Why This Matters: When words like “liberty” and “humane” are used to justify violence, we have a responsibility to look closer. This story reveals how language itself has become one of the animal research industry’s most powerful weapons against animals.
The animal research industry doesn’t just harm. It gaslights.
It tells us that incarcerated and maimed animals have good “welfare.”
It tells us that treating sentient beings like disposable tools is “humane.”
It tells us that brutalizing others in the name of profit is “science.”
And, now, it dares to equate the imprisonment of monkeys with “liberty.”
Violence on the Highway, Silence from the Lab
When monkeys are being gunned down on the side of a Mississippi highway and slated for imprisonment at a massive breeding compound in Georgia, the truth becomes impossible to ignore: This is a system built on violence, exploitation, and greed—and it relies on gaslighting the public to keep operating.
Tulane National Biomedical Research Center (formerly Tulane National Primate Research Center) recently made headlines when monkeys it shipped escaped from a crashed truck on a Mississippi highway. Tulane refused to answer media questions while the monkeys were stalked and killed by law enforcement wielding assault rifles and murdered by local residents—and while those who remained trapped on the truck were re-shipped to their torture and demise. Aside from an alleged directive to law enforcement to kill the escapees, Tulane offered only empty platitudes about “advancing science.”
“Project Liberty”: A Cruel Joke
Meanwhile, in Georgia, residents continue fighting a different face of the same evil—standing up against three veteran gaslighters seeking to build a monkey farm in their backyard.
The nickname of the operation, which would imprison 30,000 primates for breeding and sale to labs?
“Project Liberty.”
This Orwellian nightmare is being pushed by a newly formed corporation called Safer Human Medicine—a name that is itself a gaslight. (As one Bainbridge resident rightly put it, what Safer Human Medicine is pushing ”is not safe, is not humane, and is not medicine.”)
The company is backed by three longtime animal research industry insiders we’ve previously profiled:
- A former Charles River Laboratories executive, who left the company shortly before it was subpoenaed by the U.S. Department of Justice (and sued by shareholders) for its alleged role in criminal primate trafficking.
- The former Chief Operating Officer of Envigo, who oversaw operations when the Department of Justice raided the facility and rescued 4,000 beagles (despite his intent to “sell them off” instead); and
- A double alumnus of both Envigo and Charles River, who left the latter just months before the Department of Justice’s primate trafficking subpoena came down.
These aren’t even scientists. They’re opportunistic profiteers—and, just like their peers at Tulane, they depend on public misdirection and deception to do what they do.
As former primate researcher and primatologist, Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel, puts it, the only question they care about is:
“How much money can I get off the backs of these animals?”
Scientists, says Dr. Jones-Engel, are waking up to the truth that animal research doesn’t work—that they “can’t get a quick, efficient, correct answer from an animal model”—and they are open to other options.
But those behind Safer Human Medicine? They’re not interested in science—only in profit. And, they’re driven by a “vested interest in the infrastructure that they built in order to maintain these animals.”
That’s why they’re still “holding on to the monkey tail, riding those monkeys,” all the way to the bank . . . and all while the monkeys themselves try, desperately, to escape.
Why the Monkeys Run
In the new documentary 30,000 Monkeys in Our Backyard, Dr. Jones-Engel explains why escapes happen “all the time”:
You take a primate, and you take away everything from them, you take away their ability to choose who they’re going to be with . . . any type of comfort that they would get, their ability to have real companionship of their own choice, their ability to challenge that big brain of theirs, and you are left with an animal that is destroyed and an animal who has one thing in mind and that is to get out of that spot. And, so, every single facility that has primates has escapes. You have escapes all the time.
Just like what happened in Mississippi.
And in South Carolina before that.
And again and again before that.
Every time it happens, the industry spins its false narrative, the media repeats it, and the public is left with a carefully crafted illusion of “containment,” “compliance,” and the supposed needs of “science.”
We’re not supposed to think about what—and who—the monkeys were running from.
We’re not supposed to ask what is done to those who aren’t killed for daring to break free—or why.
We’re not supposed to see the faces of those who profit from their enslavement—or question their motives.
This is how gaslighting works.
The industry doesn’t just cover up the violence—it tries to manipulate us into believing that the violence is justified. Necessary. Even compassionate.
And, it’s all culminating in one of the most grotesque lies of all: “Project Liberty.”
This codename name isn’t just misleading—it’s a weapon. A calculated attempt to reframe oppression and enslavement as freedom (and, it appears, to keep the project “out of the spotlight”).
But we see it. And we name it.
There Can Be No Liberty In a Cage
“Liberty” is defined as “the state or condition of being free.” And, there is no freedom—no liberty—in being bred, bought and sold, and harmed by others for profit.
In reality, animals used in research are denied every form of liberty, despite being like us in all the ways that matter.
In the words of Dr. Jones-Engel:
There is no meaningful difference between us and macaques. They love each other the way we love each other. The males and females will protect their offspring in the same way that we will protect ours . . . They have complex cultures . . . Everything about them that is primate, we share.
Everything—except, of course, freedom. And liberty.
Take Action Now
The citizens of Bainbridge, Georgia have brought suit to stop the construction of Safer Human Medicine’s nonhuman primate “warehouse.” Stand with them. Stand with these citizens as they oppose the establishment of this nonhuman primate breeding and holding facility.
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