A.N.I.M.A.L.

At the Covance drug testing facility in Vienna, Virginia, the pervasive meanness to animals—not just any animals, but animals already having rotten painful lives, forced to undergo terrifying procedures, with no control over their environment or ability to pursue happiness because they're either locked inside a tiny cage or being pulled out of there by humans who hurt and frighten them—made the news a few years ago when PETA revealed shocking, incriminating footage from one of their excellent undercover investigations.

I wanted to revisit this story because long after the hoopla and media buzz dies down, the animals in the Covance facility still have to endure pain, terror, deprivation, endless stress, and lifelong trauma.

Call this a "side effect" of animal experiments: Here are two examples of the callous and cruel things that employees of Covance Labs—one of the largest vivisection companies and importers of primates in the United States—yelled at captive monkeys who were helpless, undergoing painful procedures, and possibly terrified or in shock. This was all documented by a PETA undercover investigator who worked at the lab for nearly a year:


The these horrible hateful remarks were said to monkeys in cages, monkeys being restrained, monkeys with tubes shoved up their noses and mouths.

Here's one more:


That was a Senior Covance technician talking to a monkey who did not want to open his mouth for insertion of a tube.

Nice. This little animal understandably does not want something stuck inside his mouth, so the vivisection lab technician insults the animal, over and over.

Here are some of the everyday abuses that Covance employees inflicted on monkeys. Note that these monkeys—these individuals—were the legal property of Covance, imprisoned in Covance cages, entirely without rights or choice of their fate, sadly lacking in legal protections or oversight, and utterly dependent on the humans who worked at Covance for any quality of life. This is how those humans acted acted toward the vulnerable and helpless animals in their care:
Here are some of the ways that the monkeys coped with this hellish existence:

• Self-mutilation


• Stress-induced diarrhea that was so bad it cause painful intrusions of the intestines through the rectum

Imagine that you are an intelligent social animal, and your world is reduced to a tiny steel cage, interrupted by painful invasive procedures, performed by people who yell at you and treat you roughly. You'd go crazy, too.

How about this incident?


Forcing your prisoners, on whom you've inflicted pain and terror, to dance to loud, blaring music is sadism.

In addition to causing victims' suffering, daily cruelty destroys the people who engage in it. Our bodies, minds, and emotions—and communities—work optimally when we are honest and kind. When we radically depart from that, we pay the price, and so do those around us. When we are cruel and violent, we create inner turmoil; our consciences and ideals become in conflict with our actions. No amount of rationalization or willful denial can cure that. The only peaceful solution is stopping the violence in our hearts and in our behaviors. In the meantime, we may project our inner rage toward others; it may come out in the form of craving to control others (because we can't control ourselves), or repeatedly pointing out shortcomings in others (because that's easier than confronting our own wrongdoing).

Covance management's chronic cover-ups, pathetic lies, and desperate denials are signs that their bodies and minds know that what they're doing is wrong. They resort to ludicrous fiction in a vain effort to protect themselves from the awful truth of what they're doing. They get to the point where they stop realizing that no one believes their stories.