Sarah J. Blige

Bip woke to the sound of screeching, just as she had almost every day of her young life. Boo and Bim were not in her cage, and she feared the crying and screaming was coming from her brothers. She glanced to the corner of her room where her mother’s cage was kept and was relieved to see that The Coats had not taken Mae as well; at least she wouldn’t lose every last member of her family this morning. The screeching eventually stopped, likely because the terrified monkeys had given in to exhaustion and accepted defeat.

Soon after, two of The Coats returned to Bip’s room with Boo and Bim hanging limply in their arms. Boo was unconscious, and though Bim was still awake, he was completely listless and unresponsive to the sights and sounds around him. Both monkeys were covered in blood, and The Coats joked about looking like axe murderers with all the blood splattered on their once stark white lab jackets. They forcefully threw Bim and Boo back into their cage and left the room, still laughing about the blood on their coats. Bip tried to shake words out of Bim, but her frightened brother simply sat hunched in the corner, staring blankly at the hallway across the room. She was finally able to wake Boo and convinced him to tell her what had happened.

“They held us down while one of The Coats approached with a big tube. They got to Bim first, and shoved the tube down his throat, pouring a horrible greasy substance into his stomach. I could tell it was terribly painful; Bim squirmed and cried and blood kept coming up through the tube. When they were finished with him they walked over to me with the same tube, laughing about how much blood could come out of such a small monkey.  I tried to fight them off and get away, but they hit me in the face with a pipe over and over…and I guess I passed out.”

Bip had not been taken to the grease pit before, but she usually met with the same fate as her brothers, so she feared that was where she’d be headed the next time The Coats came for her.

A week earlier, her leg had been broken by one of The Coats as she struggled while a tube was inserted into her nose.  She was left in her cage for days without any kind of painkiller while the inexperienced vet toyed over what to do about the break. He finally decided to amputate Bip’s leg, as it seemed to him “the easiest way”.

Bip and her brothers were born in Covance, a drug testing laboratory in Virginia. She’d accepted the daily abuse at Covance as a normal part of life, simply because it was all she had ever known. But her mother Mae had been plucked from the Jungle a year earlier and struggled more with life at Covance than those who had been bred and born there.

Bip was used to suffering and had witnessed many horrific procedures during her time at Covance, but nothing could have prepared her for the nightmare that was about to unfold.

Later that afternoon, The Coats came back to collect Bip and her mother. They held them by their arms and legs and carried Bip and Mae into a massive room with dozens of small, clear tubes on one side and a monkey morgue on the other. Bip couldn’t take her eyes off what looked like hundreds of dead monkeys separated into two categories: unexpected deaths, marked with red tags, and planned deaths, marked with yellow tags. What frightened her most was that the majority of the monkeys in the morgue had red tags dangling from their feet. She recognized some of the bodies as her friends, but was shocked by just how many monkeys had spent their lives and died in this facility.

Before Bip could linger on that thought for too long, she was shoved head first into one of the tubes, then watched as her mother, writhing and sobbing, was put into a tube beside her. Mae told Bip that she loved her and asked her to be brave, though it was difficult for Bip to see passed the utter terror in her mother’s eyes; she was sure this would be the end of them both.

A needle was inserted into one leg of each monkey that had been placed into these tubes and a substance was infused into the monkeys’ veins for 10 minutes. Bip was relieved when the infusion finally stopped, but the real suffering began only five short minutes later when she and the other monkeys were bled for testing purposes, a procedure that took place eight more times over the 12-hour period that followed. Bip felt herself losing control of her body, and within hours of her first dosing, she was completely unable to move. She overheard a few of The Coats discussing what this torture was for, and all she could make out was that they were testing a new pharmaceutical product.

On the tenth day of the tests, the monkey to Bip’s right was hunched over in a small cage, and she wondered if there was any life left in him; her mother was in a tube to her left, and she watched in despair as Mae began to convulse violently. One of The Coats approached her mother’s tube and simply noted Mae’s condition on a clipboard. They did nothing to help Mae, and her shaking body eventually came to rest. Bip’s mother was dead. Her lifeless body was dumped out of the tube into a pile of monkeys that had succumbed to the cruel tests at Covance.

The tests continued for two weeks, during which period all of the monkeys involved in this procedure had suffered tremendously.  Many had swollen or “dead” legs, most suffered convulsions and several had vomited all over themselves while stuck in the tiny tubes. All experienced severe anxiety and indescribable fear.

Two days after Christmas, the torture finally ended. The Coats injected one last dose of a different substance into Bip and the rest of the monkeys that had survived this trial, once and for all ending the suffering they had inflicted on their helpless test subjects. All of the monkeys were moved to the other side of the room and labelled with red tags.

The above story is a dramatization of actual atrocities that were committed at Covance. Thousands of monkeys continue to suffer abuse, neglect and psychological torment in drug testing facilities, and millions of animals experience the same torturous existence in research facilities across the world.

Bioculture (a company that sells primates to various testing labs) is proposing the construction of a breeding facility in Puerto Rico. Please do your part to stop this from happening, and go to https://secure.peta.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=2259 to send a letter to Puerto Rican Governor Luis Fortuño asking him to stop the construction of this primate breeding facility.

Also visit http://www.stopanimaltests.com/primates-inlaboratories.asp to learn more about animal testing and to find out what you can do to help put a stop to this abuse.