BACK STORY
In 1985, members of the Animal Liberation Front raided a vivisection laboratory at the University of California Riverside and rescued hundreds of animals who were being brutalized by vivisectors. They liberated 467 mice, rats, cats, opossums, pigeons, rabbits, and a baby monkey who had endured painful experiments on his eyes since infancy. His eyes had been sewn shut and an electronic sonar device attached to his head that emitted a high-pitched noise every few minutes. The baby monkey, who was named Britches by his tormentors, had his filthy bandages removed, his stitches taken out, and received medical treatment. He was taken to a sanctuary and given to a macaque female monkey who raised him. Britches lived happily for 20 years in the Primarily Primates sanctuary in San Antonio. The negative publicity that resulted because of the raid forced an investigation by the NIH who found that the program where baby monkeys were tortured was an “appropriate” program. Even so, many people believed they would never see anything so savage as the torture of Britches ever again. They thought wrong.
EUNICE SHRIVER’S OBSESSION WITH ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION
Funding horrific experiments on baby monkeys is something the NIH has perpetrated for decades. The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Heath and Human Development at the NIH has been funding the torment of baby monkeys and their mothers in vivisection labs all over the country since 1963.
In 1942, Eunice’s sister, Rosemary Kennedy, the most beautiful and vibrant of all the Kennedy children, at age 23, was given a lobotomy at the order of her father Joseph Kennedy. Rosemary was what they called “retarded” in those days and was an intellectual embarrassment to him. The lobotomy was a disaster and rendered her physically, mentally, and emotionally incapacitated. The family kept her isolated in an institution for ten years until Eunice brought Rosemary out of hiding after Joseph Kennedy died. Eunice apparently forgot all about the lobotomy and pretended not to know why her sister was completely incapacitated. Rose Kennedy also forgot about the lobotomy and said Rosemary was “retarded” because it was “God’s will.”
BABY MONKEYS BECOME THE SCAPEGOATS
Eunice decided that experiments on monkeys would be the perfect way to find out why human children “like her sister” were born with or developed intellectual and physical challenges. Eunice used all her influence, including that of her brother, President Kennedy, to establish her foundation at the NIH and begin the experiments. Eunice was extremely enthusiastic about animal experimentation (she called it “lab work”) but after the labs had been up and running for a few months vivisectors told her that the experiments were showing no results that benefited humans. She refused to listen to any naysayers and demanded even more vivisection.
Heavily inspired by the brutal experiments perpetrated on monkeys by the infamous Harry Harlow, the most heinous vivisector that ever lived, Eunice could not get enough of the laboratory horrors inflicted on animals. She was determined that they pay off for her. Sixty-three years later, not one experiment on one single baby monkey has yielded any useful information pertaining to human babies. Her family chooses to forget about Eunice’s role in the experimentation of millions of animals and focuses instead on Eunice’s Special Olympics that garner her praise even after her death. Funny how the Special Olympics grow bigger and bigger every year as the number of challenged children continues to grow. None of them have benefitted one whit from the millions of animals Eunice tortured during her lifetime and now from the grave.
EUNICE’S HELL HOLE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
Since 1983, vivisectors, led by Thomas Burbacher and Gene Sackett, at Eunice’s lab at the University of Washington, have been brutalizing thousands of baby monkeys and their mothers in ways that even Eunice could not have imagined. Sackett’s mentor is none other than Harry Harlow. Our campaign in Seattle to shut down the lab was ignored by the UW. So for several years we attempted in every way possible with phone calls, emails, home demos, petitions, and personal pleas, to convince Maria Shriver to help us close down her mother’s baby monkey labs, including the one at the UW, but she and her brother Bobby Shriver refused. This is not surprising since Maria is intensely involved in vivisection herself on behalf of the Alzheimer’s Association. The UW vivisection laboratories, among the worst in the nation, have since moved underground, safe from the ALF and others who might expose the atrocities they commit on animals.
