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PETA apparently submitted evidence to the US Department of Transportation that Quebedeaux’s Transport appeared to be illegally transporting monkeys to labs, the organization said in a news release.
An email from the DOT obtained by Daily Voice confirms Quebedeaux’s Transport, Jeff Quebedeaux, is "out of the transportation business."
In January 2022, a trailer carrying 100 monkeys overturned in a crash with a dump truck on I-80 near Route 54 in Montour County. Responders spent several hours trying to contain some animals that had escaped.
The company's shutdown nearly a year later follows owner Jeff Quebedeaux’s alleged failed attempt to turn a defunct Louisiana human prison into a quarantine facility that would house hundreds of monkeys imported into the U.S. for use in laboratories, PETA said.
Quebedeaux took to LinkedIn to proclaim his innocence, acknowledging a federal investigation but denying any wrongdoing.
"Just for the record I want to let everybody know that I have done nothing wrong in the industry and plan on not doing anything wrong because the feds have made me sign paperwork saying that I would never come back to the research field," he writes. "The only thing I have done for the last 39 years of my life."
PETA sent complaints to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the USDA and provided local and state officials with information about the potential hazards of warehousing monkeys in a decrepit prison.
Quebedeaux was apparently denied the licenses needed to warehouse monkeys, and the local and state agencies cracked down on his proposal for a quarantine facility.
For years, Quebedeaux’s trucks crisscrossed the U.S. carrying some of the tens of thousands of monkeys imported and used for experimentation, PETA said.
The vast majority of the monkeys transported were long-tailed macaques —one of two species of monkeys pushed to the brink of extinction by experimenters’ demands. These monkeys, who PETA says can harbor diseases transmissible to humans, land at U.S. airports and travel on U.S. highways, often for thousands of miles, before reaching quarantine facilities.
“PETA’s persistence has flushed Quebedeaux’s Transport—and its plan to build a massive monkey quarantine facility at a dilapidated human prison—down the drain where it belongs,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “We are now calling on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to end the importation of monkeys destined for laboratories.”
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