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January 2, 2024
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Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
Brazoria County, Texas – PETA has exposed plans through Charles River Laboratories, the most important importer of monkeys used for laboratory experiments, to construct the most important monkey-holding facility out of doors Asia—in a position to housing 43,000 primates—and the corporate is pursuing building on ecologically delicate land in Texas in spite of the objections of native citizens and elected officers.
Credit score: PETA
In March, Charles River bought 500 acres bordering land owned and secure through The Nature Conservancy, the U.S. Fish & Natural world Provider and the San Bernard Nationwide Natural world Shelter. It did so below a unique corporate title and hasn’t disclosed the plans publicly.
PETA joined with native citizens who got here out in drive towards the plans, shifting the Brazoria County Board of Commissioners on November 28 to unanimously undertake a solution recommending that state and federal government now not factor the wanted environmental allows to Charles River. Paperwork got through PETA display that different county workforce have met with corporate representatives and feature recognized the level of the plans for months.
“Charles River is proposing the most important moral, environmental, and clinical disaster in American historical past,” says PETA primate scientist Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel. “PETA applauds Brazoria County officers for taking steps to dam this bad plan and urges federal and state government to do the similar.”
The present biggest monkey-holding facility—owned through Envigo and situated in Alice, Texas—confines 6,000 to 11,000 monkeys. It creates an estimated 22,000 gallons of liquid waste according to day. The ability used to be constructed to take care of just a 3rd of this quantity, so the corporate hauls as much as 16 truckloads on a daily basis to a wastewater web site in Austin. In contrast, Charles River’s proposed facility would produce an estimated 100,000 gallons of liquid waste each day, posing a significant possibility of environmental injury to the federally secure salt marshes, lakes, and coastal prairies that border the valuables.
The proposed facility would introduce monkeys’ saliva, blood, and different physically fluids into the surroundings. Monkeys utilized by the experimentation business are recognized to hold and transmit a slew of nasty pathogens and sicknesses, together with herpes B virus, tuberculosis, Ebola-like viruses, simian hemorrhagic fever virus, shigellosis, salmonellosis, Campylobacter, malaria, and dengue. There’s additionally a possibility that monkeys may just break out, which has took place at different primate laboratories in Texas.
Charles River is lately below civil and prison investigation through the U.S. Division of Justice for violations of the Endangered Species and Lacey acts. The corporate additionally lately said that it’s below investigation through the Enforcement Department of the U.S. Securities and Trade Fee associated with its sourcing of monkeys from Asia.
PETA—whose motto reads, partly, that “animals aren’t ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more info on PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please discuss with PETA.org, pay attention to The PETA Podcast, or practice the crowd on X (previously Twitter), Fb, or Instagram.