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When it comes to weekday talk-show fare, it's no surprise that I'm partial to Ellen and Oprah. Today, however, some props go out to Tyra Banks for following up on a feature that set off alarm bells here at PETA.

A few days ago, The Tyra Banks Show aired a segment about a woman who gushed about her "pet" capuchin monkey. Sure, capuchins are cute and smart, but the "Joe Blows" who buy baby monkeys soon realize that they cannot control the strong animals after they outgrow their diapers. Case in point: Oprah's recent interview with Charla Nash, who barely survived an attack by her friend's 15-year-old chimpanzee, Travis. And while capuchins are much smaller than chimpanzees, they are still very strong and very fast, and they have extremely sharp canines that can quickly do a great deal of damage to an unwitting person.

Consequently, many monkeys are discarded at pseudo-sanctuaries and shoddy roadside zoos because there simply aren't enough reputable sanctuaries to care for them all. Some species can live to be well into their 50s, and many primates who are abandoned by their "owners" face decades of misery in appalling conditions.

We wrote to Tyra Banks to express our concern that some viewers might be tempted to purchase a monkey of their own after seeing the segment on her show. We're heartened to learn that she's added a warning on her Web site stating, "Please note, PETA has contacted the show and does not recommend keeping monkeys as pets."

Folks, please let other people know that when it comes to capuchins and other exotic animals, the most humane action is always: "Monkey see, monkey do … not buy one!"

Posted by Karin Bennett

Earlier this year, Travis, a 15-year-old "pet" chimpanzee, was stabbed repeatedly, pounded with a shovel, and finally shot to death after he attacked a Connecticut woman named Charla Nash. Yesterday, Ms. Nash, who has been in a hospital since the attack, appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and spoke for the first time about her recovery. During the show, Nash declared her readiness to move on and said that she had an optimistic outlook on the future.

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The images of Nash are shocking, her buoyant hopefulness is inspiring, and both of those points should prompt another look at Travis' trajectory from his days as a baby chimpanzee to his years as a confined adult "pet." Travis, who appeared in several commercials when he was an infant, was just one of many exotic animals who have been torn away from their mothers at a young age in order to be raised by people who don't fully understand their needs.

Once chimpanzees reach adolescence, they become too strong and aggressive for their guardians to handle. They are then often abandoned at roadside zoos or—as was the case with Travis—stay in the home of a person who remains unaware of their tremendous strength until it's too late.

Chimpanzees and other exotic animals were never meant to be confined to people's homes, and keeping them as "pets" can often be lethal to both the animals and those who live near them.

Posted by Logan Scherer

Dancing With the Stars has hosted a virtual cornucopia of PETA supporters, from contestants Joanna Krupa and Steve-O to dancing pro Karina Smirnoff and judge Carrie Ann Inaba. So we were bummed to learn that DWTS planned to use a chimpanzee as a "guest judge" on last night's episode.

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Yesterday morning, several organizations, including PETA, Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest, and International Primate Protection League, contacted the show's executive producer, Conrad Green, to try to convince him not to air the segment. In our letter, we alerted Green to the fact that workers tear captive baby chimpanzees away from their mothers and beat them in order to force them to perform. We also sent along our moving video about great apes in entertainment, which is narrated by Anjelica Huston.

Anjelica must have worked her magic, because the kind Mr. Green got back to us right away to let us know that the segment featuring the chimpanzee would be cut and that he would never use great apes in the future. Good to his word, no chimpanzee put in an appearance on last night's show, according to the crazed avid DWTS fans on our staff.

This just goes to show that if you speak up, good people like Conrad Green are quick to do the right thing.

Posted by Alisa Mullins

citypages / CC

They're smart, playful, and ridiculously adorable—but they don't belong in ads.

The hip swimwear and clothing company Bonobos has shown that it's a champion for chimpanzees by pulling from its Web site a video that featured a chimpanzee cavorting in swim trunks.

Once Bonobos gave it some thought (maybe after its staff filled up on what must be their favorite brain food), it didn't seem like such a great (ape) idea to support an industry that captures baby apes and keeps them isolated in cages. The company realized that ads making apes look cute and clownish misrepresent these wild animals, who often end up dumped in roadside zoos when they get too large and strong to manage.

Here's what the company had to say:

"At the end of the day, we made Big Chimpin' with the best intentions—but we were also a little naive, and we're not afraid to say so. One of our missions as a company is to help out our friends in the Congo who are working so hard to improve the situation there, so in using a real chimp in our video, we were actually doing ourselves a disservice as well."

And what brought about the company's change of conscience? People like you!

"We thank everyone who wrote to us out of concern for Suzy's safety and dignity. In the end, it's because of your thoughtfulness and willingness to speak up that we learned so much!"

Three cheers to Bonobos! It's one more company—like Sprint Nextel, Gap, and SEGA—that has realized that apes do not aspire to be models or actors (even if they do seem cuter and more intelligent than some former child stars).

