Monkey Fright

Summary

National Institutes of Health (NIH) experimenter Elisabeth Murray has spent the last 30 years cutting open monkeys’ skulls, suctioning out or burning portions of their brains to cause permanent damage, and locking them in cages, where she shows them large rubber snakes and spiders, terrifying them. These horrific experiments haven’t advanced human health at all, of course—they’ve only tormented and killed animals and wasted precious medical resources. This cruelty is why 16-year-old Archit Kumar of Dublin, California, is on a mission to end speciesism, and he’s developed a video game called Monkey Fright to help accomplish that. The game brings awareness to the constant suffering and deprivation that these monkeys experience inside small, barren cages in windowless laboratories—day in and day out—where they’re denied companionship, sunshine, fresh air, exercise, and everything else they care about.