Quebedeaux’s Transport, the transportation company whose truck carrying lab-bound monkeys crashed in Pennsylvania in January 2022 (in which three monkeys escaped and were later shot dead) has notified the US Department of Transportation (USDOT) that it has sold off its trucks and is out of the animal transport business.
According to PETA, the animal rights organisation that had been investigating the company, Jeffrey Quebedeaux, the head of the company, had been retrofitting an old human prison to quarantine hundreds of monkeys slated for use in experiments in Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana. After complaints were filed, the local school board, which owns the land, voted to start eviction proceedings to terminate his lease and collect past-due rent.
PETA also filed multiple complaints with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) regarding the transport company, including alleged improper handling of the monkeys in the Pennsylvania crash and improper veterinary inspections of monkeys trucked to laboratories. The USDOT issued the company an out-of-service order, prohibiting it from conducting business because it had refused to undergo a safety audit. PETA discovered that Quebedeaux hauled four elderly long-tailed macaques from a breeding operation in Florida to Arizona State University, which they say is a serious violation of the Animal Welfare Act.
The animal rights organisation also urged the USDOT to investigate four other shipments that appeared to have taken place after the out-of-service order was given, including a shipment of 180 Cambodian long-tailed macaques from Orient BioResource Center. The state-required paperwork appears to have contained lies about the company that transported these animals. In 2021, more than 31,000 monkeys were imported into the U.S. for experimentation.
PETA said, “monkeys trucked by transport companies are stuffed into tiny crates and crammed into trucks before being hauled across the country to laboratories, where they’ll be poisoned, drugged, maimed, and ultimately killed in useless experiments. The truck routes are often thousands of miles across the country, and during the journeys, the monkeys have to sit in their own waste and hear the screams of dozens of other terrified monkeys.”
