Monkeys in NIH Lab Get Congressional Support
An Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)
December 2014

[For more, please visit Maternal Deprivation Experiments]

Full-page ad

I am writing to share some exciting developments that promise new hope for the hundreds of monkeys imprisoned in a National Institutes of Health (NIH) laboratory recently exposed by PETA.

Last week, in response to PETA's campaign, compassionate members of Congress fired off a letter to NIH requesting that the agency's Department of Bioethics conduct a thorough scientific and ethical review of the cruel psychological experiments in which baby monkeys are bred to suffer from depression and other mental illness, torn away from their mothers at birth, and subjected to years of scary and painful procedures that are totally irrelevant to humans.

In their letter to NIH Director Francis Collins, the members—led by California Congressmember Lucille Roybal-Allard—express their own apprehensions about the experiments, cite their constituents' concerns arising from media reports about PETA's exposé, and point to the inadequacy of NIH's previous responses to the public and Congress about the case.

And to keep the issue on the national agenda, PETA just ran a full-page ad exposing these torturous experiments in an influential Washington, D.C., newspaper and in this past Sunday's New York Times.

These are just the latest developments in PETA's vigorous campaign to bring these cruel and archaic experiments to a halt. The campaign has attracted support from more than 150,000 caring people like you around the world and a wide range of public figures, including world-renowned primate expert Dr. Jane Goodall, celebrity psychotherapist Dr. Jenn Berman, and conservative strategist Mary Matalin.

You might remember that we previously ran 250 eye-catching ads throughout the D.C. Metro system and that one of our ads prompted a C-SPAN host to confront Collins about the case on live TV.

On the ground, PETA activists recently surprised the NIH director and the lead experimenter on the baby monkey studies during presentations at academic conferences, and PETA call-in actions to NIH have tied up the agency's phone lines for days and ensured that the public's overwhelming objections to these experiments are heard loud and clear.

The campaign to get NIH to end these horrible and wasteful experiments is continuing to gain steam, and the new year is bringing new hope for the monkeys.

Thank you for taking action on this campaign. If you haven't already, please also ask your friends to be a voice for the monkeys by urging NIH to modernize its research program.

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