Photo Rex/Shutterstock

His Holiness the Dalai Lama

March 18, 1998

His Holiness the Dalai Lama
The Office of Tibet
241 East 32nd Street
New York, NY 10016

Your Holiness:

It has come to my attention that you will be leading the commencement address at Emory University this year. As you are an internationally beloved spiritual leader of non-violent beliefs as well as a man of genuine compassion, I am compelled to inform you of the brutality, pain and anguish suffered by animals at this university, and I am asking you to speak on behalf of the many sentient beings there who continue to suffer and die in silence.

Each year, over 100,000 animals lose their lives in Emory laboratories after enduring the agony of viral infections, chemical addiction, prolonged isolation and psychological abuse.

In representing the horror of animal research at Emory University, one chimpanzee in particular stands out among the many thousands of innocent individuals subjected to incarceration and suffering at this institution. His name was Jerom. Along with 13 other chimpanzees at Emory’s Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center, Jerom was repeatedly injected with an exceptionally virulent strain of HIV, but unlike the others he contracted the virus and eventually succumbed to the severe physical and emotional trauma of AIDS, tormented and ravaged by the disease until he finally was killed on February 13, 1996.

In an effort to prevent a repeat of Jerom’s fate, his caregiver kept a journal of Jerom’s final days to document his painful experience, hoping that someone would halt this cruelty. She writes, “During this time Jerom began to recognize me as his caregiver. He was so severely weakened by the wasting that he had difficulty holding his head up. He would sit with his knees drawn up and hold his chin in his hands. He had to manually turn his head in the direction he wished to face. At times, Jerom would hold his head and sob quietly. Other times, he would climb down from his bed board and curl up in a fetal position on the floor in front of me.”

I challenge this suffering, especially in light of the burgeoning millions of people all over the world who want a science that is not based on the devastation of others, a true science that transcends the pain and destruction of animal-based research, one that yields dependable and sustaining benefits without torturing and killing individuals. This kind of science can be a reality, but only if enough voices, like yours, speak out.

Humans are a conscientious species, yet if we continue to barter ethics for scientific justification and trade in one life for another, then I question such a cost to compassion and ultimately to humanity.

To give you a more complete understanding of Jerom’s tragedy and the trauma caused by this kind of senseless research to both animals and humans, I’ve enclosed the memoir from Jerom’s caregiver and a booklet, Aping Science: A Critical Analysis of Research at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center.

It is not my intent to merely shock or horrify you. The witness you bear to atrocities against your own people and so many others has certainly seen to this end already. But it is your witness itself, your encounters with enduring cruelty, that I appeal to now. In your entire life—here now, before and after—can you ever see how the purposeful wounding and infecting and killing of some should be used to alleviate the suffering of others?

Please search your heart and offer what you find there to the students receiving your commencement address. For the human and non-human animals at Emory University, I urge you to put into the words that I cannot, what it means to the human soul, psyche and spirit to benefit by barbarism and cruelty.

With enduring hope.