A complaint with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s Office of Law Enforcement has been filed against Hainan Airlines for reportedly shipping 720 endangered long-tailed macaques from Cambodia to Chicago in August 2022. The animal rights organisation PETA, which filed the complaint, said that the USDA confirmed that it had cancelled Hainan Airline’s registration in May, making this shipment an apparent violation of the federal Animal Welfare Act. PETA said they received a whistleblower report saying that monkeys were sent to a facility operated by Envigo Global Services Inc. in Alice.
PETA stated, “Envigo has repeatedly shown that it values profits over animal welfare. Following PETA’s undercover investigation into Envigo’s beagle-breeding facility in Virginia last year, the USDA cited the company for 48 violations of the AWA and a US Department of Justice civil case led Envigo to announce that it will shut down the facility. In 2019, the USDA also cited the company’s monkey facility in Texas with a critical violation of the AWA for failing to provide 25 monkeys with food for six days. Envigo had to euthanise two of these animals because they were so severely starved.”
A federal judge approved a plan to transfer 4,000 beagles from Envigo’s a breeding facility in Virginia to shelters nationwide for adoption, and it appears that Meghan Markle has already adopted one. In August 2022 the airline Egyptair said that it had stopped transporting monkeys from Africa and Asia to vivisection laboratories around the world. Air France announced the same a month earlier, as did Kenya Airlines in February. One by one, airlines are turning their back on vivisection, but action must be taken if it is discovered that they just say they would stop transporting monkeys, but still carry on doing it when nobody is looking.
