VIDEO: Nude PETA ‘Monkeys’ Crash Harvard-Yale Football Rivalry to Protest Monkey Experiments

For Immediate Release:
November 18, 2023

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

New Haven, Conn. — Earlier today, two nearly nude PETA supporters bodypainted as macaques, wearing tails, and holding signs that read, “Harvard: End Monkey Tests!” to protest Harvard experimenter Margaret Livingstone’s terrifying maternal and sensory deprivation tests on monkeys interrupted the annual Harvard-Yale football game in the third quarter. Police took away their signs and detained the two bodypainted women as well as a third protester wearing a “Harvard: Shut Down the Monkey Lab” T-shirt. All three were arrested. Photos and video are available here.

“Livingstone’s twisted experiments inflict irreversible harm on lonely, terrified baby monkeys, and not a single treatment for humans has resulted from this torment,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA is urging Harvard to shut down Livingstone’s lab of horrors.”

During her experiments, Livingstone has ripped baby monkeys away from their mothers, sewn the infants’ eyes shut for up to a year, and then observed how abnormally their vision developed. In other tests, the motherless baby monkeys are reared by humans wearing welding masks so that the traumatized animals never see a monkey or human face. Then Livingstone immobilizes their heads using head posts, chin straps, and bite bars to test their facial-processing abilities or surgically implants electrodes in their brains to record how their deprived brain cells respond to visual stimuli. After years of torment, she kills many of the monkeys and dissects their brains. She has conducted these types of curiosity-driven experiments for 40 years without identifying a treatment or cure for humans.

In addition to disrupting the Harvard-Yale football game, PETA is running a 15-second TV spot in the Hartford metropolitan area now through Sunday, November 26, that shows a customer wanting to know how much a prescription costs—and a computer-generated monkey, tattooed with an ID number and wheezing through a breathing tube, has the answer: “Too much.” The spot calls on locals to urge lawmakers to support PETA’s Research Modernization Deal, the world’s first comprehensive plan for phasing out the use of animals in experimentation.

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 X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, or Instagram.