The business of importing monkeys for use in experiments is big. It’s big on suffering, corruption, fraud, and disease risk. It’s pushing a monkey species to the brink of extinction while also posing an unaddressed but dangerous public health threat.

U.S. Reps. Greg Steube (R-Fla.-17) and Dina Titus (D-Nev.-01) have introduced the Preventing Risky Importation of Monkeys to Avoid Toxic Exposures (PRIMATE) Act. This important, common-sense legislation would ban the import of monkeys used for experiments. It aligns with PETA’s years-long efforts to end the suffering of monkeys, help protect endangered species, and safeguard the health of Americans who are unknowingly at risk of the spread of dangerous diseases.

Why Is This So Important?

Passage of the PRIMATE Act would represent a tectonic shift toward compassion and away from worldwide cruelty and corruption. It would end the incentive driven by U.S. demand for traffickers to turn a fast buck abducting monkeys from forests, help endangered long-tailed macaque populations recover, dry up the profit motive for shady monkey breeders, reduce the risk of dangerous diseases entering the country through the primate trade, and drive investment toward superior, non-animal research methods that have a much greater chance of helping human patients in need.

End Suffering and Death

Monkeys suffer at every step along the importation pipeline. Some are illegally ripped from forests on the other side of the world, crammed into bags, and sent to fetid monkey farms. They’re shoved into tiny crates and stacked into the cargo holds of airplanes, where falsified paperwork books their passage to the U.S.

Reduce Laboratory Torment

If the protracted journey of thousands of miles doesn’t kill them, laboratories then confine monkeys to small, barren cages and subject them to painful and invasive procedures, including repeated surgeries, force‑feeding of drugs or chemicals, and deliberate infection with diseases. These conditions cause both physical pain and severe psychological distress.

The U.S. imported nearly 285,000 monkeys between 2015 and 2025. Nearly all went to laboratories. They don’t make it out alive.

Reverse the Road to Extinction

Most monkeys imported for laboratories are long-tailed macaques, a species classified as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the world’s most comprehensive source of information on the global conservation status of animals. The organization has said their numbers over the next three generations will decline by 50 percent—half!—if trends continue.

Stop Corruption

The monkey importation pipeline is rife with fraud. A five-year U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service investigation that ended in 2022 alleged that a single Cambodian monkey farm sent more than 30,000 monkeys who were smuggled from the wild to companies in the U.S. Smuggling attempts across the Thai-Cambodian border continue.

End Disease Risk

Imported monkeys have arrived in the U.S. carrying tuberculosis, drug-resistant Shigella, malaria parasites, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and other pathogens capable of infecting humans and other animals. These pathogens aren’t confined to the laboratories. Because they’re shed in feces, urine, blood, and saliva, dangerous infectious diseases can easily spread through workers, wildlife, insects, and the environment.

Encourage Non-Animal Science

The National Institutes of Health acknowledges that about 95% of drugs that appear safe and effective in tests on animals fail in humans. Monkeys are not miniature humans, so tormenting and killing them in experiments is pointless. Superior, non-animal methods are readily available but starve for funding, while money instead flows to the animal-killing industry.

The FDA Modernization Act 2.0 clarified that non-animal methods may replace animal testing in drug development. Senators Rand Paul (R-KY) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) later introduced the FDA Modernization Act 3.0 to align FDA regulations with current federal law and state-of-the-art testing methods.

Monkeys belong in forests, not laboratories. Please use the form below to urge your U.S. representative to cosponsor this important, common-sense legislation today!

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