The photograph is shocking. Dead monkeys, piled high in garbage cans. If an ordinary picture is worth a thousand words, this one screams them in horror. Even so, everyone should see it because it deserves to become the image that immediately springs to mind when thinking about primates in laboratories and the airlines responsible for transporting them to their deaths.

A Waste of Lives

The photo comes from a new investigation by the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) documenting how Noveprim—a company owned in large part by Covance—has been killing off monkeys simply because they are not the size that experimenters desire. Noveprim abducts wild monkeys from their homes on the tiny island of Mauritius for breeding and sale to laboratories in the U.K. and the U.S.

The sight of the lifeless monkeys discarded like crumpled paper speaks volumes about the experimentation industry's absolute disregard for animals' lives. The monkeys were reportedly healthy, so at a minimum, Noveprim could have had the decency to release them back into the wild—but decency would likely be a hindrance to snatching and trafficking living beings.

Rationalizations Are the Real Rubbish

Air France is reported to be the only airline still shipping primates to laboratories from Mauritius. Earlier this year, PETA was successful in stopping one such shipment, and this new investigation underscores why Air France should ground these flights permanently.

What You Can Do

Please join PETA in urging Air France and other airlines that still ship monkeys who have been ripped from their homes to laboratories where they will be tormented and killed to wash their hands of the whole dirty—and deadly—business.

Update: As another indicator of the decline in the demand for its cruel services, just one month after Covance announced that it would be closing its animal-testing laboratory in Chandler, Arizona, the company has announced that it will also be laying off 50 employees at its facility in Madison, Wisconsin, where thousands of primates and other animals endure painful and lethal tests every year.

Just three years after it opened following a long battle with PETA and local citizens, a laboratory owned by a notorious animal testing company, Covance, in Chandler, Arizona, is closing because of lack of demand for its cruel and deadly services.  

Shutting Down Cruelty …

When plans to build the Chandler facility were uncovered in 2005, PETA worked with outraged local residents to try to stop it and managed to delay its construction. The world's largest contract testing laboratory, Covance subjects animals to painful and deadly tests of cosmetics ingredients, personal and household products, food additives, industrial chemicals, and drugs. Covance is also the world's largest breeder of dogs and the largest U.S. importer of primates to be tormented and killed in experiments.

Despite media censorship, word clearly got around about the horrendous cruelty found inside Covance's laboratories, including physical and psychological abuse of primates and lack of veterinary care for sick and injured animals.  

The shutdown of the Arizona facility follows the 2010 closure of a Covance lab in Virginia, where shocking abuse of animals was exposed by a PETA undercover investigation. Around that same time, Covance scrapped plans to build a massive facility elsewhere in Virginia that PETA had urged officials to reject.

… But Keeping Up the Pressure

These closures will save countless monkeys, dogs, rabbits, mice, rats, and other animals from suffering, but Covance is still in business, so PETA's work goes on, including a recent protest at the company's annual meeting, where PETA also presented a resolution calling on the company to make animal welfare improvements.

Ready to help animals in laboratories? Learn how—and be sure to follow PETA on Twitter to learn about more opportunities to get active.

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In the triumphant finale to a long, hard legal struggle over a suit filed by PETA and citizens of Guayama, Puerto Rico, the Puerto Rican Supreme Court upheld the decisions of the lower courts that the monkey-breeding facility built in Guayama by Bioculture, Inc., was constructed illegally and therefore cannot be opened for business!

The court also denied Bioculture's motion to reconsider the ruling. So, as Kathy Guillermo, PETA's vice president of laboratory investigations, put it, "The final nail is now in Bioculture's coffin, and the 4,000 monkeys and generations of their offspring who would have suffered and died for the company's profit have been officially spared."

Muchas gracias to everyone who helped put a stop to Bioculture's plan to capture monkeys from their homes in the wild, imprison them in cages, and then sell their offspring for use in painful and deadly experiments at notorious facilities such as Shin Nippon Biomedical Laboratories, Charles River Laboratories, and Covance. 

Now, let's put another nail in the nasty monkey-pimping-and-torture coffin. Click here to urge airlines that still transport nonhuman primates to U.S. laboratories for cruel experiments to cut out the monkey business.

Every year, more than 124,000 primates are tormented and killed in U.S. laboratories. Have you ever wondered how these intelligent and sensitive animals wind up in these hellholes in the first place?

Some primates are born in laboratories, forced to exist from cradle to grave as living "tools" exploited by experimenters who perform painful, invasive procedures on the animals, and then they're tossed out like so much trash when the experimenters are done with them.

For tens of thousands of other primates, the journey begins thousands of miles away in Asia and Africa, where—at the behest of global animal testing multinationals like Charles River Laboratories and Covance—they are bred in cramped, squalid breeding mills or are trapped or netted in the wild. Ripped away from their families, the traumatized primates are shoved into cramped wooden crates and shipped in the noisy and terrifying cargo holds of planes, often with unsuspecting passengers just a few feet above them.

One of the worst drivers of the miserable primate trade is animal testing conglomerate Shin Nippon Biomedical Laboratories (SNBL), which brings nearly 3,000 primates into the U.S. each year for use in experimentation. Recent photos and video footage leaked to PETA by a whistleblower at an SNBL laboratory in Everett, Washington, show sick, distraught monkeys imprisoned in barren steel cages. The whistleblower reports that monkeys suffered untreated wounds from being stabbed repeatedly with needles to have blood drawn multiple times a day, and that workers handling the monkeys were so rough that they bloodied the animals' noses and broke their fingers and toes.

