PBS Documentary on Chimpanzees Rescued from Experiments Takes Emmy

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PBS Documentary on Chimpanzees Rescued from Experiments Takes Emmy IDA provided extensive research and documentation for award-winning film Billy Jo (pictured) was a circus chimpanzee before being sold to LEMSIP, a research laboratory. He lived out his years at the Fauna Foundation in Carignan, Quebec. (Cici Clark © EBC) At the Emmy ceremony in New York on September 24th, a powerful documentary that tells the stories of hundreds of chimpanzees saved from research labs was awarded a News and Documentary Emmy for "Outstanding Individual Achievement in a Craft: Research." IDA provided extensive research and documentation for the film, and we offer our congratulations to the

filmmaker, Allison Argo, for her groundbreaking work on the cruelties perpetrated on animals by the biomedical research industry. "We congratulate Ms. Argo and PBS for bringing this important and painful subject to the attention of viewers nationwide," said IDA president Elliot M. Katz, DVM. "We are proud to have played a role in the development of this film that powerfully and poignantly exposes the suffering that chimpanzees endure in labs." The documentary, titled "Chimpanzees: An Unnatural History," tells the stories of hundreds of chimpanzees saved from chimpanzee research labs, two of which -- The Coulston Foundation of Alamogordo and New York University's Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates -- were shut down amidst intense and years-long IDA

investigations and campaigns. IDA has been in the forefront of working to stop research on chimpanzees and exposing their abuse in labs for over 13 years. IDA Research Director Eric Kleiman provided Ms. Argo, the writer, producer and director of the film, with extensive support and documentation relating to the decades-long controversy over hundreds of chimpanzees held in labs in New Mexico by the Air Force and the Coulston Foundation. We are pleased that an excellent film that documented the terrible cruelty to chimpanzees that In Defense of Animals ended through our closure of the Coulston Foundation finally came to fruition and aired on PBS. "While we celebrate this film that documented the transformation in the lives of the chimps who made it out, we cannot forget those who were left behind," Katz said. Two

hundred and fifty chimpanzees are still held at Holloman Air Force Base in the lab that was operated by Coulston and was taken over by the federal National Institutes of Health in 2001. In addition to providing Ms. Argo with documentation of the abuses taking place at the Coulston Foundation of Alamogordo, IDA also provided evidence of criminal animal cruelty at this federal lab to Otero County District Attorney Scot Key. After independently corroborating the information, Key filed unprecedented criminal cruelty charges against Charles River Laboratories, the government contractor that now operates the lab. The case is currently under appeal at the New Mexico Supreme Court. For more information on IDA's ongoing campaign to save chimpanzees from labs and end chimpanzee research, please visit www.idausa.org/endchimpresearch. We welcome your feedback and appreciate your donations. Please join today! All donations to IDA are tax-deductible. Home Humane Research Take Action Campaigns FAQ Materials Contact Us Get Active Donate

If a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals. -Albert Einstein