Macaques were caged alone for 80 days. For 55 continuous days, experimenters blasted them with roughly the volume of a jackhammer for 12 consecutive hours. They deprived the animals of water or any other fluids for 12 hours at a time and of food for 24 hours.
PETA: An experimenter at Wake Forest University (WFU) appears to be funneling tax dollars to China in order to conduct obscenely unethical experiments on monkeys that amount to outright animal torture, CIA black site–style — and the school appears to be in violation of U.S. Public Health Service requirements.
A paper, co-authored by Carol A. Shively of the Department of Pathology at the Wake Forest School of Medicine and published in January, describes experiments conducted at Chongqing Medical University in China that are so extreme that they likely would never be allowed to take place in the U.S. The paper reports that the experiments, designed to induce depression in adolescent macaques, were in part bankrolled by a taxpayer-funded National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant, even though the Chinese school isn’t authorized to receive NIH money.
Lab workers caged the macaques alone for 80 days. For 55 continuous days, experimenters blasted them with a 100-decibel sound—roughly the volume of a jackhammer—for 12 consecutive hours. They deprived the animals of water or any other fluids for 12 hours at a time and of food for 24 hours. They put the monkeys in cages barely bigger than their bodies, severely restricting their movement for four hours; sprayed them with cold (50-degree) water for 10 minutes; forced them to endure a strobe light for 12 hours; and subjected them to inescapable and repeated electric shocks on their feet for up to 90 seconds.
Food and water deprivation, movement restriction, sonic and cold-water blasts, and electric shocks—by any standard, this is torture. This behavior toward humans is banned by international law and punishable by strict penalties. The authors also subjected the monkeys to the human-intruder test, a wildly cruel experiment developed by notorious monkey tormenter Ned Kalin, to “elicit anxiety-like behaviors”…
These egregious experiments appear to be a case of “ethics dumping,” or outsourcing experiments to a country with lax ethical and legal protections. Possibly the most disturbing aspect of this case is that these grotesque experiments have been proposed as a “paradigm” to create “a promising model” to study depression… WFU has a panel charged with overseeing animal experiments called the Institutional Animal Care & Use Committee (IACUC). However, its stamp of approval is curiously missing from the published paper. This is problematic… PETA has filed a complaint with NIH and demanded that Wake Forest launch an immediate and thorough investigation into the possible misappropriation of NIH money and the possible failure of the school’s IACUC…
You don’t have to go all the way to China to find NIH-funded monkey horrors. Elisabeth Murray’s monkey fright fest—egregiously awful experiments in which experimenters inflict permanent and debilitating brain damage on monkeys, deprive them of food and water, restrain them for extended periods, and lock them inside darkened cages, where they’re deliberately frightened with fake spiders and snakes—take place right here in an NIH laboratory in Bethesda, Maryland. SOURCE…
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