"There were forty-three runaways, part of a troop of roughly fifty.... All were rhesus macaques, a species known for its deep communal bonds and larkish intelligence...."

"'Macaques are the marines of monkeys, because they never leave a man behind,' Lisa Jones-Engel, a primatologist and senior science adviser at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (peta), told me. 'They could have followed the woods and ended up in a rhesus nirvana. What kills me is they were crying for their friends and daughters to come with them.'... Groups that oppose animal testing, historically the province of liberals and progressives, were in the process of forging a delicate alliance with the incoming Trump Administration. An estimated third of the forty-eight-billion-dollar budget of the N.I.H. goes toward funding animal research—and animal protectionists, Make America Healthy Again adherents, and anti-establishment libertarians were realizing that they shared a desire to see that budget slashed...."

From "The Runaway Monkeys Upending the Animal-Rights Movement/A troop of macaques escaped one of the largest primate-breeding facilities in America. Now a strange coalition of uncompromising activists and maga loyalists is demanding that all lab animals be set free" (The New Yorker).

White Coat Waste was founded in 2011 by Anthony Bellotti, a Republican consultant who, while campaigning to defund the Affordable Care Act and Planned Parenthood, discovered that he could reframe the issue of animal experimentation as yet another example of federal misspending. His group eschews associations with “animal rights,” describing itself instead as a government-watchdog organization “uniting liberty-lovers and animal-lovers.”... Unlike other groups that oppose animal research, White Coat Waste does not concern itself with what people eat, wear, or hunt....