Tag Archives: monkeys

Animal Issues

2016 was a good year for animals

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Rose rescued Cece in 2016 …  pic: R.T.

The Worcester Animal Rescue League on Holden Street is where Rose got her Husky-Mountain Feist cross “Jett,” the late great Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever “Bailey” and beautiful brindle greyhound-lab cross “Grace.” All homeless dogs that needed to be rescued!

If you can’t adopt a homeless cat or dog – do the next best thing: VOLUNTEER on behalf of animals. There are infinite ways to help! A good place to start is  WARL (open to the public 7 days a week, noon to 4 p.m.)! To learn more and see their dogs and cats up for adoption, CLICK HERE!       – R.T.

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Lots happened in 2016 besides the election

By Jennifer O’Connor

Most Americans are still feeling a bit frayed by the divisiveness of the presidential election. It’s easy to feel jaded and worn out, and many commentators are happy to see the end of 2016.

But while it was easy to get caught up in the more lurid headlines, a ton of uplifting things happened in the past year, particularly for animals used in the entertainment industry.

Let’s begin with elephants. Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, which has been forcing elephants to travel and perform for more than a century, pulled the animals off the road in May. They will no longer be chained up and hauled around in fetid boxcars. When a circus as big as Ringling makes a decision like that, you know the days of performing elephants are numbered.

The National Aquarium in Baltimore also made a precedent-setting decision: It will send the eight dolphins currently in its possession to a coastal sanctuary. Animal advocates around the world have called on aquariums and theme parks to stop exhibiting marine mammals—and this is the first step. Protected sea pools afford dolphins and orcas room to move around and some degree of autonomy and self-determination. They’re able to see, sense and communicate with their wild cousins and other ocean animals — and they finally get to feel the tides and waves and have the opportunity to engage in the kinds of behavior that they’ve long been denied.

SeaWorld is starting to see the writing on the wall. In May, the corporation announced that it would stop breeding future generations of orcas, who would have to spend their lives in cramped tanks. But kind people everywhere are calling on the corporation to release all its animals into coastal sanctuaries. As the public’s condemnation of captive marine mammal displays continues to grow, there’s little doubt that protected sea pens are the wave of the future.

Travel giant TripAdvisor recognized the trend towards compassionate tourism and stopped selling tickets to most excursions using animals for entertainment, including cruel “swim with dolphins” programs, elephant rides and tiger photo ops. Since many facilities dupe visitors into believing that they’re helping animals, many vacationers unwittingly support cruelty by patronizing them. But by informing travelers about the dark underside of these excursions and refusing to offer them, TripAdvisor’s new policy will have a very real impact on animal exploitation in tourist traps.

Nearly a half-dozen roadside zoos — where animals suffered in filthy, ramshackle cages — closed their doors in 2016. Families are turning their backs on exhibits in which bears are confined to concrete pits and tigers pace in fetid pens.

But progress for animals hasn’t been limited to the U.S. In Argentina, a judge found that Cecilia, a chimpanzee languishing in a Mendoza zoo, isn’t a “thing” but rather a sentient being who is “subject to nonhuman rights” — and ordered that she be sent to a sanctuary. Countries as disparate as Norway and Iran banned exotic-animal acts.

Argentina passed a ban on greyhound racing, sparing countless dogs a short, grim life in the “sport.” India’s Supreme Court upheld a ban on a cruel pastime called jallikattu—in which bullocks are raced and often struck with whips and nail-studded sticks to make them run faster. And the annual Toro de la Vega “festival” — in which a young bull is chased through the streets of Tordesillas, Spain, and stabbed with darts and spears — was banned.

While 2016 was a good year for animals, there’s always more to be done. We all have the power to spare animals pain and suffering in the year ahead—and beyond—simply by making kind choices about what we do for entertainment.

Animal Issues

It’s time for laboratories to get out of the monkey business

By Dr. Alka Chandna

In 2013, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) made the historic decision to retire the majority of federally owned chimpanzees from use in experiments. While this was a monumental victory for chimpanzees, there are still 110,000 monkeys and other primates imprisoned in U.S. laboratories.

A new PETA eyewitness investigation at a company in Florida that sells monkeys to laboratories is shining a spotlight on the need for urgent action for these animals as well.

