Thank you for the Gazette’s coverage of the issues surrounding People for the Ethical Treatment of Animal’s efforts to obtain videos of experiments on monkeys in the laboratory of Dr. Melinda Novak at University of Massachusetts Amherst.
I am a primatologist who worked for many years at a national primate research center. As such, I am aware that Novak has repeatedly shown — for decades — that caging monkeys in laboratories causes profound distress. Self-injurious behavior, pacing, hair plucking, eye poking and other stereotypical behavior, miscarriages, maternal neglect of infants, aggression, and more are all visible manifestations of the damage that captivity does to primates.
We have also known for decades that the less visible — the immunological and physiological impacts of captivity — compromise any data gathered from experiments on monkeys.
There is absolutely nothing that we can do about the distress except to end the use of primates in research. The only solution to causing distress to monkeys in laboratories is to not put them there in the first place.
Lisa Jones-Engel, PhD
PETA
The writer is a senior science advisor (primate experimentation) in the Laboratory Investigations Department at PETA.