FROM TREES TO TERROR

AIR FRANCE-KLM is the only major European carrier that still ships primates for medical research. PATTON BOGGS mediates global trade and transportation issues as lawyers and lobbyists for the airlines. Both are complicit in cruelty and scientific deceit.

Primates are trapped in trees rigged with nets. Stuffed into mesh sacks. They shriek and claw at enclosures. No one hears. They are taken.

Some are bred on barren, concrete farms that churn out live product for the international animal research trade. Nonhuman primates are valued models for experimentation, though they fail to produce clinical symptoms or data relevant to human disease processes, and can even mislead experimenters with false conclusions.

To reach research labs, animals are crated and trucked for miles. Most wind up in the extreme heat or cold of a plane's poorly ventilated cargo hold, where they are caged during flights that can last 60 hours.

They enter a world bound by metal bars, pain and fear. Primates are induced with human disease and injury. Experimenters poison, overdose and mutilate monkeys. Electrodes are lodged in exposed brain matter. Seizures are stimulated. Limbs removed…