Urge Harvard’s administration to stop cruel experiments and release the remaining monkeys to a sanctuary
- by: PETA U.S.
- recipient: Gerald Pier, Ph.D., Chair, IACUC, Harvard University
Margaret Livingstone, a Harvard University experimenter, has spent her entire 40-year career tormenting animals, including by tearing baby monkeys away from their mothers and sewing their eyes shut—or making sure they never see a human or monkey face in other ways—just to see how badly it damages their brain and visual development.
Livingstone calls it science. We call it torture. Harvard must shut down her lab permanently and have her head examined. Livingstone has stolen perfectly healthy babies from their loving mothers at birth and deprived them of normal visual input by stitching their eyes closed, condemning them to a world of complete darkness.
In some of Livingstone's experiments, she sewed the baby monkeys' eyes shut and left them that way for up to a year. In others, the motherless monkeys are reared by laboratory staff who wear welding masks.
These fragile and terrified infants don't see any face, monkey or human, for a year. Livingston then tests their face-processing abilities to see how badly they've been damaged.
To do this, Livingstone immobilizes her helpless victims by surgically implanting a steel post in their head, strapping their chin tightly, or forcing them to bite down on a bar. Sometimes, she surgically implants electrodes into their brain in order to record how their deprived brain cells respond to visual cues.
After years of this torment, she kills many of the monkeys and dissects their brains.
Take a minute to urge Harvard's administration to close Livingstone's laboratory, get her a psych evaluation, and release the remaining monkeys to a sanctuary immediately.
Gerald Pier, Ph.D.,
I'm writing to urge you in the strongest possible terms to close Margaret Livingstone's laboratory, release the remaining monkeys to appropriate sanctuaries, and have her evaluated for psychological disorders.
Stealing infant monkeys from their distraught mothers and sewing their eyes shut for up to a year is so far beyond the pale that it borders on the unbelievable. That the venerable Harvard University fosters, encourages, and funds such abject depravity is both shocking and shameful. In 40 years of experimentation, Livingstone has contributed nothing to scientific understanding and hasn't advanced human health one iota. Her legacy is nothing more than the echoes of shrieking mother monkeys and their terrified, disoriented babies.
Although her daily cruelty is the stuff of horror movies, Livingstone claims that it's a "privilege" to work with macaques and that she treats them well and raises them "in comfortable, enriched environments with a lot of nurturing care."
These statements conflict sharply with objective reality.
Please close her laboratory.
Thank you for your attention to this important matter.
Sincerely,
[Name]
