Nick Pyenson

I'm anesthetizing them and the animals go to sleep and I go into the trap and I grab the mom and infant and I clean out her cheek pouches and I bring her out.

I take the infant and actually stick the infant into the scarf that I'm wearing.

At some point, I hand him off to one of my assistants, and we finish getting everyone processed and collecting all of our biological samples, and I've got everyone else now back in the big recovery trap, and everyone's waking up, and it's going well.

Mom is awake now, and she's eating a few things, and the infant is still vocalizing.

He was just naughty.

And I remember thinking, oh, this is going to be a good release.

I look, everything's clear, and I tilt the big trap back, and boom, man, those animals take off like a shot.

And then I hear squeak.

That mom heard it the exact same moment that I did.

And I literally, I saw her basically like checking, I mean, she's running her hands over her body, her chest and her back, like, wait, where's my child?

She heard her infant squeak.

She spins around.

She comes straight back into a trap.

She knew what that trap meant.

So at that point, I had to decide what I was going to do.

And, you know, I think what finally changed for me was acknowledging that the macaques understood far more about what was happening to them than I had ever admitted.

I owe my scientific career to macaques.

I was no longer willing to be part of a system that refused to meet those two criteria, the best welfare and the best science.

When I left, I knew that every day, every night when I go to sleep, another thousand macaques have died.

Whether they've been intentionally killed at the end of an experiment, or whether they died of a diarrheal disease in a laboratory in the US or the UK or the EU,