The Humane Society of the United States rescued 111 chimpanzees from horrendous conditions in testing facilities, and gave them — for the first time, or for the first time in a long time — their natural right to a peaceful habitat.
Rescuers brought the chimps to Chimp Haven, which is a vast stretch of land designated exclusively to rescued chimpanzees, located in northwest Louisiana. This group of apes has nearly doubled the size of the sanctuary, and is the largest number of chimps ever rescued at once.
Maternal deprivation experiments on baby monkeys are a textbook example of unethical psychological research, and they need to stop. Hundreds of infant monkeys are being torn away from their mothers, causing them to suffer from psychoses at a US National Institutes of Health (NIH) laboratory. So when Dr Stephen J Suomi, the head experimenter on baby monkeys at NIH, was to speak in Cardiff at the annual general meeting of the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Faculty of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, I, along with another activist, decided to make my voice heard and interrupted his keynote speech.
Suomi is responsible for tormenting baby monkeys in disgustingly cruel and archaic experiments that cause them to experience severe anxiety, fear, pain and depression. Some of the monkeys bite at their own flesh and pull out their own hair. This was all revealed following the release of hours of video footage and hundreds of photographs and documents obtained by PETA US from NIH through a contested Freedom of Information Act request. After watching the video below, any compassionate person would wonder how Suomi can sleep at night.
We’re in the age of brain imaging and superior human-based research that allows us to study the causes and treatments of mental illness in humans without terrorising animals in traumatic experiments. Yet videos revealed that experimenters laughed while infant monkeys were being terrorised, screaming frantically and trying to escape and hide. This is not science – it’s violence.
This is the moment a group of chimpanzees sees daylight for the first time in 30 years - after being locked in cages for medical testing. The animals hugged each other in delight before they took their first steps outside. Emotional footage shows how they reacted to their new surroundings. The outing marked the end of a 14-year bid to re-integrate the 38 primates after they spent most of their lives cooped up inside.
