It has just been revealed that the largest macaque colony of its kind in the U.S. is housed in a disease-ridden breeding farm in the Arizona desert. It’s a facility operated by the Washington National Primate Research Center (WaNPRC), and PETA’s 18 months of painstaking research has uncovered a tragic death rate for the sensitive monkeys held captive there as well as a waste of research dollars.
Monkeys at these facilities have been given water from wells contaminated by a toxic waste site, wreaking havoc on their health and development. Many have suffered from severe illnesses such as Valley fever and Chagas disease and carry pathogens like the bacteria that cause tuberculosis and even cholera.
Those who manage to survive these dismal conditions will be shipped to WaNPRC in Seattle and to other laboratories across the country to be used in likely painful experiments. All this puts public health at risk, while also compromising the experiments they were bred for.
Records obtained by PETA show that officials at the University of Washington (UW)—which runs the WaNPRC and the satellite facility in Mesa—were aware of the issues but failed to take any meaningful action to correct them. This is not surprising, considering that the WaNPRC in Seattle has its own outrageous record of violations of federal animal welfare laws and monkey deaths caused by incompetence and neglect.
The WaNPRC has been promising that experimenting on monkeys would lead to vaccines for dreadful human diseases such as HIV, tuberculosis, and Zika for nearly 60 years. But not one marketable vaccine has materialized. Instead, it has shown itself to be hell-bent on squandering hundreds of millions of dollars and the lives of thousands of monkeys on crude experiments.
Since The Arizona Republic first revealed what PETA scientists and researchers uncovered at that ghastly Arizona breeding facility less than two weeks ago, more than 100,000 supporters have joined our call to close both of these despicable monkey prisons—and with your help, I know we can succeed.
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We’ve set a deadline of October 31 to raise $300,000 through the “Stop Animal Testing” Challenge. Gifts made after that date or after our goal has been met will not be matched, but they’ll still make a tremendous difference to PETA’s work against cruel and archaic experiments on animals. PETA is grateful to David J. Reuben for providing the funds for the matching-gift challenge.
