UW-Madison Uses Sick Monkeys in Cruel Sleep Deprivation Test; PETA Urges Federal Probe

For Immediate Release:
December 12, 2024

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

In a complaint filed today, PETA urges the U.S. Department of Agriculture to investigate likely violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act at the University of Wisconsin-Madison after experimenters subjected chronically ill marmoset monkeys to a grueling sleep deprivation experiment.

Records obtained by PETA show all six monkeys in the experiment had diarrhea for several consecutive days before and during the test – two of whom were afflicted so severely they required medication and a special diet for weeks before, during, and after testing. One monkey lost 3% of her body weight prior to the test.

Experimenters went ahead with the cruel test anyway, scaring the monkeys awake with loud noises every fifteen minutes all night, despite a high likelihood that the monkeys’ compromised health would adversely affect any results. The experiment was the brainchild of University of Massachusetts–Amherst experimenter Agnès Lacreuse.

“Subjecting already sick and stressed monkeys to a cruel and useless sleep deprivation experiment is cruel and it’s bad science,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA calls on federal authorities to investigate immediately.”

Lacreuse collected approximately $340,000 of taxpayer money to bankroll the test, despite completing none of the goals in her grant proposal.

The test was conducted supposedly to study the connection between sleep fragmentation and Alzheimer’s disease. But at least eight other studies using humane, non-animal methods have already investigated that connection.

The experiment intended to use 16 monkeys and last up to two months, but after thousands of PETA supporters contacted the university with complaints, the test ended after just one night.

Violations of federal animal welfare laws are nothing new at UW-Madison, which has racked up a litany of citations for burning monkeys with heat lamps, botching a blood draw so severely that a monkey had to be euthanized, allowing stressed monkeys to injure each other, and letting a heavy cage door slam shut on a monkey’s hand, among other horrors.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits for people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow PETA on X, Facebook, or Instagram.