Covance Too Cheap to Provide Enrichment for Monkeys

With facilities in 17 countries, Covance is one of the world's largest animal testing laboratories. While Covance's billion-dollar annual revenue is built on the suffering of monkeys who suffer and die in its labs, Covance refuses to part with the few dollars it would take to buy an engaging toy or a foraging tray to provide some psychological enrichment for the primates. Languishing in their sterile cages without anything to engage their minds, the monkeys develop stereotypic behaviors, such as spinning in their cages, pacing frantically, chewing at their own flesh, and pulling out the hair on their bodies. And Covance officials look on, indifferent to the animals' suffering, perhaps thinking that they will be dead soon anyway.

Having seen the deprived conditions for Covance monkeys firsthand, PETA has written to six companies that manufacture or distribute enrichment devices, requesting a donation of foraging trays—which simulate to an extent the gathering and processing aspects of natural feeding, as monkeys rummage through wood chips and other materials to retrieve their food—and interactive, absorbing toys.

As the laboratory environment reduces miles of lush forested terrain to a small metal cage; a cornucopia of fruits, leaves, and insects to a handful of primate chow; and a network of intricate relationships to the loneliness of a solitary existence, implementing a plan for psychological enrichment can make a world of difference for primates caged at Covance. But as might be expected, Covance does not consider animal welfare to be a priority. Making money is the company's focus and it shows in the bleakness of its laboratories.

In 1985, 25 years after Jane Goodall began to shake the world with her discoveries of the rich emotional lives of chimpanzees, Congress amended the Animal Welfare Act to acknowledge the psychological needs of primates. Laboratories that use primates are ordered to design a written program of primate enrichment and socialization. Even so, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has failed to set standards for primate enrichment and socialization, meaning that laboratories only need to show inspectors that they have a written program of primate enrichment and socialization, without having to purchase a single toy, foraging board, or piece of fruit. Into this gaping loophole vanishes the psychological well-being of the more than 50,000 primates in U.S. labs, as documented by PETA's investigation inside Covance.

You Can Help

• Please contact your senators and the USDA, imploring them to close the loophole in the 1985 amendment to the Animal Welfare Act by implementing regulations that ensure the psychological well-being of primates in laboratories.
• Please take a moment to spread the word to compassionate friends, coworkers, neighbors, and family members.
• Write to Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns using our automatic e-mail form.

	What if your entire life was reduced to a small metal box? In this box, you could sit, lie down, stand up, and take one or two steps in each direction. You would have no companionship, and you would not be free to leave your cage. You would never feel the sun on your back, the wind in your face, or the ground under your feet. Your days would be spent inside your metal cage, inside a room with concrete block walls and fluorescent lighting, staring at other beings trapped inside their own cages. There would be no friendly visitors, no distractions, and no change in scenery; nothing to touch but the metal bars of your cage; and nothing to do but languish through weeks, months, and years of lonely deprivation. This is life for animals in laboratories. All animals deteriorate in such environments. With nothing to occupy their minds, they go insane. Scientists have observed animals in labs performing the same useless tasks repeatedly, with a compulsive persistence reminiscent of what is often seen in psychiatric hospitals. Mice perform backflips, one per second, for up to 30 minutes at a time; dogs spin frantically in their cages; and monkeys rock back and forth, their vacant eyes focused on nothing. Animal behaviorists refer to such highly regimented, repetitive activities with no apparent purpose as stereotypies. In extreme cases of psychological distress, animals injure themselves, biting their flesh and pulling out their hair.