World Laboratory Animal Liberation Week

World Laboratory Animal Liberation Week is the week that surrounds April 24th every year - It's a national week of protests, media events, etc. at laboratories to stop testing and research on animals

Fact Sheets

Primate Experimentation in the U.S. – The National Picture (2003 Ed.)
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The Facts About Primate Experimentation

Primate experimentation in the U.S. is out of control. The system which is supposed to regulate the use of primates is utterly ineffective. We cannot say with any real degree of accuracy how many primates are experimented on because the USDA cannot force laboratories to report animal use accurately, or even to report at all. Recently, the number of labs who did not report their experimental animal use has been as high as 128. In fiscal 1998 Harvard under-reported their primate use by over 1200. During the same year Yale under-reported their primate use by 95.

Statistics based on data published by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) indicate that primate experimentation in the U.S. has reached epidemic proportions with an estimated 52,000 of our closest relatives suffering & dying in laboratory experiments every year. As many as another 43,000 primates are imprisoned for breeding purposes.

Widespread Suffering

Many different species of primates including macaque monkeys, squirrel monkeys, baboons, and chimpanzees are experimented on in many different ways. Macaque monkeys are used most often, with baboons second and squirrel monkeys third.

Isolation is severely stressful to primates. In fact, 10% of isolated primates are so severely stressed that they begin to engage in self-injurious behavior. Many different psychological experiments also stress primates severely. Documentation from the University of Wisconsin (UW), Madison indicates that 1/3 of the primates that die within UW facilities are suffering from digestive tract pathologies which may have been brought on by stress.

Many diseases and conditions plague the primates that are held captive within laboratories, such as: pneumonia, encephalitis, hepatitis, and gastric bloat.
Common experimental practices include depriving primates of food or water so that these things become effective rewards. In some instances, the primates may receive water for only an hour or two per day, or are deprived of as much as 20% of their regular food intake.

The use of primate restraint chairs is also common, with confinement reaching as much as 104 consecutive hours. These devices are highly stressful for normally active and mobile primates. In brain mapping experiments many devices are literally bolted onto the skulls of primates, and electrodes are fed directly into the brain. Intravenous catheters are surgically implanted in experiments with addictive drugs. These devices can lead to serious infections, and other potentially fatal conditions.

Government Waste

Most primates are not used in experiments that study the diseases that kill most Americans. Projects that study primate psychology, alcohol & addictive drugs, brain-mapping, and sex in primates far outnumber studies involving heart disease or cancer.

Repetition is rampant among NIH-funded projects. Currently, 187 NIH projects study neural information processing in macaque monkeys. These useless experiments waste over $56 million in federal tax dollars every year. Many of these projects continue on for decades wasting millions of tax dollars each year and victimizing primates for an entire lifetime.

What you can do to help:

1. Read, copy, and distribute this fact sheet.

2. Write to your federal legislators to request a General Accounting Office (GAO) investigation of National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded primate experimentation.

The Honorable____________ 202-234-3121
U.S. House of Representatives www.house.gov
Washington, D.C. 20515

Senator __________________ 202-234-3121
U.S. Senate www.senate.gov
Washington, D.C. 20510

3. Send as large a tax-deductible donation as you can afford to Stop Animal Exploitation NOW! (SAEN) to support this campaign.

Downloadable PDF Version

 

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