For eight months, a witness worked at Florida-based Primate Products, Inc. (PPI), a notorious primate dealer that imports hundreds of monkeys each year and warehouses and then sells them to laboratories. PPI has been awarded federal contracts worth more than $13 million—including by NIH, the Army and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. PPI also sends monkeys to universities and contract testing conglomerates across the country

The witness documented that some monkeys with painful injuries, including exposed bones, were left to suffer without adequate veterinary care for days. One monkey was denied adequate medical treatment for an exposed vertebra in her tail for at least a week, despite the fact that the witness had notified a supervisor, a PPI manager and another worker repeatedly about the injury.

Many monkeys were confined to virtually barren concrete pens littered with feces and old food with other stressed and apparently incompatible monkeys, sometimes for months at a time. While monkeys, like humans, are highly social animals, the severe psychological stress of being imprisoned in a small space with strangers and given virtually nothing to do probably contributed to fights among the animals. With no escape, subordinate monkeys lived in constant fear of attack by aggressive monkeys as well as by their human captors.

One monkey, named Loretta by the witness, was left penned with the very monkeys who had injured and apparently terrified her for more than 22 weeks, despite at least 23 written and verbal reports to PPI staff that she was being attacked and appeared to be afraid of the other monkeys. Loretta’s face was frequently lacerated, and she had extensive hair loss. Another monkey, whom the witness named Sweet P, was forced to live for more than two weeks with monkeys who had attacked her. She was finally moved but was then kept isolated in a barren metal cage for 20 days—during which time PPI’s behaviorist admitted to having forgotten about her.

Monkeys were also terrorized by PPI workers who chased them and grabbed them by their sensitive tails. Workers aggressively swung nets at them, yanked them off the fences that they desperately clung to and even hurled them into nets.

Other monkeys were confined all alone to tiny, bleak metal cages. Locked in isolation and denied suitable companionship, which is crucial to their mental and physical health—just as it is to ours—some of these psychologically distressed monkeys rocked back and forth and paced in circles, likely signs of intense boredom and distress.

Though temperatures dipped to as low as 35°F, most monkeys kept outside were denied heat throughout the winter, leading to frostbite and apparently even the death of at least one monkey in an outdoor enclosure.

In 2014 alone, PPI imported 1,000 monkeys from Asia and Africa—63 percent of whom, according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service documents, were taken from their families and homes in the wild.

These animals are eventually trucked to government agencies, universities and contract testing laboratories, including facilities that blast monkeys with radiation, drill into their skulls, test sexual lubricants on their rectums and intentionally infect them with an HIV-like virus that causes crippling AIDS-like symptoms, even though every single HIV vaccine developed using monkeys has failed in humans.

Recognizing this chain of abuse, nearly every major airline in the world now refuses to transport monkeys to PPI or any other laboratory or dealer.

PETA is working toward a day when every cage in every laboratory is empty. Readers can make a difference by urging their members of Congress to push the National Institutes of Health to fund more modern and superior non-animal research instead of cruel and ineffective experiments on monkeys and other animals.

InCity Voices

I passed on the DCU event for the sake of animals

By Mike Germain

Last week I was offered four free admission tickets to an upcoming event at the DCU Convention Center for myself, my girlfriend, her son and my son.

The event is a sort of travelling carnival, complete with kiddie rides, refreshments, raffles and, of course, the obligatory kiddie zoo.

The zoo was listed as complete with a bull, camel rides, monkeys, and a petting zoo, etc.

Ah, Yes! The annual travelling zoo and carnival is making its way back to these parts!

Because the offer of the free tickets was thoughtful and made with all good intentions, I accepted the tickets and thanked my friend. But we didn’t go. The tickets  brought back memories …

Three years ago I had a very similar experience. I came across tickets to this very same event with pretty much the same advertising : “kiddie rides, petting zoo, camel rides, live animals” etc. I thought to myself, this may be a great way to spend some quality time with my girlfriend and her 4-year-old son.

So off we went for the afternoon to the so-called carnival and traveling zoo. Upon arrival, my girlfriend’s son sprinted through the doors! His first experience was some sort of bull, the biggest bull you can imagine, lying in a pile of hay enclosed by a metal fence. The area that this bull was in was barely large enough for him to stand up and turn around. Our four year old was cognizant enough about the situation to ask me: “Is the cow OK? He can’t get much exercise!”

The cage the bull (cow) was kept in to transport when not on display was just as compact as this fencing area – if not smaller.

Next we moved on to the area that had some monkeys. They were displayed in another small cage, and the number of monkeys housed in it seemed substantial to me.

I saw the look on our once excited four year old become very confused. He asked us: “Why can’t the monkeys move?”

