An American animal rights activist and his 11-year-old son have been held in a cell in an Ethiopian jail and forced to sleep on a mattress on the floor overnight after they got too close to the headquarters of Ethiopian Airlines at Addis Ababa Airport.
Jason Baker, the Vice President of International Operations at animal rights organization PETA, along with his son and another staffer, have been held in prison in the Ethiopian capital following their arrest on Wednesday when they went looking for a spot to carry out a demonstration against the airline.
The trio had made their way to the Ethiopian capital to protest the decision of the country’s flag carrier to continue taking part in the transportation of hundreds of endangered monkeys, which are flown thousands of miles away to animal testing labs in the United States.
Baker had been on vacation with his son in Nairobi, Kenya, but when he heard that Ethiopian Airlines had rejected calls for it to stop taking part in the shipment of long-tailed monkeys, he decided to cut his holiday short and go straight to Addis Ababa to hold a demonstration outside Ethiopian’s office buildings.
Along with PETA’s UK Campaign Leader Reuben Skeats, the trio were arrested by Ethiopian police and have been imprisoned for hours, despite the fact that they hadn’t held a demonstration.
The group had planned to stand outside Ethiopian Airlines HQ dressed in prison outfits and monkey masks, but their fate remains unknown.
“My 11-year-old son is with me. We were on holiday in Nairobi last week and when I learned that Ethiopian Airlines was not going to stop shipping monkeys to laboratories,” Baker said from inside jail.
“I cut my vacation short. It’s important to teach my son that we must speak up for animals. We had just seen monkeys living in their own homes in the wild in Kenya, and that’s the way it should be.”
“Being detained in a cell is not fun, but it’s nothing compared to what monkeys just a few miles down the road at the airport go through. It will only get worse when they are imprisoned in laboratories in America. I would do it again,” Baker continued.
PETA has accused Ethiopian Airlines of packing monkeys into tiny wooden shipping crates, which are then forced to sit in their own faeces, urine, and blood as they are transported for many hours to the United States.
In January 2023, Ethiopian Airlines was accused of shipping 584 monkeys into the U.S. without mandatory health certificates, while in July 2023, PETA said Ethiopian Airlines was cited by the USDA for failing to give airport ground crew proper feeding and watering instructions.
Many airlines have already publicly denounced any involvement in shipping monkeys and other animals to testing labs, although Ethiopian Airlines has seemingly refused to join the growing rollcall of carriers that don’t want to take part in this practice.
In 2022, Kenya Airways said it would no longer transport long-tailed macaque monkeys to the United States, although that decision was the result of an incident that occurred after the shipment had already arrived in the United States.
In that incident, a shipment of monkeys was involved in a road traffic collision in Pennsylvania, which resulted in four primates escaping. A good samaritan motorist who went to help became seriously unwell after contact with the monkeys and Kenya Airways was highlighted as being responsible for shipping them to the US.
Americans think they can do as they please in other countries.
Take note of the above.
Wait, what? They were simply looking for a location to peacefully protest the torture and killing of monkeys. How is that a crime? The crime is vivisection.
Bravo to these brave protestors for speaking up for monkeys. It’s time for all airlines to stop facilitating the cruel and deadly trade in primates that supplies laboratories with their victims. Using living beings as nonconsenting test subjects is not only unethical but produces grossly misleading results that do not benefit human health.
Bravo ! Hope they will be free soon. And shame on Ethiopian Airlines!
Congratulations on Ethiopian Airlines for not giving in to the blackmail by these groups. The world needs new vaccines and new medications so people stop dying from cancer Ebola Covid and other diseases. Hopefully the detainees don’t get sick in the jail in Ethiopia as I’m sure they will be the first to reject medications that were created thanks to animal research.
Testing on animals has been a spectacular failure that has resulted in the loss of trillions of dollars and has cost the lives of innumerable humans and other animals. Experiments on one species almost always fail to predict results in another. Even the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, acknowledges that 95% of all drugs that are shown to be safe and effective in animal tests fail in human trials. Richard Klausner, former head of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), has observed, “The history of cancer research has been a history of curing cancer in the mouse. We have cured mice of cancer for decades and it simply didn’t work in humans.” Studies have found that the chemicals that cause cancer in rats only caused cancer in mice 46 percent of the time. If extrapolating from rats to mice is so problematic, how can we extrapolate results from mice, rats, guinea pigs, rabbits, cats, dogs, monkeys, and other animals to humans? We can’t, because of vast biological differences in species. Modern, sophisticated, human-relevant methods exist and hold much more promise for curing human diseases, and we should them. God bless these brave souls for speaking out against senseless torment and killing of animals, and I’m so glad they’re going home!
Since when is freedom of speech illegal in Africa? Thank you to these brave heroes for calling out Ethiopian Airlines for transporting monkeys to a torturous, unnecessary death.
ANIMAL RESEARCH SAVES LIVES!!!!!!!
My wife is alive because of a drug developed as a result of animal research. I love animals but do their lives come before human health ?
Animal experimentation is a farce. My father is dead because animal experimenters have wasted time and money on trying to cure Alzheimer’s in mice rather than humans.
Since when is freedom of speech illegal in Africa? Thank you to these brave heroes for calling out Ethiopian Airlines for transporting monkeys to torturous, unnecessary deaths.
The world depends on airlines like ET to support the development of new drugs and treatments. I wholly support ET in their decision.
Holding people in jail over plans to peacefully protest the torment and killing of monkeys? That’s just nuts. Let these peaceful people go! The world is watching. (Writing from Canada)
Shame on Ethiopian Airlines! This is unbelievable!
I have farming project in Mauritius, we spend money and three months to grow our crops and feed people and our families and sell our crop to feed our families, Then the monkeys comes and in two or three day the monkeys consume all the food we grow, our solution is shoot, kill or poison the monkeys. Our other solution is have the trapper catch the monkey and we get some money back for the damage they did and the monkeys go to good cause in science and save the lives of sick persons in the world full of new pandemic and disease, I think the better decision is to let the monkey be use for science and any airline company should support them moving those monkeys as long as under proper condition. A live monkey in science is better than a dead monkey in the field.