British National and Two Americans, One a Child, Still Jailed in Ethiopia for Protesting Monkey Shipments
18 July 2024
British National and Two Americans, One a Child, Still Jailed in Ethiopia for Protesting Monkey Shipments
Bristol – Bristol-based PETA Campaign Leader Reuben Skeats and PETA Asia Senior Vice President Jason Baker and his 11-year-old son have been imprisoned for more than 16 hours and are currently being held on mattresses on the floor of a jail in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. They were arrested while scouting for a future demo location in that city at the Ethiopian Airlines ticket office on Churchill Road. They were planning to stage a demonstration wearing prison uniforms and monkey masks outside the company’s headquarters today to demand that it stop cramming endangered monkeys into tiny crates and shipping them halfway around the globe to be mutilated, tormented, and ultimately killed in laboratories. They have been held since 6:30 pm yesterday at Legehar Police Station.
Skeats sent the following statement from jail:
I’ve been held here overnight simply for speaking up for monkeys who are suffering because Ethiopian Airlines ships them to laboratories, where they may be poisoned, electrocuted, or face other horrors. The real crime is what’s being done to these monkeys.
Please also see the following statement from PETA US Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo:
Sitting in prison is a miserable way to spend the night, but we know that Reuben, Jason, and his son will be home soon – unlike the thousands of monkeys who are torn from their families and sent halfway around the globe to die in US laboratories. Ethiopian Airlines is contributing to this misery, and it’s one of the few airlines in the entire world willing to do so. Shame on them. PETA and our supporters around the world will continue to urge the company to do the right thing.
PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk or follow the group on Facebook, X, TikTok, or Instagram.
Contact:
Jennifer White +44 (0) 20 7837 6327; [email protected]
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