Eva Nyambura
Kenya Airways will no longer send monkeys to the United States for research purposes.
When its current contract expires next month, the airline that has transporting hundreds of monkeys from a Mauritius breeding facility says it will stop doing so.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) approached KQ CEO Allan Kilavuka barely 24 hours before the company made its decision, citing the animals’ severe treatment, which included a long travel followed by suffering and death in laboratories.
Following a truck accident last week, a box of monkeys flown by KQ to New York fell out onto a Pennsylvania roadway in Philadelphia.
“PETA would like to thank Kilavuka and Chair Michael Joseph for their decision to do away with this cruel, heinous business at Kenya Airways. Monkeys belong in the wild, not in laboratories, where their most basic needs, including home, family, and community, are better met,” PETA Senior Vice-President Jason Baker said.
Following the crash that left monkeys spilled across a Pennsylvania highway, Kenya Airways has agreed to stop shipping monkeys to laboratories after hearing from PETA!
Join us in calling on @WamosAir and others to do the same! https://t.co/2EJcsI6VK1
— PETA (@peta) February 1, 2022
“By making this decision, Kenya Airways also demonstrates their understanding of how using monkeys—or indeed any other animals—for research purposes poses higher risks to the possibility of emerging infectious diseases.”
Because the risk of disease transmission is so high, employees in full-body personal protective equipment unload crates of monkeys when they arrive in the United States.
But no one wore even a face mask as they waded through the panicked monkeys’ feces and pee scattered across the highway, said PETA.
Herpes B has never been detected in monkeys from Mauritius, where these primates originate, and investigations demonstrate that no one has looked for it recently.
Read: Racist White South African Bosses Call Nissan Kenya Employees “Monkeys”
Monkeys may also carry a variety of undiscovered viruses.
According to PETA, importing monkeys for research is done with little to no monitoring. Monkeys come by plane from Asia or Africa, where they have traveled for days, sitting in their own pee and feces.
They are then transported to undisclosed quarantine facilities before being dispatched to laboratories all around the country. PETA has discovered that if monkeys get bloody diarrhea or other problems beyond their quarantine period, no officials are notified and no one seems to care.
PETA is urging the United States Department of Health and Human Services to shut down monkey facilities and relocate the animals to trustworthy sanctuaries.
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