Pain and Misery

Besides having their most fundamental needs and desires disregarded, primates imprisoned in laboratories are subjected to painful and traumatic procedures, including the following:

 

Pharmaceutical tests:

In these tests, thick gavage tubes are forced up primates’ nostrils or down the animals’ throats so that experimental drugs can be pumped into their stomachs—even though the U.S. Food and Drug Administration reports that animal tests have an appalling 92 percent failure rate in predicting the safety and/or effectiveness of pharmaceuticals. Video footage taken by a whistleblower inside SNBL reveals the anguish and trauma that monkeys used in pharmaceutical tests endure.

 

Vaccine tests:

Chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys are given infectious diseases and then used as test subjects for experimental vaccines. Even though decades of these experiments on primates have failed to produce effective vaccines for humans, monkeys are still infected with HIV-like diseases that cause them to suffer acute weight loss, major organ failure, breathing problems, and neurological disorders before they die excruciatingly painful deaths or are killed.

 

Military experiments and training:

In recent experiments conducted by the military, primates were exposed to anthrax and infected with botulism and bubonic plague. In archaic chemical casualty training exercises that were ended after protests from PETA, squirrel monkeys were poisoned with nerve agents that caused them to convulse, even though human-patient simulators exist and provide more effective training.Maternal-deprivation experiments: These unbelievably cruel studies began more than five decades ago when Harry Harlow infamously pulled baby primates away from their mothers, giving them only rag dolls or noxious wire “mothers” as substitutes. Even though we know the negative implications of separating babies from their mothers, similar experiments are conducted today at places such as the Oregon National Primate Research Center, Wake Forest University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Washington, where infant monkeys are torn from their mothers in order intentionally to cause psychological trauma and examine the harm that results. In some recent egregious studies, experimenters looked at the connection between maternal deprivation and whether the baby monkeys became right-handed or left-handed or how it affected the animals’ alcohol-drinking behavior later in life.

 

Invasive brain experiments:

In disturbingly common experiments at universities across the country—including the University of Utah, the University of California—San Francisco, and the University of Washington, monkeys have holes drilled into their skulls, metal restraint devices screwed into their heads, and electrodes inserted into their brains. Experimenters at Columbia University caused strokes in baboons by removing their left eyeballs and using the empty eye sockets to clamp critical blood vessels leading to their brains. Some animals have portions of their brains destroyed or removed to impair their cognitive function or cripple them. These sensitive, intelligent animals then have their bodies immobilized in restraint chairs and their heads bolted into place as they are forced to perform a variety of behavioral tasks while their brain activity is recorded. In order to coerce the monkeys to cooperate, they are sometimes deprived of water for up to 24 hours at a time. When the experiments conclude, most of the animals are killed and their brains are removed and dissected.