In a revealing profile published in its most recent issue, The New Yorker delves into the chaotic escape of 43 rhesus macaques from the Alpha Genesis primate facility in Yemassee, South Carolina, in 2024.
The article, titled “The Runaway Monkeys Upending the Animal-Rights Movement,” highlights how this incident became a flashpoint in the fight against taxpayer-funded animal testing, with White Coat Waste Project (WCW) emerging as the key player in turning the fugitives into a political cause célèbre on Capitol Hill.
However, amid the drama, the piece reveals simmering tensions within the animal activism world, particularly PETA’s resentment over WCW’s aggressive, results-driven tactics.
The New Yorker details how WCW has laser-focused on defunding federal animal experiments, forging unlikely alliances with MAGA figures like Rep. Nancy Mace and anti-establishment voices to slash NIH grants and push agencies toward non-animal alternatives.
This extremely successful approach has ruffled feathers in the animal activism world, typically dominated by leftists, with PETA representatives absolutely unloading their apparent jealousy. When asked about WCW’s pointed remarks, PETA’s Alka Chandna told the magazine, “White Coat Waste has young-male-testosterone energy, and it seems like they attack all the other groups for fundraising purposes.”
Even sharper was PETA scientist Lisa Jones-Engel’s reaction to WCW’s criticism of NIH official Nicole Kleinstreuer, a Dr. Anthony Fauci fangirl, saying, “Have they lost their f-cking minds?”
The article notes that WCW’s absolutist stance, demanding immediate ends to taxpayer-funded animal research, has isolated it from the ineffective establishment groups like PETA that are instead cozying up with NIH officials who continue funding animal labs.
Ironically, while PETA criticizes White Coat Waste for its uncompromising approach to removing animals from taxpayer-funded labs, the liberal group has repeatedly attempted to claim credit for White Coat Waste’s campaigns and victories, which have been significant and agenda-setting in Washington during both Trump administrations.
As the New Yorker article mentions, White Coat Waste has “done more than anyone to turn the [monkey lab] fugitives into a cause célèbre on Capitol Hill.”
The group has unquestionably been the driving force behind the government’s shift away from primate testing and other animal experiments under both Republican-led and Democrat-led administrations and Congresses. Something that PETA and other polarizing and partisan left-wing animal rights groups failed to achieve for decades.
Prompted by a White Coat Waste campaign that started under the first Trump administration, Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins said in May of this year that his agency is ahead of schedule on eliminating all primate testing. This marks the first time a federal agency is completely ending primate use.
During President Trump’s first term in the White House, the Food and Drug Administration canceled nicotine tests on monkeys uncovered by White Coat Waste and sent over two dozen of the animals to a sanctuary in Florida, marking the first time the agency had done so.
White Coat Waste’s campaigning and lobbying later caused a drastic reduction in FDA primate testing and prompted it to close its largest monkey laboratory in 2023.
In August of this year, in response to Gateway Pundit’s reporting about a White Coat Waste investigation exposing NIH funding for transgender experiments on monkeys, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said, “We are working ferociously to end all non-human primate studies except in cases that are vital to saving human life, and for which no other option exists.” Independent journalist Laura Loomer also reported that Kennedy told her his agency “is working with the White House to review and cut these ongoing primate testing grants exposed by WCW” and that “he looks forward to working with White Coat Waste to identify and cut more wasteful, inhumane, and unnecessary taxpayer-funded animal tests.”
Just this past week, as Gateway Pundit, Fox News, and other media outlets reported, White Coat Waste was the first group to flag that the monkeys that escaped from a truck crash in Mississippi came from a laboratory primarily funded by the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Fauci.
Despite these and other accomplishments when Trump was last in the White House, PETA wrote in a now-deleted November 2021 X post that, “Trump did nothing to stop animal experimentation.”
PETA was also among the many animal rights organizations that stayed silent when the Biden Administration canceled Trump’s plans to end animal testing at the Environmental Protection Agency, an effort that current EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin resumed with the help of White Coat Waste when he took office this year.
The leftist organization’s current criticism of White Coat Waste seems to be overcompensation for its own ineffectiveness.
In May 2025, PETA claimed that it shut down a monkey lab at Harvard, stating, “HUGE victory! In a massive win for animals, the lights have finally gone out on Margaret Livingstone’s dark experiments on baby monkeys after years of sustained pressure from PETA.” However, it appears that funding for the controversial experiments may have been reinstated by a federal judge just a month later.
On PETA’s watch, the primate testing problem exploded in the United States. Despite its $70 million-plus annual budget, the number of primates in labs reached record highs and PETA has not succeeded in closing any federal primate labs in ten years. WCW has reversed the trend and shut them down inside various agencies, retired monkeys, and enacted historic legislation with a budget that’s over 10 times smaller than PETA’s.
PETA’s complaints about WCW’s “testosterone energy” also ring hollow, given their own history of aggressive stunts.
In April 2020, they organized drive-by protests at NIH headquarters and the homes of Director Francis Collins and NIH experimenter Elisabeth Murray, with cars decorated in fake snakes and spiders to mimic her fear tests on monkeys (which, ironically, were first uncovered by WCW in 2019). The following year, PETA planned a “shriek-in” outside NIH experimenter Elisabeth Murray’s home, where supporters in monkey masks blasted recordings of distressed primates to protest her work.
This hypocrisy also extends to PETA’s attacks on competing animal organizations for donor dollars.
In December 2024, PETA circled the ASPCA’s New York headquarters with a “Hell on Wheels” truck blaring turkey distress cries and accusing the ASPCA of supporting “sexual abuse of turkeys” through welfare certifications. The following month, PETA activists were arrested after attempting to dump frozen manure outside the ASPCA’s office in an embarrassing failed stunt protesting “humane-washing” of factory farms.
During another “aggressive” incident, a PETA protester in a pig costume was arrested for chaining himself to the door of a Humane Society gala, chanting against their support for factory farm labels, while others disrupted the event.
For their part, White Coat Waste makes no apologies and takes pride in its numerous victories.
“We’re proud of our hard-hitting campaigns and historic victories against government animal labs that made this issue high politics, front page news, and won the support of President Trump, his family, and his administration. We’ll never apologize for aggressively fighting to save animals from government abuse and to hold federal bureaucrats accountable for lying to taxpayers and wasting animals’ lives and taxpayers’ money. PETA hates us because they ain’t us,” said Justin Goodman, White Coat Waste’s Senior Vice President since 2016 and a former PETA director who has criticized his ex-employer’s divisive and futile approach.
The post PETA Goes on Jealous Rant Against White Coat Waste, Slams Successful Anti-Animal Testing Crusaders for Having ‘Young-Male-Testosterone Energy’ While Trying to Steal Credit for Their Wins appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.