EUNICE’S LAB IN POOLESVILLE
Another protégé of Harlow, Stephen Suomi, led the experiments on baby monkeys at the Eunice Shriver Baby Monkey Lab in Poolesville, Maryland. Harlow died in 1981 but Suomi continued the same horrific “behavioral research” for over 30 years in Poolesville, just as other Eunice Shriver labs are doing right now. After PETA obtained hundreds of photos and videos of the depravity occurring in the lab – babies taken from their mothers at birth and isolated in dark boxes (Suomi humorously labeled them “pits of despair”), babies being terrified with loud noises, driving the babies insane, causing them to tear at their own skin and rip out their hair. Some of them were so traumatized they starved themselves to death. Suomi and his fellow vivisectors perpetrated every manner of invasive experiments such as spinal taps, causing intense physical pain and death. Some of the babies were imprisoned in a tiny metal box for up to a year. PETA showed the videos of the experiments, made by the vivisectors themselves, to the public, the media, and to members of Congress who were so horrified at what they saw that they called for the closing of the lab.
Dozens of animal groups became involved and we all inundated Congress and the NIH with demands that the lab be shut down. After a year-long campaign the lab was finally phased out in 2015. That Suomi was permitted to continue his experiments for 30 years tells us everything we need to know about the NIH being willing to fund useless experiments. Suomi admitted back in 1977 that the animal experiments he was doing could not be extrapolated to humans. Furthermore, mental health professionals made it clear that the experiments on the baby monkeys and their mothers have absolutely nothing to do with treating people who have mental health problems. The NIH and Eunice’s people at her foundation couldn’t care less.
Because the Poolesville lab was a stand alone NIH lab, Congress had the authority to shut it down. Vivisection labs at universities like the University of Washington and the University of Wisconsin where Harlow perpetrated his horrific experiments are more difficult to close down because of their immense political power and other funding sources.
The director of Eunice’s foundation at the NIH denied the animals had been mistreated even though the photographic evidence was staring him and everybody else in the face. They claimed they shut down the lab for financial reasons, not because activists blew their cover. Vivisectors cannot help but lie. It’s what they do.
WHY DOES THE NIH CONTINUE TO FUND ANIMAL EXPERIMENTS?
So why does the NIH still hand out grants to vicious vivisectors to the tune of billions of dollars? Because the NIH is made up of vivisectors. They okay each other’s grants no matter how outrageous, ridiculous, unscientific, and useless they may be. Whenever the president of the United States tells Congress and the NIH to fund “cancer research” or any other “research” that means billions of more tax dollars will go to vivisectors to commit atrocities on animals.
MARGARET LIVINGSTONE
Unfortunately for baby monkeys and their mothers, there is never a shortage of vivisectors who crawl out from underneath rocks eager to follow in the footsteps of Harlow and repeat his godforsaken experiments that have been perpetrated a thousand times. Generation after generation, helpless primates find no relief from the relentless hordes of psychopaths who show them no mercy. Now there is intense focus on just such a vivisector, Margaret Livingstone, hired by Harvard in 1998 to follow in Harlow’s footsteps and take the experiments to a new level. She rivals Harlow as the most sadistic vivisector who ever lived. Eunice Shriver would be proud of this vivisector, a legacy of Eunice Shriver’s commitment to perpetrate every horrific act on baby monkeys that a twisted imagination can come up with.
SCIENTISTS AND DOCTORS ATTEMPT TO END LIVINGSTONE’S EXPERIMENTS
In February of this year, Harvard Law School’s Animal Law & Policy Clinic, Wild Minds Lab at the University of St. Andrews School Of Psychology and Neuroscience in the UK, and more than 380 scientists, doctors, academics, and lawyers from around the world, including Jane Goodall, Dr. Ian Redmond, and Dr. Richard Wrangham were so appalled by Margaret Livingstone’s experiments on baby monkeys that they sent a letter to the NIH asking that they terminate funding of the Harvard Medical School’s maternal and sensory deprivation experiments on macaques, making it clear that both ethically and scientifically the experiments are unacceptable. The letter urged the NIH to support research that is actually relevant to humans and “end funding for current and future projects that lack ecological validity and involve cruel and inhumane treatment of animals used in experimentation.” So far, even those brilliant minds have not moved the NIH or Harvard to act on their request to shut down the lab.
