VICTORY! EGYPTAIR Ends Transport of Monkeys to Laboratories After International PETA Campaign
VICTORY! EGYPTAIR Ends Transport of Monkeys to Laboratories After International PETA Campaign
London – EGYPTAIR has informed PETA that it is no longer in the business of transporting monkeys from Africa and Asia to laboratories in the US and elsewhere. This follows an intense three-month campaign by PETA entities around the world, which included protests at London’s Heathrow Airport as well as airports in the US – John F Kennedy International Airport (JFK) in New York and Dulles International Airport in Washington, DC – and in Frankfurt, Manila, and Paris; e-mails from more than 100,000 supporters of PETA entities; hundreds of phone calls; and online advertisements. PETA Asia also sent T-shirts and coffee mugs – emblazoned with artwork calling on the airline to stop cruel monkey shipments – to EGYPTAIR’s executives and sent an open letter to its CEO to company employees. Other organisations, including Action for Primates in the UK, Stop Camarles in Spain, and One Voice in France, also campaigned to end the shipments.
Airline industry insiders first alerted PETA US to a shipment of 720 macaques flown by EGYPTAIR from Cambodia to JFK on 30 April. Records show the airline has flown 5,000 monkeys into the US since March.
“EGYPTAIR’s decision will prevent thousands of monkeys from being ripped from their families, shoved into tiny boxes, and shipped around the globe to endure misery and death in laboratories,” says PETA Vice President Mimi Bekhechi. “Any other airline considering getting into this trade should think again – PETA is watching.”
In January, Kenya Airways announced it was ending its transport of monkeys to laboratories just 24 hours after discussions with PETA US, and in June, Air France banned the practice after a decade-long campaign by PETA.
The macaque wildlife trade is steeped in violence and disease. A vast monkey-abduction pipeline has been funnelling hundreds of thousands of wild-caught monkeys into laboratories and breeding centres in the US and around the world. One species of monkey transported by EGYPTAIR was the long-tailed macaque. Last month, the International Union for Conservation of Nature upgraded the conservation status of long-tailed and pig-tailed macaques from “vulnerable” to “endangered”. The exploitation of these once-plentiful species as part of the international wildlife trade involving experimenters in the US is a major factor in their dramatic population crash.
PETA scientists’ Research Modernisation Deal provides a strategy for ending the use of animals in experiments and replacing them with modern, human-relevant research methods.
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, Twitter, or Instagram.
Contact:
Jennifer White +44 (0) 20 7837 6327; [email protected]
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