People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sued the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institutes of Health Thursday, claiming a First Amendment right to follow a live feed inside an animal testing lab in Bethesda, Maryland.
The animal rights group said it has a right to access communications between primates to observe their pain and suffering.
In the nine-page complaint, PETA said the rhesus macaques, monkeys of Asian origin, are “willing speakers under the First Amendment, regularly communicating about their physical and psychological pain and suffering through vocalizations, facial expressions, head and limb movements, body postures, and stereotypical … behavior indicating anxiety and depression.”
The lawsuit added, “PETA has a right to receive those communications in real time directly from the macaques and to report the information received to the American people in order to inform public discourse on the highly controversial and much-criticized issue of government-funded experiments on animals.”
It comes after PETA’s request last August for “uncensored and unedited access to a live-streamed audiovisual feed of the rhesus macaques” to “receive the macaques’ communications and exercise its First Amendment right to listen” was denied by NIH.
No lawsuit until this one has attempted to collect the communications between animals, according to PETA’s press release.
“Nick Nack, Beamish, Sam Smith and other monkeys have been imprisoned alone in barren steel cages, cut open, injected with toxins and brain-damaged for years and, in some cases, over a decade,” said Jeff Kerr, chief legal officer for PETA. “PETA urges the court to uphold our First Amendment right to hear what these monkeys have to say because their jailers are ignoring their cries of agony and despair.”
The complaint argues that by the monkeys’ expressions and sounds, they can express “pain, suffering, stress, fear and depression” and that information is part of newsgathering efforts by PETA.
Spokespeople from the National Institutes of Health did not immediately respond to a Washington Times request for comment.
