Video: Animal Allies at COP16 Conference Call For End to Monkey Exports to Labs

For Immediate Release:
October 29, 2024

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Wearing giant masks representing species of monkeys abducted from their forest homes to be sold to laboratories, advocates from PETA Latino, Animal Defenders International, Conexión Animal, and Federación de Liberación Animal protested outside the 16^th meeting of the United Nations biodiversity conference, the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP16), earlier today. The conference was attended by government leaders, including representatives from countries where monkeys are frequently torn from their homes and families to be sold for use in biomedical experiments, including Barbados, Cambodia, Colombia, Indonesia, Mauritius, the Philippines, Saint Kitts and Nevis, South Africa, and Vietnam.

The masks depicted the faces of four species of monkeys frequently exported to laboratories in the U.S. and other countries, where they’re tormented and killed. Photos and videos of the demonstration are available here.

“COP16 attendees must agree to safeguard all the planet’s inhabitants, including the monkeys who are abducted from their natural habitat and stuffed into plastic bags or wooden crates and transported to laboratories, where they’re used and killed in experiments,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA urges government leaders to keep monkeys out of experimenters’clutches and shift to human-relevant, animal-free research methods.”

In their natural homes, monkeys form deep emotional bonds with troop members and forage over large areas of forests. Monkeys abducted for use in the animal experimentation industry are packed into tiny shipping crates and forced to sit in their own feces, urine, and blood for hours-long journeys. The frightened and often sick animals are trucked to laboratories, where they’re deprived of food and water, mutilated, poisoned, restrained, infected with painful and deadly diseases, psychologically tormented, and used in a battery of other excruciating experiments before they’re killed.

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 the group on X, Facebook, or Instagram.