Posted by Heather Drennan

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Elvis swiveled his hips to that hit single decades ago, and today his daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, is singing a similar tune in behalf of a baby chimpanzee who is named after her.

An anonymous whistleblower at an Illinois Park District contacted PETA after witnessing the owners of Ed and Annette's Monkeys & More—a company that provides animals for parties and other functions—transport Lisa Marie (the baby chimpanzee) in a Rubbermaid bin to and from events.

Ed and Annette purchased Lisa Marie from a Missouri primate breeder who removed her from her mother within weeks of birth. Now, when she's not being dragged to community events and children's parties, Lisa Marie lives alone in a barren cage. She will likely grow too strong for her handlers by the time she's 8 years old and be tossed aside to a roadside zoo to languish for decades—if she doesn't have a breakdown and hurt someone first.

To show support for our efforts to rescue Lisa Marie and other baby chimpanzees from abuse in the entertainment industry, Lisa Marie Presley has written to Ed and Annette's Monkeys & More urging them to release her namesake to an accredited sanctuary.

As a lifelong Elvis fan, I think he'd agree that any business that cashes in on chimpanzees is "Too Much Monkey Business."

Posted by Karin Bennett

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I hope your closets are prepared, because I'm sure this bit of news will have you rushing out to stock up on vegan sweaters and skinny jeans. Both Levi's and Gap Inc. have pledged not to use great apes in future advertising campaigns!

Following the tragic death of Travis, a chimpanzee who formerly starred in Old Navy commercials, PETA approached Levi's and Old Navy's parent company, Gap Inc. (which also owns Gap and Banana Republic), to ask the companies not use apes in any future ads. Executives for both companies knew that their choice was clear once they learned that young apes who are used in commercials are ripped away from their mothers when they are only days old, trained by being beaten, kicked, and punched, and then discarded to live in filthy roadside zoos when they are too old and strong to handle.

Gap Inc. and Levi's join other progressive companies and organizations that have also signed our pledge, including Harris Teeter, SEGA, Honda, PUMA, Subaru, Keds, Yahoo!, and The Ad Council.

And, because we are never ones to let compassionate acts go unrewarded, we are sending both companies thank-you gifts for a job well done.

Posted by Shawna Flavell

citypages / CC

The recent attack on a Connecticut woman by a chimpanzee named Travis served as stark reminder that great apes should never be kept as "pets" or used for entertainment. In the wake of this tragedy, we are happy to announce that Young & Rubicam (Y&R) (the fourth largest ad agency in America) has called on all its offices worldwide not to use great apes in any future advertising campaigns.

In a commentary that appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Jane Goodall explains that the widespread portrayal of chimpanzees as cute clowns in ads, TV shows, and movies has misled the public about the dangers they pose. "Only a month ago," she writes, "Americans watching the Super Bowl may have laughed at an ad in which chimpanzees dressed as mechanics worked on a car. … Is it any wonder viewers might think that chimpanzees would make great pets?"

Y&R joins other progressive companies, including SEGA, Honda, PUMA, Subaru, Keds, Yahoo!, and The Ad Council, that have also pledged not to use great apes in ads.

Icing on the cake? Even the U.S. government is doing its part. On Tuesday, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved the Captive Primate Safety Act, which would ban the interstate transport of primates for use as pets. The bill is now going to the Senate, so please urge your senator to support this important legislation.

Posted by Liz Graffeo

On Monday, a 15-year-old chimpanzee named Travis, who was kept as a "pet" by a woman in Connecticut, went on a rampage and mauled a visitor. Travis was stabbed multiple times, "pounded" with a shovel, and eventually shot to death.

A former "star" of Coca-Cola and Old Navy commercials and an episode of the Maury Povich Show, Travis was "raised almost like a child by this family," according to a police officer. Great—except that 200-pound chimpanzees aren't children.

Keeping any wild animal as a "pet" is inhumane and dangerous. There have been scores of incidents in which captive chimpanzees inflicted grave injuries on people. This tragedy illustrates the need for Connecticut to add primates to its ban on potentially dangerous animals—which already includes big cats, bears, and wolves—and we have asked Governor Rell to do that.

Academy Award–winning actor Anjelica Huston has spoken up in a moving public service announcement in behalf of great apes used for entertainment. Check it out below:

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Thanks to companies like CareerBuilder and, more recently, Castrol Oil, whose ads show baby chimpanzees dressed up in clothes and "monkeying around" in offices and service stations, many people seem to think of chimpanzees as comical sub-human clowns. They aren't. They are wild animals who are torn away from their mothers at an obscenely young age and beaten into submission. By the time they are 8, they are big enough and strong enough to fight back, which earns them a one-way ticket to a cage in someone's basement or a concrete pit at a roadside zoo.

Neither Travis nor any other great ape belongs in show business. Who ends up happy in this story? Were those 30-second commercials really worth a lifetime of confinement in an unsuitable environment that eventually led to a woman's grave injury and Travis's death? Click here to take action on this issue.