This definitely tempered our enthusiasm for the day.

At that point I looked around and saw what seemed to be similar situations at most of the other exhibits: Animals caged or housed in enclosures that seemed much too small for their size or housing too many animals.

My girlfriend’s son was visibly upset and we decided it would be best to just leave.

He thought the animals were “unhappy.”

I love animals of all different kinds, and I love to watch them in their natural environment. I’m not a follower of PETA and quite frankly I think they go a bit too far. However, this experience opened my eyes to the traveling zoo culture, and it certainly made me more sympathetic to the plight of these animals.

I urge others not to attend this event.

If you want to satisfy your love for animals in their natural environment and enjoy the beauty of their existence, I suggest tuning into The Animal Planet on cable network.

Michael (Mike) Germain is a former Worcester City Councilor, a Worcester small biz owner, supporter of the Worcester Friendly House, kids ice hockey teams and other Worcester youth sports teams. He owns a very large parrot!

InCity Feature, InCity Letters, InCity Voices, Uncategorized

PETA sues Massachusetts

STATE SUED FOR IDENTITIES OF LABORATORIES IMPORTING MONKEYS FOR EXPERIMENTS

PETA Argues That Massachusetts Is Unlawfully Concealing Which Companies Imported Monkeys Possibly to Be Poisoned, Infected, and Killed

 Boston — PETA filed a lawsuit today in the Suffolk County Superior Court to compel the state’s Department of Agricultural Resources (DAR) to release information on the companies, universities, and individuals involved in the importation of 141 monkeys into the state in 2013, many of whom were likely headed to laboratories for invasive and painful experiments.

PETA sought this information in February through a Freedom of Information Act request. The DAR withheld the information on documents it released to PETA, and PETA’s lawsuit argues that it failed to provide an adequate justification for doing so. PETA contends that access to information about the origin and destination of these animals is critical because primates in laboratories are sometimes imported to the U.S. unlawfully, can carry infectious diseases such as herpes or Ebola, or are sometimes supplied by dealers who have violated animal welfare laws. 

“Thousands of monkeys are cut into, sickened, and killed in Massachusetts laboratories each year, and the public has a right to know where these animals came from, where they went, and how they got there,” says PETA Director of Laboratory Investigations Justin Goodman. “PETA wants the state of Massachusetts to stop insulating universities, drug companies, animal dealers, and others from much-deserved public scrutiny about the use of monkeys in deadly experiments.”

Each year, thousands of monkeys are taken from the wild or bred on squalid breeding farms in Asia and Africa, crammed into tiny wooden crates, transported on long-haul flights to the U.S., and trucked across the country to laboratories in Massachusetts and elsewhere. In recent studies, monkeys confined to Massachusetts facilities had holes drilled into their skulls, were addicted to cocaine, and were restrained and forced to pull burning-hot metal levers heated to 140 degrees.

According to the most recent federal data available, thousands of primates were confined to Massachusetts laboratories in 2011, including at Boston University, Charles River Laboratories, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During recent inspections, the U.S. Department of Agriculture cited Massachusetts laboratories for dozens of violations of the Animal Welfare Act.

A copy of PETA’s complaint is available upon request. For more information, please visit PETA.org.

InCity Feature, InCity Letters, InCity Voices, Uncategorized

Time to retire cruel, archaic monkey experiments!

By Justin Goodman
 
Most people are probably familiar with the infamous experiments conducted by Harry Harlow starting in the 1950s.

Harlow — whom author Laurel Braitman calls “a dark lord of monkey torture” in her new book, Animal Madness — tore newborn monkeys away from their mothers, gave some infants “surrogate mothers” made of wire and wood, and kept other traumatized babies in isolation in tiny metal boxes to cause them irreparable psychological damage.

They rocked incessantly, bit and clutched at themselves and ripped out their own hair. Some even died.
 
You’d be forgiven for thinking that these archaic experiments had already gone the way of transistor radios, Polaroid cameras, the Edsel and other ’50s-era relics, but similar experiments have continued for 30 years—and you’re still paying for them.

That’s what PETA discovered after obtaining more than 500 hours of videos, hundreds of photographs and many internal documents from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) through a Freedom of Information Act request for which the agency unsuccessfully tried to charge PETA $100,000.
 
Terrorizing baby monkeys is archaic, morally reprehensible and completely irrelevant to our understanding and treatment of human mental illness, and it needs to stop.
 
