PETA
A rhesus macaque in a cage.
Cornelius, a rhesus macaque, who is used as a breeder at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is asking a Dane County judge to issue criminal animal cruelty charges against staff at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center — a federally funded biomedical facility located on the UW-Madison campus. The petition for a criminal complaint, filed in June, focuses on the treatment of two rhesus macaque primates named Cornelius and Princess. Madison attorney Andrea Farrell of the Jeff Scott Olson Law Firm is working with PETA’s legal team on the case.
“Reasonable minds can debate on whether animal suffering is a necessary evil for the furtherance of science. That’s not what’s happening here. What we are pursuing is in regards to the cruel treatment of Princess and Cornelius while they were breeding animals,” Farrell tells Isthmus. “Just because it’s a UW-Madison lab doesn’t mean it’s a place where animal cruelty can take place with impunity. We are petitioning the court because there is probable cause of serious and unnecessary harm to Cornelius and Princess that violates state law.”
The allegations against the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center stem from an undercover investigation conducted by PETA in 2020. An operative from the animal rights group was hired by the research facility and worked there for six months. The individual provided daily updates to PETA on what took place in the campus facility, which is home to hundreds of animals used for scientific research. The operative collected photographic and video evidence of the treatment of Cornelius and Princess and the conditions they endured while confined to the primate research center’s breeding colony. PETA also obtained evidence through open records requests.
“Cornelius and Princess, currently warehoused in wholly inadequate and substandard metal cages, [are] subjected to cruel treatment in their use as ‘breeders,’ and deprived of the ability to engage in any behaviors that are both normal and necessary to the welfare of this highly social species. This cruelty has been perpetrated on the campus of the University, by WNPRC personnel, for at least several years,” states PETA’s petition. “This intentional cruel treatment has resulted in Cornelius and Princess engaging in self-mutilation within the last six years, giving rise to probable cause for felony violations.”
The complaint names four employees of WNPRC who PETA claims are responsible for criminal acts against Cornelius and Princess: Jon Levine, the director of the primate center; Saverio “Buddy” Capuano, the attending veterinarian; Bonnie Friscino, manager of Colony Services; and Peter Pierre, head of Behavioral Services.
Neither Levine, director of the WNPRC, nor Jordana Lenon, communications and outreach program manager, responded to Isthmus’ request for comment. But the requests were forwarded to Kelly Tyrrell, director of UW-Madison media relations and strategic communications. She says the university first learned about the petition for criminal charges from Isthmus.
“We note that the care of animals used in research is highly regulated by federal law and no UW employees should be subject to criminal prosecution for carrying out their university duties,” Tyrrell writes in an email. “Recognizing the many levels of oversight in this area, Wisconsin state statute provides an exemption for research activities and related animal care.”
Typically, District Attorney Ismael Ozanne is responsible for prosecuting alleged crimes committed in Dane County. In May 2021, PETA provided Ozanne’s office with the evidence it had collected through open records requests and its undercover operation. Ozanne agreed to investigate. He did not respond to Isthmus’ request for comment.
According to court filings, the DA’s office sent letters to the primate research center inquiring about Cornelius’ condition in July 2021 and Princess’ condition in September 2021. PETA senior vice president Kathy Guillermo said attempts to check in with Ozanne were met with long periods of silence and he canceled meetings with PETA’s attorneys at the last minute.
“The district attorney refuses to say whether he is or is not pursuing charges. He is just doing nothing,” says Guillermo. “With all the evidence we have alleging violations of the law, the DA’s inaction is appalling. We just couldn’t keep waiting for him.”
In the absence of action by Ozanne, PETA filed a petition for criminal charges directly with the court on June 9. State law allows a judge to decide whether there is probable cause to pursue prosecution of a crime “if a district attorney refuses or is unavailable to issue a complaint.” A judge can appoint a special prosecutor to try the case, which is what PETA is asking for in its court filings.
Dane County Judge Nia Trammell held an evidentiary hearing on July 27 to consider PETA’s petition. Before PETA’s expert witnesses provided evidence for Trammell to consider in determining whether there is probable cause for the criminal case to proceed, the judge asked Ozanne whether his office was going to pursue charges or not. “At this point, we have not decided not to prosecute or not to move forward,” he told Trammell. The judge gave Ozanne until Sept. 28 to make up his mind.
The primate center is regulated by the United States Department of Agriculture. In 2014, the department fined UW-Madison for violating the Animal Welfare Act and imposed a $35,000 penalty. Additionally, in April 2020, the university reached a settlement with the USDA concluding a four-year investigation by two federal agencies. The agreement states the primate research center violated federal law 28 times between 2015-2019. UW-Madison announced in a news release that it had agreed to pay $74,000 in fines to settle the matter. The university also took the opportunity to reinforce what it sees as the importance of animal research: “Research with animals is an important way — and in many cases the only opportunity — to answer crucial questions about basic biological processes and to ethically study diseases with often devastating consequences for humans and animals.”
Wisconsin’s animal anti-cruelty laws include a broad exemption for teaching and research facilities like UW-Madison’s primate research center, which boasts on its website it has advanced therapies for HIV, kidney disease, glaucoma and developmental disorders, as well as COVID-19. Rhesus macaques are frequently used by medical researchers because of their physical and mental similarities to humans. According to PETA’s undercover investigation, the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center currently houses 2,000 monkeys.
PETA has filed complaints with the USDA and other federal agencies for violations involving animals at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center as recently as September 2020. What PETA is currently pursuing in Dane County court is an attempt to hold the university criminally liable for its treatment of Cornelius and Princess. PETA alleges the research exemption in the state’s animal cruelty laws doesn’t apply in this situation.
