VICTORY! Chinese Company Scrapped Monkey Warehouse Plans Following Uproar From PETA

For Immediate Release:
February 9, 2023

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

PETA has confirmed today that Chinese company JOINN Biologics has dropped plans to build a massive monkey-importation and quarantine facility in Levy County, following opposition from PETA that included urgent warnings to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Gulf Hammock–area residents, and county commissioners. The facility would have sold monkeys to U.S. laboratories.

PETA reached a JOINN official by phone who said the company had scrapped its plans for building the facility on 1,400 acres of Florida’s northwest Gulf Coast in one of the largest recent Chinese acquisitions of U.S. land. The official cited zoning problems as the chief reason.

JOINN lacked permits to build its monkey warehouse and sought zoning changes to allow it. PETA urged Levy County officials to reject those proposed changes.

“PETA celebrates this massive blow to the monkey-importation pipeline as a huge victory for animals,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “We’re grateful to the Florida residents and officials who joined us in saying ‘no’ to greedy importers and experimenters who harm and kill monkeys.”

If constructed, the JOINN facility would have established Levy County as another point along the dangerous and deadly wildlife-trade chain, which exposes often stressed and injured monkeys to pathogens that can spread to humans. The disease-prone animals are sold and trucked to laboratories across the U.S. for use in barbaric experiments.

Long-tailed macaques, one of the species JOINN would most likely have imported, are now recognized as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature—in large part due to their capture and exploitation as part of the international wildlife trade to U.S. laboratories. There, they are mutilated, poisoned, deprived of food and water, forcibly immobilized in restraint devices, infected with painful and deadly diseases, tormented, and killed.

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, listen to The PETA Podcast, or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.