Animal transport company JKL Secure Freight, a repeat offender of the federal Animal Welfare Act (AWA), was recently once again cited by the feds after workers left 336 endangered monkeys crammed in tiny crates on the tarmac of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport for as long as 95 minutes in 87-degree heat. PETA has asked the Atlanta Police Department to investigate.

It was so hot during the July 16 incident that an employee had to take breaks while loading the long-tailed macaques, according to a recently released U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) report. It was the first time in several years that monkeys were flown into the airport.

The USDA also cited the company for tilting, dragging, and dropping the crates as they were being loaded onto a truck, likely causing even more trauma for the monkeys trapped inside. The animals were imported from Mauritius via Ethiopian Airlines. PETA has urged the airline to stop shipping monkeys for laboratory experiments.

A monkey is confined to a shipping crate. Credit: PETA

“It’s outrageous that these terrified monkeys were flown halfway around the world, only to be tossed around like rag dolls and left to bake in the July sun,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA is calling on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to stop the importation of all monkeys for experimentation immediately.”

JKL has been cited for three violations of the AWA this year alone, including a violation in May for transporting 167 macaques cross-country without proper veterinary exams.

Importing monkeys poses a grave and potentially fatal public health risk. Monkeys infected with tuberculosis—a highly infectious disease that’s readily transmitted to humans—have already been imported to North American labs from Mauritius, and monkeys from Cambodia have arrived infected with a bacterium so deadly that the U.S. classifies it as a bioterrorism agent. Long-tailed macaques have been driven to the brink of extinction in part because people capture the animals in nature to be sold to the experimentation industry.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information on PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org, listen to The PETA Podcast, or follow the group on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, or Instagram.