WHAT: Stop UBC Animal Research is staging a week-long vigil and public outreach effort at UBC to protest UBC’s cruel experiments on monkeys. Next month, the university is expected to kill four monkeys currently used in research at UBC. Animal advocates will be dressed in monkey costumes to help bring attention to the issue and will call on UBC to release the primates to a sanctuary.

WHEN: From Monday, March 28th until Friday, April 1, Stop UBC Animal Research is maintaining a presence on the UBC campus. Each day, members of the animal advocacy group will gather on the southside of the UBC Student Union Building. During that week, Stop UBC Animal Research will be on the UBC campus in shifts from 9AM-12 and 12-4PM.

WHERE: UBC Student Union Building. (Click here for SUB address and directions.)

WHY: Earlier this year, Stop UBC Animal Research learned of UBC’s experiments on non-human primates. According to documents obtained by the organization, UBC has been:

Injecting toxins into monkeys’ brains to simulate “parkinsonism.” A UBC report obtained by Stop UBC Animal Research states that one researcher is using four to eight non-human primates to create in the animals “a new, progressively degenerative ‘model’ of Parkinson’s Disease.” According to the document, the UBC researcher’s experiment “uses rhesus monkeys which are receiving injections of proteasomal inhibitors into their brains. Head-holding devices have been surgically implanted into the monkeys’ brains, and protrude from the top of the monkeys’ heads, to be hooked up to frames when the researchers want to totally immobilize the animals presumably for injection of drugs and for scans at 3, 6, 9 and 12 months.  The monkeys have been scanned after implantation but before injection, for baseline (or starting point) information. Some animals are to be killed at 6 months, some at 12 months.” According to an April 12, 2010 progress report published by TRIUMF, Canada’s National Laboratory for Particle and Nuclear Physics, UBC’s Parkinson’s experiment is active and ongoing. It is anticipated the monkeys will be killed by April, when federal funding for the project ends. Stop UBC Animal Research has offered to buy the monkeys so they can be placed in a primate sanctuary.

VISUALS: Activists dressed in monkey costumes; Stop UBC Animal Research banner; information table.

QUOTE:

“Four monkeys are sitting on UBC’s death row,” said Mya Wollf of Stop UBC Animal Research. “The clock is ticking for these poor animals. We’re here this week urging UBC to grant the monkeys a stay of execution.”

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