Every year, dozens of monkeys are intentionally bred to be genetically predisposed to mental illness in the NIH laboratory of psychologist Steven Suomi, a Harlow protégé. Currently, some 200 monkeys of various ages are being used in these cruel and archaic studies.
 
Half of the monkeys born each year are separated from their mothers within hours of birth and never returned.

As in Harlow’s experiments, some are given only a fabric-covered bottle to cling to in place of their mother. They undergo years of terrifying and often painful experiments that are designed to cause them to suffer from severe anxiety, fear, depression and other physical and mental illnesses. A

As they age, some monkeys are forcibly addicted to alcohol, making their symptoms even worse. 
 
NIH videos obtained by PETA reveal that in recent experiments, newborn infants were restrained inside tiny cages and placed in isolation in “startle chambers.”

The experimenters terrified the babies with loud noises, causing them to cry out and try frantically to hide or escape.

In some trials, the experimenters released a realistic-looking electronic snake into the cage with the baby monkeys, who innately fear the reptiles.
 
In other experiments, infants were caged with their mothers, but the mothers were chemically sedated. The terrified babies screamed and cried, climbing onto and frantically shaking their unresponsive mothers.

In one case, experimenters can be heard laughing while a mother struggles to remain awake to comfort her distraught infant.
 
In a pathetic attempt to defend the barbaric project, NIH made the ludicrous statement that the laboratory is “not that different from a human nursery”! 
 
In the past seven years alone, these experiments have received $30 million in taxpayer money, even though they have never led to the development or improvement of treatments for human mental illness.

As far back as 1977, Suomi acknowledged, “Most monkey data that readily generalize to humans have not uncovered new facts about human behavior …” After four more decades of these useless experiments, nothing has changed. In a recent paper, Suomi and his colleagues wrote, “[T]his animal model of maternal separation has never been validated as a measure of drug efficacy in humans. … The only way to know definitively whether [anti-depressant drugs work] in humans would be to study our species.” 
 
Meanwhile, researchers who actually do study our species—conducting sophisticated brain imaging and other human-based research that actually benefits human health—struggle to find funding.
 
Respected researchers, mental health professionals and primate experts including Dr. Jane Goodall have joined PETA to urge NIH to end its maternal deprivation experiments on baby monkeys and modernize its research program.
 
Technology has changed since the 1950s, and so has science. Just as doctors would no longer dream of endorsing cigarettes and parents would no longer buy radioactive science kits for their kids, it’s time for NIH to stop conducting and funding equally indefensible and archaic experiments on monkeys.
 

InCity Voices, Uncategorized

Cruelty shouldn’t fly

By Michelle Kretzer

 Would you board a flight if you knew that under your feet in the cargo hold, there would be terrified monkeys on their way to a laboratory, where they would be tortured and killed? Few people would. Perhaps that’s why almost every major passenger airline in the world now refuses to accept blood money for shipping primates to their deaths.

 Every major airline, that is, except for one.

 Earlier this year, world-renowned primate expert Dr. Jane Goodall sent a stern e-mail to Air France urging the company to end its part in this cruel trade.

 Dr. Goodall explains that in their natural homes, long-tailed monkeys—the species that Air France ships most often to laboratories—form strong bonds, live in groups of up to 30 individuals and “travel up to a mile a day playing, foraging for food and socializing with one another.” She adds, “Babies are nursed by their mothers until they are more than a year old and females remain in the same social groups for life with their mothers, daughters, sisters and cousins. These social, intelligent primates can live to be more than 30 years old.” But monkeys in laboratories don’t get to experience any of this.

Numerous investigations have found that in order to abduct primates from their homes in the wild in Asia and Africa, companies supplying monkeys to laboratories pay trappers to shoot the mothers from trees with dart guns and then capture the babies, who cling, panic-stricken, to their mothers’ bodies. Some wildlife traders catch whole primate families in baited traps. The animals are then tossed into bags or cages with little to no food or water and taken to filthy monkey breeding facilities. After the babies are born, they are torn away from their mothers in order to be sold to experimenters in Europe and the U.S.

 Every year, thousands of these monkeys are locked inside tiny crates and loaded into the dark cargo holds of planes for terrifying multistop journeys that can last more than 30 hours.

 Once the monkeys arrive at their final destinations, they are locked inside barren cages all alone and forced to undergo painful, invasive and traumatic experiments. They may be force-fed experimental chemicals, addicted to cocaine, or given infectious diseases such as botulism or bubonic plague, or they may have holes drilled into their skulls. Babies are also torn from their mothers simply for the purpose of studying the harm caused by the resulting psychological distress. Afterward, the monkeys are often killed.

