Toga was a beautiful and lively little monkey before he was deliberately brain damaged on 7/8/01. Filmed following surgery, he was seen hunched in the corner of the recovery cage, the long cut across the top of his head bloody and raw and his whole face looked swollen and distorted. The hopeless expression in his eyes was heartbreaking.

This shocking investigation by the BUAV reveals for the first time the full in-depth horror of primate research in the UK.

A horror that is part funded by public money. It strikes at the very heart of the medical research industry. For 10 months a BUAV (British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection) investigator worked inside one of the UK's leading academic brain research centres, Cambridge University, an institute with an international reputation that claims to be at the cutting edge of neuroscience. During that time, she secretly filmed and recorded the plight of hundreds of marmosets, deliberately brain damaged, imprisoned inside small, barren cages. This is what she saw. It is a nightmare world of pain, distress, suffering, torment and death...

At Cambridge University a colony of between 400-500 marmosets were kept in small, barren metal cages. The monkeys were being bred for use in brain experiments. The research looked at aspects of brain function, brain disorders and potential treatments. There were three areas of research taking place during the time of the BUAV investigation; a mixture of pure or basic research (simply finding out about the brain) and applied research (trying to develop a marmoset model of human illness):

• Using marmosets as 'models' for human stroke and testing new drugs
• Using marmosets as 'models' for human Parkinson's Disease (PD) and comparing experimental treatments
• Looking at the roles of specific brain regions in cognition and emotion

The experiments, some of which could last more than two years, included the deliberate infliction of brain damage (once, twice or three times) either by cutting or sucking out areas of the brain or by injecting toxins (this normally involved the top of the marmosets' skull being sawn open or drilled); training and testing on tasks before and after brain damage (water deprivation and food restriction were used to coerce the monkeys to carry out the tasks); testing novel drugs, brain grafts and gene therapy on the brain damaged monkeys.

The suffering and distress experienced by the marmosets was immense. Such brutality towards our closest living relatives in the animal kingdom cannot be allowed to continue. The BUAV is therefore calling for the Zero Option, a new campaign initiative to end the use of primates in research.

See for yourself some of the actual secret footage as filmed by our investigator.

Check out the latest press coverage and updated news of the campaign.