LOS ANGELES, CA--(Marketwired - Aug 6, 2013) - Sunday (8/4/13) Last Chance for Animals (LCA) brought more public awareness to Air France's primate transportation policy by staging a protest that displayed a 20X50ft vinyl billboard facing up alongside one of LAX's busiest runways. Passengers, crew and pilots aboard incoming planes could not miss the massive message, "Air France Flies Monkeys to Lab Cruelty." The protest, located near the busy intersection of Sepulveda Blvd and Westchester, also educated heavy bypassing traffic.
The billboard is part of LCA's ongoing public awareness campaign aimed at ending the transportation of primates to research facilities by three major commercial airlines, Air France, Air India and China Southern. Despite opposition and mounting pressure from the public and animal advocacy groups, all airlines continue to transport laboratory animals, with Air France being the number one transporter.
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Every year, tens of thousands of primates, mainly rhesus macaque monkeys, are kidnapped from the wild, separated from their family groups, caged and bred in large-scale breeding facilities in Mauritius before undergoing the trauma of international flights in the cargo hold of passenger planes. Upon their arrival to research facilities, they are forced to spend the rest of their lives imprisoned in tiny cages and tormented in costly, unnecessary and inhumane experiments. The federal government spends over a billion U.S. tax dollars each year on primate research, the majority of it for pharmaceutical testing. Advanced alternative methods, such as epidemiological studies, in vitro research, human cell and tissue cultures and computer simulations prove that primate testing is no longer necessary.
Last Chance for Animals is an international animal advocacy organization that fights for the rights of animals by conducting undercover investigations that expose animal cruelty and launching public awareness campaigns. For more information, visit www.LCAnimal.org.
