injected with testosterone and then tested for cognitive functioning. In some tests, these sensitive, social monkeys are kept in solitary confinement.
“This is your opportunity to leave a legacy that confirms your stated commitment to ‘create a better, more just world’ and puts UMass on a path to modern, human-relevant research,” writes PETA neuroscientist Katherine Roe.
UMass has racked up numerous violations of animal welfare laws and regulations and has been cited by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for severely burning an animal on a heating pad as he was recovering from surgery, failing to alert an attending veterinarian to sick animals, and more.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information on PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org and follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
