It’s a monkey fright night! PETA has obtained never-before-seen video footage of government experimenters terrifying brain-damaged monkeys with fake snakes and spiders as part of a decades-long project in which monkeys are abused and terrorized. It cost you, the taxpayers, $47 million.

Murray claims that her experiments shed light on human neuropsychiatric disorders, but what is abundantly clear is that they are designed to elicit maximum fear.

Murray carves out a section of a monkey’s skull then injects toxins into the brain or suctions out portions of it, causing permanent and traumatic damage.

The monkeys are then put all alone in a small metal cage, which is contained inside a larger box painted black. A guillotine-like door at the front of the cage is suddenly raised, revealing something inherently frightening to monkeys—a snake or a spider. Murray’s snakes and spiders are artificial but realistic-looking, and some can move or even jump.

Because monkeys, like all primates, innately fear snakes, some respond defensively—freezing or looking or turning away. Others shake their cage. Some grimace or smack their lips—signs of submission in the face of a threat. The monkeys endure this same torture repeatedly. When Murray has finished with them, they may be killed or recycled into other experiments, to be further tormented.

For more detailed information about the horrors that monkeys in Murray’s laboratory endure, click here.

Elisabeth Murray has terrorized and butchered hundreds of monkeys in her laboratory, but each one imprisoned there is an individual with their own experiences, feelings, and desires. Here are some of their stories.

Murray’s experiments have raked in tens of millions of taxpayer dollars—nearly $47 million since 1998. The footage obtained by PETA is from an NIH project called “Neural Substrates of Reward Processing and Emotion.” Murray has received $16.4 million for this project since 2007.

NIH throws taxpayer money at Murray’s laboratory hand over fist. But not one treatment or cure for humans has come out of it in 30 years.

Murray likely knows that her experiments are catastrophically flawed. In a 2007 paper, she and her colleagues acknowledged that, because the monkeys they used and eventually killed were purchased from breeding colonies, “we cannot rule out the possibility that environmental factors such as stress contributed to the genetic influence on cognition we report.”

Murray’s experiments are an affront to human decency and an embarrassment to science. But for decades, other researchers have been studying the roles of specific brain regions in emotional regulation and behavioral flexibility in humans, and that is producing reliable, applicable results. Research money needs to be redirected into human-relevant models and cutting-edge methods that hold promise for humans.

Murray’s “research” has amounted to 30 years of monkey torture. (To see what SHE fears, go here.) This is not who we want to be as a species. This is not how we succeed. Take action now: Join PETA honorary director and Hollywood A-lister Anjelica Huston, who wrote a letter asking that the funding for these cruel experiments stop, and let NIH know that you won’t stand for this pointless cruelty. Please use the form below to demand that our government stop these experiments and immediately shut down this lab!

“People are dying for lack of ventilators, effective treatments, and even hospital beds, and many Americans are now confronting difficult choices about the best way to use their shrinking resources. NIH is in a similar position. Studies that are pointless, wasteful, or extremely cruel should be ended now, and that means the emphasis should be placed on non-animal studies, because they offer real promise.”

—Anjelica Huston