Anjelica Huston has decades of experience on the set, tracing back to watching her father, John, filming during her childhood. Given her experiences with animals on the set, we were excited when she sat down with PETA US to discuss the abuses endured by great apes used in film, television, and advertising.

U.S. Department of Agriculture inspectors have documented that chimpanzees and orangutans were denied even minimal “environmental enrichment” and veterinary care in times of illness. And undercover investigations have shown that trainers beat and scream at great apes in order to force them to perform dumb, confusing tricks, take after take, under the burning arc lights.

Chimpanzees can live to be 60 years old and orangutans can live to be 50, but they grow too strong to be handled around the age of eight. That’s when, useless to the industry, most are dumped in roadside hellholes, where they can live in barren cages, languishing amid their own waste or sold for use in experiments. There is no Hollywood actors’ retirement home for them.

Anjelica also gave an exclusive interview after the filming of the video, explaining how she grew so passionate about this issue, and why the abuse of great apes will never happen on her set.

Thanks, Anjelica, from us and from them!

Here at PETA Europe’s blog, we like chimps. In case you couldn’t tell from the name.

Testing on primates – or any animal for that matter – is bad. I know that, you know that, we all know that. But a new study due to be made public on Monday in Edinburgh found that 95 per cent of former lab chimps display the same symptoms as torture victims – human torture victims, that is. Put specifically, these are symptoms of ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ which include anxiety, depression, insomnia, anger outbursts and “floating limb” displays (said to be an expression of disassociating their body with the real world). And worryingly, these are being displayed for years after their incarceration and experimentation – that’s if they make it out alive, which most don’t.

Testing on great apes has not been allowed for around ten years here in the UK, but it is still legal throughout most of Europe. The European Commission will shortly publish the first draft of a new animal experimentation directive and the hope is that experiments on great apes (and other primates) will be permanently banned. It’s said it will come out in September, so watch this space but in the meantime you can learn more about Felix, the Oxford University monkey who lived and died in captivity, and touched the hearts of all at PETA.

Image: Release Chimps / CC

Two experiments to study rhesus macaques’ brains have been banned by a court in Zurich. The ban is being appealed and may yet be overturned, but hey, what a great story anyway! According to Nature News, the court ruled that “society was unlikely to see the benefits of the research during the three-year funding period approved, and thus the burden on the animals was not justified.” Swiss law, which I’ve praised before, requires society’s benefits to be weighed against the ‘burden’ on the animal before any experiments can take place. You may not know this (neither did I ‘til I just quizzed my main man on the ins-and-outs of vivisection, Alistair), but this is no different from UK law!

Sadly, in Britain claims that benefit will occur can be extremely vague and still get a rubber stamp from the government. You can see this in the 3 million experiments that take place every year despite all the scientific failings of vivisection. What also separates us Brits from the Swiss here though, is the time measured from doing the experiment, and when the ‘benefit’ is seen. So, in this case a “benefit” would have to be seen straight after carrying out the test, but done in the UK, vivisectors and scientists just need to indicate there may possibly be benefits far in the future. Fingers crossed the decision isn’t overturned…

Image: ABC / CC

Five rhesus monkeys were ‘created’ in a laboratory via IVF, genetically modified to be born with the agonising Huntingdon’s Disease.

Huntington’s disease is a terrible affliction, leading to physical and mental degeneration, such as jerky, uncontrollable movements and cognitive impairment. Just a few years ago, researchers were hailing a mouse model and now they’re saying that’s not good enough and they need a monkey model.

A New Scientist article explains that researchers splice human genes in and out of mice to give them diabetes, cancer, and heart disease but they’re of limited use when looking at brain diseases such as Huntington’s. Sufferers can’t control their movement, speech or swallowing, but mice engineered with the Huntington’s protein don’t jerk their muscles like humans do, so it goes a bit wrong really. The researchers can’t study the cognitive decline properly.

Anyway, back to the five monkeys. According to the Daily Mail one of the monkeys, who is now ten months old, is suffering from involuntary spasms of the hand and face (classic symptoms of the disease) but two of the others died within a day, one after a month and one isn’t showing any symptoms at all.

Whichever way you look at this, it is an appalling way to treat such amazing creatures, who have the capacity to feel so much yet languish in a laboratory, being tampered with in such an unnatural way.

Just in case we needed any more proof that animals are amazing, intelligent and caring individuals, they’ve hit the news this week with tales of heroic deeds and groundbreaking communication skills. Moko, a friendly bottlenose dolphin known in the Mahia beach area in New Zealand, swam to the rescue of two stranded whales, that us humans had not managed to refloat despite several attempts. There was talk about having the poor whales euthanized to prevent them from suffering any longer, but Flipper-esque Moko escorted them out to safety. That is so cute, and so worthy of our respect.

In other news, researchers have discovered that monkeys have a far greater language system than previously imagined, combining different calls to make them meaningful just like humans do. See, we told you animals are awesome.