For Immediate Release
September 15, 2008
Miami, FL: According to a communique received by the North American Animal Liberation Press Office this week, cages containing twenty or more captive non-human primates at Worldwide Primates were opened by Animal Liberation Front activists. It is unclear how many individuals made their escape into the surrounding orchards, but those who didn’t escape are destined for lives of misery in vivisection laboratories. Worldwide Primates, located at 16450 SW 180th Street in Miami, is operated by Mathew Block, who spent a year in prison after his conviction for smuggling baby orangutans into the United States.
The communique reads in full:
“Late on September 10 we entered the compound of Worldwide Primates (16450 SW 180th Street, Miami, Florida) and cut large holes in 4 outdoor cages. Each cage held 5 or 6 monkeys. There is no doubt that monkeys can survive in Florida. There are hundreds of wild monkeys in colonies across the state. Worldwide Primates is surrounded by fruit farms.
Worldwide Primates is the business of convicted baby orangutan smuggler Matthew Block. He spent one year in prison and then went back to work importing and selling primates to vivisection labs. Mr. Block, we haven’t forgotten you. Your work is still criminal in our eyes.
– Animal Liberation Front”
There has been increasing focus on the issue of non-human primates used for vivisection recently, including acts of sabotage against vivisectors who experiment on them in laboratories around the US. While animal rights activists believe that all vivisection should be abolished, ending the use of non-human primates in experimentation has become a focal point for many throughout the world. In an apparently well thought-out strategy that abolitionists have used historically to end Apartheid, the US slave trade and additional atrocities around the world, animal activists have now focused on a single issue, the abolition of primate vivisection.
In 2006 an Austrian Parliament agreed to a ban on ape experiments, and experiments on apes that are not in the interest of the subject are now illegal in principle in that country. A Spanish government resolution in June provided certain rights to self-integrity to great apes, including the right to not be experimented on by humans. And last September, 393 members of the European parliament voted to ban all primate experimentation in Europe.
Press Officer Jerry Vlasak, MD states: “There is increasing demand that non-human primates stop being placed in barren steel cages, tortured by humans and then killed in scientifically fraudulent, perverted and evil experiments; there are signs throughout the world that this a goal whose time has come. I wish all the luck to those offered freedom from Worldwide Primates in Florida, and urge the rest of the world to shutter companies like this that imprison, exploit and sell into slavery non-human primates.”
To read the original ALF communiques, click here.