Contact The Editor
Articles By This Author
The animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the National Institute of Mental Health, saying it has a right to hear and see rhesus macaque monkeys that the group contends express "physical and psychological pain and suffering" stemming from years of caging and experimentation.
The suit, filed Thursday in federal court in Greenbelt, Maryland, alleges that specific captive macaques with names including Beamish, Sam Smith and Guinness in the NIMH lab in Bethesda, Maryland "are willing speakers under the First Amendment." PETA says the macaques regularly communicate "through vocalizations, facial expressions, head and limb movements" and other behaviors that indicate anxiety and depression.
PETA asked the NIMH in August to "provide real-time audiovisual communications from the rhesus macaques," but the agency declined, saying its closed-circuit monitoring of the monkeys "is not capable of being transmitted to third parties," according to letters filed with the suit.
Officials with the NIMH and the National Institutes of Health - also sued as the parent agency of the NIMH - declined to comment Friday.
The lawsuit argues that listeners of speech have a First Amendment right, just as speakers do, and points to a 1976 Supreme Court ruling that says exactly that. The ruling came in a Virginia case where the state had prohibited pharmacists from telling customers the price of prescription drugs before purchase, arguing it was "maintaining the professionalism of its licensed pharmacists" by preventing possible price wars among them.
"Virginia is free to require whatever professional standards it wishes of its pharmacists," Justice Harry Blackmun wrote for the court. "But it may not do so by keeping the public in ignorance of the entirely lawful terms that competing pharmacists are offering. In this sense, the justifications Virginia has offered for suppressing the flow of prescription drug price information, far from persuading us that the flow is not protected by the First Amendment, have reinforced our view that it is."
PETA asked for an uncensored, unedited live-streamed audiovisual feed of the macaques in the lab of the supervisor of the testing on the monkeys. The group said that scientists have found "rhesus macaques can communicate effectively and intentionally with humans" through a range of facial expressions, body postures, gestures and vocalizations. "Macaque communications would be recognizable to macaque experts," PETA said, "given the appropriate quality, nature, and scope of video footage."
PETA claims that "NIH admits that animals held captive in government laboratories communicate effectively with humans" in the agency's "Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals." The group said the "macaques' gestures and body language communicate intelligible messages about their torment" that PETA has a constitutional right to receive.
The NIH has a website explaining why animals are used in research. The agency posted that "similarities to laboratory animals can help researchers understand important biological and physiological processes in humans. This understanding may inform how we can better prevent, diagnose, treat, and cure diseases."
The NIH and NIMH have instructed PETA to file Freedom of Information Act requests for data on its animal testing, but PETA said the agencies are slow and provide incomplete responses to such requests. Some documents and video footage of the macaques have been released by the NIH to PETA, enabling the group to describe some of the macaques' behavior in cages, such as pulling their hair out, walking in circles and repeatedly jumping up and down, which the group said were signs of "extreme psychological distress."
PETA said that more than 500,000 animals are confined for use in experiments in the NIH's Maryland labs. Citing NIH budgets, PETA said that about 47 percent of NIH-funded research involves animal experimentation, and that the NIH spent $21.6 billion on such projects in 2023. The lawsuit provides extensive documentation of testing it asserts is being done on macaques, including drilling into the monkeys' skulls, depriving them of food and water, "fright experiments" to test reaction to stress, and keeping them in cages for many years.
The macaque Guinness, having been "fitted with a titanium head post embedded in his skull," has been in the lab for 16 years, 12 in solitary cages, PETA said. The macaque Sam Smith, described by PETA as having been in a small metal cage for 15 years, has had portions of his brain suctioned out and other portions injected with toxins.
The violations of PETA's "First Amendment right to communicate with the macaques" are "particularly detrimental to PETA's role in promoting transparency of animal treatment through journalism." the group argues. The suit, assigned to U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, asks for "access to the rhesus macaques' communications" in the laboratory and an order prohibiting the federal agencies from withholding such access in the future.