Primates are sensitive, intelligent individuals who belong in the wild with their families. They are not laboratory equipment or cargo.

 After learning from PETA and our affiliates around the globe how primates suffer in experiments and after hearing from outraged customers who demanded that they stop the practice, other major airlines—including Air Canada, American Airlines, China Southern Airlines, Lufthansa and United Airlines—made the compassionate decision to end their involvement in this dirty business. As a result, imports of primates to U.S. laboratories have dropped by one-third in recent years, and there’s been a 15 percent decrease in the total number of primates imprisoned in these laboratories. This trend must continue.

 You can’t escape your reputation, even at 30,000 feet. It’s time for every airline to refuse to deliver primates to a life of pain and misery inside a laboratory.

InCity Letters, InCity Voices, Uncategorized

There’s been a delay … / ICT PETA op ed

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The Housing Report (for the City of Worcester) is not ready. Should be coming out around Oct. 18. – R. T.
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Starving monkeys won’t help humans live longer

By Alka Chandna, Ph.D.

Since the late 1980s, experimenters at the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the University of Wisconsin–Madison have isolated monkeys in tiny barren cages and kept them chronically underfed—giving them a whopping 30 percent fewer calories than they needed—to see if this would make the animals live longer. Now, more than two decades later, the NIA experimenters report that 20-plus years of unrelieved deprivation had no effect on the monkeys’ life spans.

This hideous experiment may not have extended the animals’ lives, but it certainly made their pitifully caged lives more miserable.

While it is always unethical to confine and kill animals for experimentation, condemning smart, social animals to a lifetime of hunger and isolation, just to prove a point, is especially egregious. It’s time for these so-called “caloric-restriction”—read, “starvation”—experiments to end and for the government to stop paying for this cruelty.

Primates are extremely intelligent animals who form intricate relationships, experience the same wide range of emotions as we do and exhibit a capacity for suffering similar to that of humans. And like us, rhesus macaque monkeys—the species used in the starvation experiments—are highly social animals who need companionship in order to thrive.

In their natural homes, these gregarious animals live in multigenerational troops with up to 200 other monkeys. They spend their days traveling miles through lush forest terrain and grooming one another. In the caloric-restriction experiments, they are confined alone in metal cages so small that they can take only a step or two in any given direction. Most likely, they will die in these cages. The cheap plastic toys and scratched mirrors commonly given to monkeys in laboratories as “environmental enrichment” are poor substitutes for the companionship of another living being.

Rhesus monkeys also have impressive intellectual abilities. They can count, use tools, communicate complex information and express empathy, and they possess a sense of fairness—something that many experimenters seem to lack.

In one particularly horrible experiment, described in Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan’s book Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, macaques were fed only if they pulled a chain that electrically shocked another monkey, whose agony was in plain view through a one-way mirror. The majority of the monkeys preferred to go hungry rather than pulling the chain. One refused to eat for 14 days.

Sadly, these astonishing traits have not saved monkeys from being abused in laboratories.

When the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s experiments were first made public in 2009, PETA filed complaints with both the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the university’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. Our concerns were dismissed, and the monkeys remain in their barren cages, waiting to die.

Even if the results of the starvation experiments had turned out differently, if the researchers had discovered that chronic deprivation prolongs life, so what? What difference would it make? When most of us eat too much rather than too little, is it realistic to expect that people will voluntarily go hungry—not for weeks or months but for years and decades—even if it means adding a few years to their lives?

Previous studies have shown us that being obese can shorten a person’s life span by as much as a decade and that the cholesterol, saturated fat and toxins in meat and fish increase the risk of early death. According to the American Cancer Society, one-third of all cancer deaths in the United States can be attributed to nutritional factors. And still we gorge ourselves on meat, dairy products, sugar, soda and heavily processed foods and wonder why we get sick.

We already know how to improve our health and prevent many of the ills often associated with aging. Locking up animals for decades in cruel and pointless experiments is not the answer.

InCity Feature, InCity Voices

Why aren’t there more felony indictments for lab animal abusers?

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By Kathy Guillermo

In our work to replace the use of animals for experimentation with superior non-animal methods, we at PETA often say, “If what happens to animals inside a laboratory happened outside the lab, it would be a crime.”

This month, a grand jury agreed with us.