The experiments perpetrated by Livingstone include ripping baby monkeys away from their mothers at birth, causing the mothers to cry out in excruciating emotional pain, sewing the babies’ eyes shut, implanting electrodes into the monkeys’ brains, altering the babies’ sight, and never allowing the babies to see another monkey’s face or a human face by making the lab workers wear welder’s masks. In her biography Livingstone describes, with what we presume is sadistic glee, withholding liquid from the babies for hours and finds the babies’ reactions “fascinating” when they are rewarded with small drops of juice. We can only imagine the desperation the babies feel at tasting one small drop of liquid and hoping in vain for more. The sadism she reveals about herself by describing her own cruel acts is mind boggling. One terrified macaque baby was strangled by a piece of cloth that was to be a substitute for his real mother. All in a day’s work for Livingstone. She expressed the opinion that spider monkeys who are caged and tortured in her lab are “neurotic.”
According to a PETA report, to test the damage she has done to the babies, “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.” Proving what? This is inflicting brutality on animals for no other reason than bringing sadistic pleasure to the vivisector.
LIVINGSTONE’S IDEA OF FUN
Livingstone also designed her own torture device for cats whereby she could keep them awake for hours using a huge cardboard drum she found at a nearby demolition site. She would imprison a cat inside the large drum and keep rolling it so the cat could never rest. She commented in her biography. “I also remember that after we had used this huge drum to sleep deprive a cat, we took it into the men’s room to empty it into a toilet. We both ended up with soggy cat excrement all over our feet.” What a hilarious situation! What fun they had tormenting cats and spilling their poop all over themselves! And how tragic for the animals trapped in her vivisection labs that she has so many people working for her that are just as mentally unbalanced as she is.
Another article describes how Livingstone indulged in the same kind of hobby as serial killer Jeffery Dahmer. As children, both liked to play with dead animals that had been run over on the highway. Livingstone says she soaked the dead bodies in lye and collected their skulls. Committing depraved acts on animals as a child is a precursor of what they will do as adults. We have seen this to be true again and again with adult murderers like Dahmer, and Livingstone is a perfect example of how her childhood hobby could have predicted the pleasure she would gain inflicting pain on animals as an adult.
Can anyone believe by any stretch of the imagination that Livingstone is experimenting on animals for the benefit of humans? She is a sadist, pure and simple. There is not a normal compassionate bone in her body. She revels in brutalizing animals. And we are paying her salary! This piece of garbage has raked in $32 million from the NIH since 1998 to fund her evil obsession. She is deeply offended by the outpouring of rage now directed at her and defends herself by claiming she has dedicated her life to “unraveling the mysteries of the human brain.” This statement made me laugh. What absurd blather. She, like all vivisectors, knows that experiments on animals cannot be extrapolated to humans because of differences in physiology, metabolism, genetics, biochemistry, environment, and diet. Vivisection is not science. It is big business. And it is the perfect profession for sadists who need an outlet for their evil perversions.
Livingstone needs to be fired. Her fellow vivisectors with so-called “scientific” degrees up the yin yang are defending her. If you never took action to put a vivisector out of business, this is the time to do it.
ACTIONS
Now that the former president of Harvard has been ousted maybe the new president will be more willing to listen to our demands that the brutal experiments on baby monkeys must end.
Contact the interim president of Harvard, Alan Garber, and express your outrage at the atrocities being committed by Livingstone and let him know that Livingstone needs to be fired. Email him at alan_Garber@harvard.edu.
Email George Q. Daley, Dean of Harvard Medical School and tell him to shut down Livingstone’s lab. Office_of_the_dean@hms.harvard.edu
Email Margaret Livingstone at margaret_livingstone@hms.harvard.edu and express your revulsion at her savagery.
(Due to an abundance of outraged activists her email could be shut down at any time.)
Call/email/write to NIH Director Monica Bertagnolli and tell her to stop funding cruel unscientific experiments on animals and let her know your feelings regarding Margaret Livingstone’s experiments.
Monica.bertagnolli@nih.gov Call 240-781-3300
Snail Mail:
Director Monica Bertagnolli
National Institutes of Health
31 Center Dr.
Bethesda, MD 20892
It took a over a year of protesting to shut down the Poolesville lab and we still have not closed any of the other Eunice Shriver Baby Monkey Labs. It will take a huge effort on the part of all of us to stop the funding of Margaret Livingstone’s baby monkey hell hole. Every single voice added to the chorus of outcries against Margaret Livingstone’s lab matters. Let yours be heard.
Further reading:
Rosemary – The Hidden Kennedy Daughter by Kate Clifford Larson
“We All Operate in the Same Way.” – The Use of Animals at the University of Wisconsin-Madison by Rick Bogle