—Edward Taub When night fell, Ingrid Newkirk would stand outside, walkie-talkie in hand, playing lookout as Alex Pacheco slipped through the darkened labs of the Institute for Behavioral Research (IBR) in Silver Spring, Maryland, taking photos and scribbling in his notebook. Over the course of several weeks in late August and early September 1981, Pacheco surreptitiously escorted a number of sympathetic veterinarians and primatologists who supported animal rights through the facility, showing them the rusty cages encrusted with monkey feces, cages whose bent and broken wires poked up from the floor like stakes that threatened to impale the monkeys. He showed them the signs of rodent infestation and of insects. But mostly he showed them the animals: sixteen crab-eating macaques, all adult males, and one adult female rhesus. Among the seventeen, thirty-nine fingers had been gnawed off, and arms were covered with oozing, unbandaged lesions. Was this standard for a primate lab, Pacheco asked each expert, or was something wrong—very wrong—here?
