UPDATE: Santa is making his rounds early this year, and this time, he's come through for more than 100 chimpanzees "owned" by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) who are being released from the horrendous New Iberia Research Center. Following pleas by PETA and many others, NIH—after initially announcing a misguided plan to send most of the chimpanzees to a notorious Texas laboratory—has now declared that all the animals will instead be properly retired to a sanctuary!

While this means a truly happy new year (with more to come) for the New Iberia chimpanzees, many others remain in miserable laboratories, where they are subjected to physically and mentally traumatic experiments and captivity. Do like old St. Nick and give them a gift this holiday season: Urge the government to retire all its chimpanzees to sanctuaries.

Originally posted on September 23rd: 

More than 100 chimpanzees will soon be freed from laboratory cages after years of pressure by PETA and other animal protection groups led the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to announce that it will be permanently retiring all the federally "owned" chimpanzees at the New Iberia Research Center in Louisiana, making them off limits for future experimentation.

The announcement follows a landmark report issued last year by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), which concluded that "most current biomedical research use of chimpanzees is not necessary." In the wake of that report, NIH announced that it was suspending funding for any new experiments on chimpanzees and that it would be reevaluating currently funded experiments on chimpanzees.

It seems that NIH is making good on its promise.

PETA has campaigned for the release of chimpanzees from laboratories for decades. In addition to publicizing video footage showing the abuse of chimpanzees in laboratories, PETA successfully campaigned for the permanent retirement of the more than 200 chimpanzees held at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. We also submitted comments to and testified before the NAS, and we submitted official comments to NIH this spring outlining recommendations for the agency's implementation of the NAS report, including calling for the retirement of all chimpanzees in laboratories.

While NIH's announcement marks a tremendous step forward, hundreds more chimpanzees—in federally funded and private laboratories—must still be retired.

Please urge your congressional representatives to support the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act, which would ban invasive experiments on chimpanzees and retire all federally owned chimpanzees to sanctuaries.

Chadica| cc by 2.0

There's good news today in a case we told you about in May 2010: The U.S. Department of Agriculture has hit the Texas Biomedical Research Institute—formerly the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research—with a fine of more than $25,000 over serious violations of the Animal Welfare Act. The facility has repeatedly allowed primates to escape from their cages and injure themselves and others, including humans.

The stiff fine comes after PETA filed a formal complaint with the agency in 2010 after two baboons imprisoned at Texas Biomed escaped from their cages, injuring an employee in the process. The fine also covers an incident from 2009 in which a juvenile rhesus macaque monkey escaped from a cage and then spent the night in below-freezing temperatures. He suffered from hypothermia and had to be euthanized. 

But quite apart from the satisfaction of seeing these primate torturers pay at least a small price for their misdeeds, these penalties are an important reminder to heartless experimenters everywhere that abusing animals can cost them more than karma points. 

But since karma is on our side, let's keep the momentum going. Texas Biomed is notorious for being one of the last laboratories in the world that still torments chimpanzees in cruel and invasive experiments.

You can do your part to help protect primates—just click here to ask your congressional representatives to cosponsor and support the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act today, which would end experiments on chimpanzees at Texas Biomed and elsewhere.