Animals’ right advocate PETA says the Government of Ethiopia arrested its staff, PETA Asia Senior Vice President Jason Baker, his 11-year-old son, and PETA Foundation U.K. Campaign Leader Reuben Skeats.
“They have been imprisoned for more than 14 hours and are currently being held on mattresses on the floor of a jail in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. They were arrested while scouting for a future demo location in that city at the Ethiopian Airlines ticket office on Churchill Street,” PETA said in a statement with photos of the staff at Addis Ababa airport.
“They were planning to stage a demonstration wearing prison uniforms and monkey masks outside the company’s headquarters today to demand that it stop cramming endangered monkeys into tiny crates and shipping them halfway around the globe to be mutilated, tormented, and ultimately killed in laboratories. They have been held since 6:30 p.m. yesterday at Legar police station.”
In a quote sent via email, Jason Baker, SVP of PETA Asia, said: “We’ve been held here overnight simply for speaking up for monkeys who are suffering because Ethiopian Airlines ships them to laboratories in the U.S. The real crime is what’s being done to these monkeys. Being detained in a cell isn’t fun, but it’s nothing compared to what the monkeys just a few miles down the road at the airport are subjected to—which will only get worse when they’re imprisoned in U.S. laboratories. I would do this again to help them.”
“My 11-year-old son is with me. We were on holiday in Nairobi last week, and when I learned that Ethiopian Airlines wasn’t going to stop shipping monkeys to laboratories, 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 natural homes—as they should be—in Kenya.”
PETA U.S. Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo said: “Sitting in prison is a miserable way to spend the night, but we know that Jason and his son will be home soon—unlike the thousands of monkeys who are torn from their families and sent halfway around the globe to die in U.S. laboratories. Ethiopian Airlines is contributing to this misery, and it’s one of the few airlines in the entire world willing to do so. Shame on them. PETA and our supporters around the world will continue to urge the company to do the right thing.”
