PETA’s ‘10 Worst Laboratories’ List
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When it comes to animals, Atlanta’s Emory University is short on Southern hospitality. Emory is notorious for causing animal suffering at its Yerkes National Primate Center, which houses more than 3,000 primates and is one of the few institutions in the United States that still experiments on great apes. Yerkes has been harshly criticized for its primate housing conditions, its cruel drug addiction experiments, its use of chimpanzees in viral infection experiments, and its refusal to deal publicly with issues surrounding the use of animals in experiments. Today, Emory continues to conduct some of the most physically and psychologically destructive primate studies ever imagined, including a hideous series of experiments that test fear and anxiety in primates and other animals.
Researchers led by Professor Michael Davis study early-life stress and subsequent responses to fear and anxiety in rhesus monkeys. Davis uses maternal separation as his stress tool, tearing infant monkeys from their frantic mothers. He believes that this will make monkeys permanently anxious and insecure. He tests his theory by strapping monkeys into full-body restraint chairs inside wooden boxes, repeatedly startling them with noise at up to 120 decibels (which is the sound level of thunder, pneumatic drills, and airplane engines), and measuring how much the terrified monkeys struggle and how their heart rates change. In the past 10 years, Davis and Yerkes have wasted more than $5 million in public funds on his cruel fear and anxiety experiments.
Another group of Emory researchers—led by Yerkes Director Stuart Zola—is studying the effects of early-life stress on primate cognitive development. Zola’s past experiments have focused on cutting lesions in monkeys’ brains, tying them to restraint chairs, and measuring the monkeys’ cognitive deficits when they complete behavioral tasks. Zola has switched from using surgery to using severe stress to impair monkeys. In addition to the same cognitive testing in restraint chairs, Zola’s group is also testing the effects of early-life stress on the development of drug addiction and fear and anxiety responses. In 2005, these projects received more than $2.2 million in government money. Emory’s focus on fear, anxiety, and stress makes it a true house of horrors for animals and earns the university a spot on our list.
Please write, call, fax, or e-mail the head of the university and politely ask him to stop these atrocities:
James W. Wagner, President
Emory University
Office of the President
Mail Stop #1000/001/1AP
Atlanta, GA 30322
404-727-6013
404-727-5997 (fax)
wagner@emory.edu
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