The protest is part of LCA's ongoing awareness campaign to end the transportation of primates by major airlines. Currently, Air France is the number one transporter of laboratory animals in the world. They are one of three commercial airlines continuing to transport primates for the research industry, despite mounting pressure from the public and animal advocacy groups to put an end to it. Earlier this year, United Airlines and China Eastern joined other airlines in their refusal to ship primates to laboratories. 

Every year, tens of thousands of primates, mainly rhesus macaque monkeys, are taken from the wild, separated from their family groups, caged and bred in large scale breeding facilities before undergoing the trauma of international flights in the cargo hold of passenger planes. 

Upon their arrival to research facilities, they are forced to spend the rest of their lives imprisoned in tiny cages and tormented in costly, unnecessary and inhumane experiments. The federal government spends over a billion U.S. tax dollars each year on primate research, the majority of it for pharmaceutical testing. Advanced alternative methods, such as epidemiological studies, in vitro research, human cell and tissue cultures and computer simulations prove that primate testing is no longer necessary.