Here’s a roundup of last week’s biggest news stories related to animal research — all the recent media coverage you need to know right now to be the most effective activist for animals in labs.
Researchers Make Mice Itch, Count the Scratches. Literally.
Rise for Animals, 3/27/2025
Taxpayer-funded researchers at the University of California – San Francisco tortured mice — burning, stabbing, injecting, and surgically mutilating them — just to confirm that mice feel pain and itch when harmed. This cruel and redundant experiment proves nothing new but exposes the waste and suffering inherent in animal research. See the video our friends at Animal Partisan uncovered: 📰 Full Story →
Opinion: They call it science, but it is really just monkey business
Lisa Jones-Engel, Ph.D., The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 3/19/2025
“Emory University’s National Primate Research Center — formerly Yerkes — has, for decades, sold the public and federal funders on the illusion that its experiments on primates drive scientific progress. The reality? These labs cling to outdated, cruel and scientifically bankrupt research.”
“The primate center, one of the world’s largest, is a house of suffering for monkeys, but it’s also a raging bonfire of taxpayer dollars. Last year alone, it raked in roughly $10.8 million in National Institutes of Health grants — also known as taxpayer money — just so it could turn on the lights and keep monkeys fed and contained, among other basic operations. That doesn’t even account for the millions more NIH funneled to Emory in 2024 — all for monkey studies that continue to produce no meaningful advances for human health. Shutting it down would do right by American taxpayers.” 📰 Full Story →
Clash on Monkey Island
Refael Kubersky, Science, 3/20/2025
“Living on Mauritius are an untold number of cynomolgus (or long-tailed) macaques, cat-size primates that have become a precious commodity to biomedical researchers. As the supply of these animals from other countries has dried up, this small island off the coast of Madagascar has become the main exporter of monkeys used in everything from vaccine development to drug safety testing. The animals—tens of thousands of which have been exported from Mauritius over the past 5 years—are in such high demand that some are sold for as much as $20,000 to labs in the United States and Europe. So it’s no surprise that Creve Coeur is rife with monkey traps.”
“ Once the monkeys are caught . . . they howl all night . . . ‘It is an unprecedented, vulgar business,’ Arvin Boolell, Mauritius’s minister of agroindustry, food security, blue economy, and fisheries, told a radio interviewer in 2023 . . . ‘Unfortunately we’ve lost our souls for speculative infrastructure development and wealth.’” 📰 Full Story →
Opinion: End experiments on dogs
Marc Bekoff and Jane Goodall, The Washington Post, 3/34/2025
“Every year, more than 40,000 dogs, mostly beagles, are used in research in the United States. They are often used in painful and deadly tests, and laws to protect them are minimal.”
“It does not have to be this way. Since 1979, the number of dogs used in experiments has been reduced by 80 percent, and Americans are increasingly opposed to the use of animals in medical testing. In 2015, the United States ended all federal funding for experimentation on chimpanzees, which effectively stopped the practice. We can end what we’re doing to dogs, too.” 📰 Full Story →
SC plays a major role in US primate research. As funding cuts loom, what happens to the monkeys?
Marilyn W. Thompson and Mitchell Black, The Post and Courier, 03/23/2025
“Taxpayers have poured billions of dollars into breeding monkeys, importing them from foreign countries, keeping them healthy and transporting them to distant laboratories. South Carolina has played a major role. But the Trump administration has signaled that the go-go days of costly primate research are in peril amid threatened federal-funding cutbacks. The money may no longer be there for the monkey business the government helped build.”
“An ever-changing roster of firms across the country import, breed and sell monkeys for research. It’s a turbulent industry with frequent mergers and acquisitions — and a dark past. The regulation of primate companies is divided among a web of federal agencies, each now facing steep staffing cuts. Despite the flood of required paperwork and regular inspections of every operator licensed to breed or sell monkeys, no one has a comprehensive estimate of the total number of research monkeys in the U.S.” 📰 Full Story →
Nonprofit Science Advocacy Group Calls for Retraction of Intimate Partner Violence Study for Which More Than 100 Young Female Animals Were Strangled and Killed
PCRM, 3/25/2025
“The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine . . . has requested the retraction of a research study published in the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity for which dozens of adolescent rats were subjected to traumatic brain injuries, inflicted by a metal plate propelled into each animal’s head, then strangled for 90 seconds, and all ultimately killed.”
“In a March 24, 2025, letter to the journal’s editors, Dr. Carol Tavani, a psychiatrist with emergency medicine experience from Newark, Del., and Janine McCarthy, science policy program manager for the Physicians Committee, asked for the study’s retraction for its violation of significant key scientific and ethical principles, including those outlined in the journal’s own guidelines on the ethical and acceptable use of animals in research.” 📰 Full Story →
Georgia town fears what will happen if 30,000 monkeys come to stay. SC’s experience offers clues.
Mitchell Black and Marilyn W. Thompson, The Post and Courier, 3/26/2025
“[In a “rural outpost of the Peach State near the borders of Alabama and Florida”], a secretive corporation has plans to gradually move in 30,000 monkeys, or more than three times the total a company holds in the S.C. Lowcountry. The company looking to open shop in Georgia projected it could earn $45 million in its first six years by housing and then selling primates for research.”
“Some residents fear the November dramatic escape and gruesome deaths of monkeys at an Alpha Genesis facility more than five hours away in Yemassee, S.C., provide a glimpse into their future reality.” 📰 Full Story →