Fourteen felony cruelty-to-animals indictments were returned against four former employees of Professional Laboratory Research Services (PLRS) in North Carolina, which was investigated and exposed by PETA last year. Indictments and charges against those who abuse animals —wherever the cruelty occurs — should happen more often.

For decades, PLRS was hired by big pharmaceutical companies to test the pesticides in flea and tick products on dogs, cats and rabbits. Last year, a PETA investigator worked undercover in the facility and caught these employees on video kicking, throwing and dragging dogs; hoisting rabbits by their ears and puppies by their throats; violently slamming cats into cages; and screaming obscenities and death wishes at terrified animals. One worker can be seen on video trying to rip out a cat’s claws by violently pulling the animal from the chain link fence that the cat clung to.

The indictments follow citations by federal officials for serious violations of animal welfare laws, the laboratory’s closure and the surrender of nearly 200 dogs and more than 50 cats just a week after we released our findings. Laboratory staff reportedly killed all the rabbits, but the dogs and cats have been placed in homes.

I know one of the rescued dogs, a small terrier-hound who looks a little like the beleaguered but hopeful pup in the animated version of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” She was known only by the number tattooed in her ear. Bone-thin, terrified and infested with worms, she was pulled from her cage and began a long journey that ended in the home of one of my colleagues.

At first Libby, as she was named, cowered in fear and crawled on her belly rather than standing upright and risk being noticed. I visited her recently. She is a joyful little dog today who loves her person, her canine friends and her happy life. Imprisonment in a laboratory has been replaced by long walks in the mountains, where she darts up and down the trails, her tail wagging.

Some abuse in laboratories has the approval of oversight committees and is funded by the federal government with our tax dollars. They don’t call it abuse of course—it’s “research” when someone gets paid to collect data on suffering animals. But forcing mice to fight with each other until they’re bloody, keeping monkeys constantly thirsty to coerce them to cooperate in brain experiments, torching sheep over two-thirds of their bodies, force-feeding chemicals to dogs, electrically shocking the sensitive feet of rats, cutting off the tops of cats’ skull to insert electrodes in their brains—all this is legal.

Many state anti-cruelty laws exempt experiments on animals. Wisconsin, where the mice-fighting experiments occurred and were in apparent violation of anti-animal fighting laws, just passed such an exemption.

As Libby shows, the animals are the same whether they’re inside a laboratory or outside it. They feel pain when they’re hurt. They want their own lives, even if some humans think these lives are of no value. Thank goodness the grand jury in North Carolina saw the appalling treatment of animals for what it was and refused to give the laboratory a free pass. Let’s hope it’s a trend.

Kathy Guillermo is vice president of Laboratory Investigations for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

InCity Letters, InCity Voices, Uncategorized

Exotic pets must be outlawed

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By Lisa Wathne

An Indiana boy and his dog were injured recently by the family’s pet monkey—who had been locked in a cage for years because of “aggression”—after he escaped and ran amok. You’d think that after a Connecticut woman’s face was ripped off by her friend’s pet chimpanzee last year—or after a toddler was strangled to death by her family’s python, or a Texas teenager was mauled to death by her stepfather’s tiger—that lawmakers would step in to put an end to the carnage.

But there’s still no federal law prohibiting people from breeding, selling or acquiring exotic and dangerous animals to keep as pets. Why?

The journey for many of these animals begins in places such as Asia and Africa and in the jungles of Central and South America. Many are imported legally in the billion-dollar-a-year exotic-animal industry. Others are jammed into trunks or suitcases or not infrequently, strapped or taped to the smuggler’s body. Such was the case with a Mexican man who was recently caught with 18 dead and dying monkeys stuffed into a girdle. Continue reading Exotic pets must be outlawed →

InCity Voices, Uncategorized

NASA’s cruel monkey experiments should be grounded

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By Ian Smith

To many people, the image of a monkey’s face peering out from an astronaut’s helmet is comically absurd and more suitable for the cover of MAD magazine than any reputable academic journal or serious government publication. To others, pictures of terrified monkeys and chimpanzees strapped into spaceships are tragic artifacts of a less enlightened time.

But just when we think that we’ve left science fiction behind, it sneaks up from behind and bites us.

While the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is no longer going to the bizarre lengths of actually sending monkeys into space, it is currently planning to fund another cruel and pointless experiment on this planet. The agency has announced that it will spend $1.75 million to fund an experiment in which up to 30 squirrel monkeys will be exposed to dangerous levels of space radiation. Continue reading NASA’s cruel monkey experiments should be grounded →