Nearly every major airline—including Delta Airlines, Qantas, American Airlines, British Airways, Aer Lingus, Cathay Pacific, and dozens of others—have agreed not to transport primates to laboratories, but some, including Air Canada, Air China, Air France, China Eastern Airlines, China Southern Airlines, Philippine Airlines, and Vietnam Airlines—continue to profit off shipping primates to their deaths.

You can help primates by clicking here and telling these airlines that cruelty doesn't fly with you and that it shouldn't fly with them either.

First, Professional Laboratory Research Services shut its doors just days after PETA released the findings of our disturbing undercover investigation there. Now, Covance's horrendous Vienna, Va., laboratory, which PETA investigated five years ago, is closing up shop. 

During PETA's 11-month investigation at Covance, our investigator documented that workers struck, choked, and screamed obscenities at frightened and "uncooperative" monkeys. Monkeys suffered from rectal prolapses as a result of constant stress and diarrhea, and baby monkeys' noses bled daily because workers shoved hard tubes up their nostrils to pump experimental chemicals and drugs into their stomachs. As a result of PETA's investigation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture cited and fined Covance for serious violations of the Animal Welfare Act.

PETA has actually been battling this laboratory for nearly two decades. I remember participating in a protest outside the facility back when Covance was known as Hazleton Research Labs, a name made famous by the book The Hot Zone, which was about the Ebola outbreak among monkeys at the now-defunct Hazleton laboratory just a few miles away in Reston, Va.

In addition to closing the hellhole in Vienna, Covance has also scrapped plans to build a massive facility in Prince William County, Va., meaning that thousands of animals will be spared years of loneliness, misery, and pain. Pop the champagne corks, folks! And let's hope that this trend involving the shuttering of animal laboratories continues into 2011.

Written by Alisa Mullins

If you guessed 25,703, you’re exactly right! I’ve got some more statistics for you, too, because I wanted to provide some concrete numbers to give a bit of context to this photo, which recently won The National Geographic International Photography Contest. The deeply disturbing image, which shows caged monkeys awaiting their fate at a medical laboratory in Hubei Province, China, depicts one small part of a nightmare that continues every day for thousands of primates who are used in barbaric, wasteful experiments. Some stats:

China, where the award-winning photo was taken, was the source of nearly 58 percent of all primates imported into the U.S.

More than 46 percent of all primates brought to this country were imported by Covance. Covance was also responsible for all 25 of the largest shipments of primates (200 or more) into the U.S.

Just three companies – huge, multi-national contract testing organizations that conduct animal experiments for profit – account for more than 75 percent of primate imports for 2007:

1. Covance: 11,935 (46.43 percent)
2. Charles River: 6,140 (23.89 percent)
3. SNBL: 2,400 (9.34 percent)

Close to 98 percent of all primates imported into this country are macaque monkeys, like those shown in the photo. These monkeys are imported strictly for vivisection.

And the photo itself is a doozy.

Photo from Covance Investigation

The AP story points out that human waste and animal waste from factory farms contaminates water with drugs, but back in July 2006, PETA discovered that animal laboratories are also contaminating water with pharmaceuticals. Our report showed that at places like Covance, animals are pumped full of massive quantities of test drugs that still haven’t even been approved by the FDA. The animals pass some of the drugs out of their bodies when they pee and poop and this waste is hosed down the drain–toxic drugs and all–and ends up in our water supply.

Now with all the attention on water safety, we’re doing our best to convince Chandler, Arizona (where we've been working with activists on this issue for some time now) to not let a Covance facility set up shop in their city.

Check out this awesome letter that our senior researcher Alka sent to Chandler, Arizona, and check out our official PETA report on this issue too.

This could be a great victory for animals if we can convince residents and government officials in Chandler, Arizona, not to allow this hellhole in their city! Thanks to Alka and the anti-vivisection team for all their hard work!

Here’s a taste of what PETA UK’s been doing with the money they received from Covance Inc. following the dismissal of Covance’s lawsuit against them. Karma’s a bitch, sometimes.

The company—whose reaction to the 2005 investigation was to use its lawyers to try and strongarm PETA and PETA Europe into removing the footage from the Web—was eventually cited for numerous violations of the Animal Welfare Act. In a separate case, five Covance facilities were cited by the USDA for instances of animal abuse, including deliberately starving a dog and depriving her of veterinary care. These guys are the world's largest breeders of dogs for experimentation, and you can bet that there were more horrors in store for the dogs made to suffer through the 28-hour-long trip in a Japan Airlines cargo hold. A Covance promotional pamphlet recently obtained by PETA shows dozens of beagles in rows of cages, with the tagline "Helping to bring miracles to market sooner."

Thanks to Covance, it's too late for these particular beagles, but we're asking Japan Airlines to follow the lead of Air Canada and other compassionate airlines by refusing to transport dogs and other animals to vivisection laboratories in future. No responsible business should associate with monsters like Covance, and we're working very hard to ensure that Japan Airlines gets that message. If you'd like to help out, you can write to the airline's CEO through this form.

It's not going to bankrupt Covance—torturing animals in experiments is big business—but this is a big black eye for them, and it's a vindication of PETA Europe's work to expose the callous disregard for suffering that helps Covance's execs sleep at night. But today, the New Jersey-based animal-testing company paid PETA Europe $290,000 following a British court’s dismissal of a lawsuit brought by the company to stop them from publicizing undercover video footage from a Covance lab here in Virginia. As PETA President Ingrid Newkirk puts it,

How d'ya like them apples, Covance? To mark PETA Europe's big victory for free speech, here's the video that Covance really, really doesn't want people to see. It should come as no surprise that the footage is extremely disturbing, but—as the British courts have just demonstrated—it's vitally important that companies like Covance not be allowed to get away with trying to keep their dirty little secrets from the public.