“Cornelius has never been used for teaching purposes, and since June 14, 2017, he has only been used intermittently for blood draws and/or screening procedures that appear to have been for the purpose of determining he was not suitable for use in specific experimental protocols, as the records do not indicate that he was placed in any experimental protocol as a result,” states PETA’s petition. “Princess has never been used for teaching, research, or experimentation while at the WNPRC; instead, she has been used only for breeding. Thus, the vast majority of the cruelty that Cornelius and Princess have suffered, and continue to suffer, has never been part of any teaching, research, or experimentation protocol or procedure whatsoever.”
At the July 27 hearing before Judge Trammell, expert witnesses testified in often graphic detail to the conditions Cornelius and Princess endured, which PETA claims violated a number of state laws, some of which are felonies. The group is alleging the primate research center failed to provide the monkeys with proper shelter and subjected them to unnecessary and excessive pain or suffering as well as unjustifiable injury or death.
Barbara King, a professor of primatology and biological anthropology at the College of William & Mary, has published seven peer-reviewed books on primate behavior, cognition, and emotion. She testified at the hearing after reviewing the evidence collected by PETA.
“We now know to a complete certainty that non-human primates, including monkeys and apes, are sentient, by which I mean they are capable of feeling a range of emotions from joy to sorrow, love and grief. And their ability to experience pain includes both physical and emotional pain,” King said during the hearing, testifying via Zoom. “It is not necessary to keep animals who are undergoing breeding procedures in these conditions or to allow them to continue to show such physical and emotional stress as is incredibly obvious year after year.”
According to court filings, Cornelius has been confined at the primate research center his entire life — much of which he spent alone in a barren metal cage. PETA’s undercover informant took a particular interest in Cornelius because of his persistent depressed behavior and “how he seemed to be checked out of the world.”
Shortly after being born at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center in 2010, Cornelius was taken away from his mother and kept in isolation. He was given a piece of wood wrapped in fleece to comfort him. King reviewed photos of Cornelius’ taken in 2020 and noted how the primate had no ability to move around or fully stand up in the small metal cage he was confined to 24 hours a day.
“This is really extraordinarily bad and cruel,” King said at the hearing. “There's no access to the outdoors at any time. There is, therefore, an absence of natural light and absence of fresh air.”
Records obtained by PETA show Cornelius was given multiple rounds of electroejaculation — a painful procedure in which the animal is strapped down and an electric probe is inserted into the penis. Cornelius underwent this procedure five times while at the research center even though he failed to produce semen each time.
“While I would definitely place the caging, the horribly inadequate caging at the top of my list, there are other factors that are contributory as well to this sense that we see that he is exhibiting a certain helplessness and depression,” said King. “My conclusion would be were [Cornelius] to be kept continuously in this kind of housing, that his stress and depression would continue. It might be on certain days slightly less because he's not having the extra horror, stress, of the electroejaculation, but it would be, I believe, still severe.”
Princess, a female rhesus macaque, was born in 2004 at the now closed New England Primate Research Center before being transferred to the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center in 2014. Aside from the periods when she gave birth and had her own infant in the cage with her, Princess also spent most of her life alone in a small cage.
“We know that five times she had her offspring removed from her forcibly at approximately one year, which is completely unlike anything that is natural for these macaques and is known in the literature to cause stress and depression in primate mothers,” King said at the hearing. “As I mentioned before, these animals can remember. This is a tremendous amount of cumulative stress.”
Both Cornelius and Princess showed outward signs of suffering. Both engaged in plucking out their own hair.
“Princess's self-harm, her self-mutilation we might say, through hair plucking…has left her nearly bald. And we can also see red and raw areas on her body,” King said. “I've been doing this a long time, and this is the worst example that I have seen.”
King and three other expert witnesses agreed the distress displayed by Cornelius and Princess would have been obvious to employees at the primate research center.
“There is plenty of evidence that the cages in which Cornelius and Princess were kept were not sufficient to maintain good health in either animal. Both primates suffered numerous physical illnesses, including the abnormal behavior pattern of self-mutilation in the form of hair-plucking (also called behavioral alopecia) that is a physical manifestation of severe psychological distress,” states PETA’s in a Sept. 2 brief, submitted after the hearing. “Princess's self-mutilation was so severe, she tore out upwards of 90 percent of her hair, excepting only the hair between her shoulder blades that she could not reach.”
After seven years of solitary confinement, the primate research center did inform Ozanne last year that Cornelius is now housed with “two compatible female rhesus macaques and remains a part of the WNPRC breeding colony.”
Attorney Andrea Farrell says there was no reason Cornelius couldn't have been in group housing his whole life.
“PETA hopes Cornelius will ultimately be moved to a reputable sanctuary where he can live out the rest of his days in peace after enduring such suffering.”
Princess’ fate has already been decided. After Ozanne’s September 2021 letter to the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center inquiring about her condition, Princess was enrolled in “a short-term, terminal project,” according to records from the primate research center. After a lifetime of producing offspring, Princess was injected with the Zika virus on Nov. 19, 2021, while pregnant. Two weeks later, she and her fetus were euthanized. PETA’s expert witnesses testified in court that Princess’ poor health and her many pregnancies made her a bad candidate for researching Zika.
Guillermo, who has worked for PETA for more than three decades, says if it were up to her no animals would be used as “lab equipment.”
“You’re right, I would like to see every laboratory with an animal in it shut down. But that does not absolve or shield the university from misdemeanor and felony anti-cruelty statutes. We just want the law followed,” Guillermo tells Isthmus. “In this case, I think the evidence shows the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center clearly didn’t care about the welfare of Cornelius and Princess or the research they were doing.”
