Published October 12, 2026 by PETA Staff.

The shrieks of baby monkeys, some just two days old, are ignored. Their terror, uninterrupted. Wires cover their shaved heads as they suck their tiny fingers and clutch blankets, the only comfort experimenters at the Washington National Primate Research Center allow.

New video released by PETA today provides an unprecedented look inside experiments at the University of Washington’s primate center, where baby monkeys are torn from their mothers within days of birth and subjected to repeated tests. Instead of the constant comfort, warmth, and security of their devoted mothers, they’re left with blankets and bottles.

The video shows the cruel results of an experiment in which pregnant monkeys were exposed to a neurotoxin. The infants, often taken from their mothers the day they are born, endure repeated tests to determine whether the toxin damaged their developing brains enough to make them tremble.

The tests run for weeks. Years, even.

None of the monkeys make it out alive. Experimenters kill them all when they’re done.

University officials and monkey experimenters have repeatedly fought to keep the public from seeing what happens inside the primate center. This video shows why.

Par for the Course

These experiments are hardly an outlier for the university or its primate center. PETA repeatedly exposes grisly experiments there and the long, sordid history of neglect and incompetence that has tormented and killed monkeys by the scores, squandered millions in federal funds and failed to produce promised treatments for humans.

This is the same facility where Beth Buffalo deprives elderly monkeys of food and water to compel them to stare at a computer screen for up to nine hours in exchange for drops of juice, claiming this allows her to understand how the brain ages.

This is the same university where Mark Walton admitted that he continues experiments that started with severing baby monkeys’ eye tendons simply to keep his job.

It’s where Greg Horwitz, Robi Soetedjo, and Jonathan Ting drill into monkeys’ skulls, pump viruses into their brains, deprive them of water and food, and subject them to repeated surgeries.

It’s where, in an unprecedented rebuke, Michele Basso was hired, demoted, and then banned from experimenting on animals thanks to her incompetence.

It’s the same place that trucks weeks-old monkeys from the Oregon National Primate Research Center with pacifiers and bottles to subject them to cruel and painful infectious disease experiments.

In 2022, a King County Superior Court found the university liable in a PETA public records lawsuit for routinely destroying photos and videos and failing to adequately search for records related to the primate center.

PETA’s new video exposes exactly how the University of Washington’s primate center operates, and why it should be shut down.

What You Can Do

Please share PETA’s video on social media. Then, please TAKE ACTION to help shut down the Washington National Primate Research Center: