I want to tell you a story. It’s about a prisoner—a prisoner who has endured horrors the likes of which we can scarcely imagine.
For nearly two decades, the needles and scalpels of the prisoner’s captors have been piercing and cutting his flesh while he endures pain, confusion and abject terror. He has spent years caged in solitary confinement, battling the depression born of repeated trauma and prolonged loneliness.
This prisoner’s name is Beamish, and he is a rhesus macaque—a living, breathing, sentient individual who deserves the opportunity to make his own decisions with the agency and dignity that all beings are inherently due. He should be free, living in a lush forest where he would be part of a vast and intricate network of social relationships within his extended family, where he would learn from the elders and teach the young. Instead, he’s held in isolation and stripped of his autonomy, forced to live in artificial conditions imposed on him by laboratory experimenters.
