“One after another, citizens came up. And they just hammered that council with additional concerns. You know, one of the guys, his place is 500ft from there. He's like, ‘what do you think this is going to do to me, to my family? How dare you expose me and my family and this community! None of you all live around there. How could you have not brought this to a vote?’ A woman got up and started talking about the research modernization deal. Another woman got up and started talking about land values. A man got up and started talking about malaria. I mean, it's just one after another. They came up and I just, I don't know… I could have just started levitating because I was so buoyed by what this community was doing. And it has not stopped since then.” – Lisa Jones-Engel

 

There's a small town in Georgia called Bainbridge. It has 15,000 residents, and recently those 15,000 residents were duped by their city and county officials. What happened was that some people came in and proposed a deal to build a $400 million monkey breeding facility, and city and county officials not only agreed to do it, but they gave them almost $60 million in handouts, a 20-year tax abatement, and hundreds of acres of public land.

And when the people of Bainbridge found out, they reached out to PETA’s Senior Science Advisor, Dr. Lisa Jones Engel.

Lisa spent many years working with primates in biomedical laboratories. She knows more about the industry than just about anyone. In 2019, when she couldn't take it anymore, she left the biomedical world and joined forces with PETA with the aim to take the primate testing industry down. And that is exactly what she’s doing.