Please, complain loudly any time you see a primate used in a movie, TV show, or advertisement. To learn more about this issue, you can catch PETA's Lisa Lange talking about Travis on Bill O'Reilly's show tonight at 8 p.m. on Fox News.

Posted by Alisa Mullins

In the '80s, when PETA began pushing cosmetics companies to stop testing their products on animals, those companies insisted that there were no alternatives to dripping mascara into rabbits' eyes and pumping copious quantities of lip gloss into the stomachs of guinea pigs. Miraculously, when consumers began sending cruelly tested products back to the companies and demanding their money back, the giants of the cosmetics industry—Avon, Mary Kay, Revlon, and others—found alternatives. Ah, what a difference a little incentive makes!

For years, PETA has been saying that non-animal alternatives are faster, cheaper, and more effective than animal tests, and just last summer, a report published by the not-so-shabby National Academy of Sciences said much the same thing. But as long as the federal government continues to pour money into cruel and pointless animal tests—and as long as vivisectors can map out a tenured career for themselves feeding at the government trough—animal experiments will continue. And even as we work to hold up a mirror to the evil that is vivisection, we need more incentives for non-animal research.

World-famous primate expert Dr. Jane Goodall hit the nail on the head last week when she appealed to the European Union to end the use of animals in experimentation, suggesting that a Nobel Prize be conferred for scientific breakthroughs that use "new ways of testing and experimenting that will not involve the use of live, sentient beings." She added, "We need to recognize at the outset that what we do to animals from their perspective certainly, and probably from ours, is morally wrong and unacceptable."

It's not the first time that Dr. Goodall has ignited a firestorm of controversy, throwing monkey wrenches into conventionally held prejudices and preconceptions. In 1960, Dr. Goodall shook the world by documenting tool use in chimpanzees, an ability that was believed to be uniquely human. Her mentor famously commented, "Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as humans."

Forty-eight years later, Dr. Goodall continues to turn conventional thinking on its head, and our guess is that she's right once again!

—Grace

Posted by Grace Friedan

PETA’s campaign to get the great apes out of advertising has been hitting some pretty big home runs lately—by way of a recap, our ad in Variety magazine calling for Hollywood insiders to blow the whistle on animal abuse received international media coverage. Then, shortly after that, I brazenly took credit for Speed Racer’s poor box performance on this very blog.

Raising awareness about the campaign is all very well, but it’s also nice to have something to show for it, and the recent decisions by multi-billion-dollar companies Subaru and CDW not to renew their ad campaigns featuring great apes are very real victories along the way to getting great apes out of advertising for good.

Subaru was given a PETA Compassionate Business Award last month after they made the following promise:

"Due to the issues surrounding their use in the entertainment industry, Subaru of America will not employ primates in its advertising in the future."

The folks at computer-equipment company CDW did things the other way round—they moved on to an ape-free ad campaign after we gave them a Litterbox Award for animal-unfriendly advertising (for the commercial with the dude and the chimpanzee setting up an office on a desert island).

But no matter how they come about, these are big victories, and it’s great to see major companies taking responsibility and helping other executives realize that any time an ad company suggests they trot out a chimpanzee for a new campaign, it’s time to hire a new ad company.

P.S. This just in – MovieTickets.com have just confirmed for us that they’ve ceased airing their ads which featured chimpanzees, and that they will no longer use great apes in their ad campaigns. Boo ya!

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Well, after a ton of hype, the Wachowski Brothers’ live action version of Speed Racer has turned out to be a really, incredibly expensive mistake. Just ask Perez.

Although I’m certainly not above gloating about a major Hollywood flop for no other reason than the sheer pleasure of it, there’s actually a bit of history to this one, since PETA contacted the Wachowski Brothers in July of last year about reports that a chimpanzee used on the set of Speed Racer had bitten one of the actors. The issue here is that, almost invariably, great apes used in film are beaten and abused to make them perform (hence, the occasional biting), then cast aside at filthy roadside zoos (or worse) once they’ve outlived their usefulness--no older than age 8! Angelica Huston recently filmed a great PSA for us on this issue, which you can watch here.

I’m willing to concede the remote possibility that there were some other factors that contributed to Speed Racer’s downfall in addition to the bad publicity they got from PETA (like, it could just be a lousy movie), so let’s just call this karma, and we’ll hope the movie’s producers can find a formula in future that doesn’t involve either a) abusing monkeys, or b) making sucky movies. Good luck next time, guys.

smh/Creative Commons

As of last week, according to The Daily Mail, Britain’s memory champion is no longer Ben Pridmore—who is capable of memorizing the order of a shuffled deck of cards in less than 30 seconds—but a 7-year-old chimpanzee named Ayumu, who soundly defeated Mr. Pridmore in a computer game which involved remembering the position of numbers on a screen.

Now I’m sure there are a bunch of things that Ayumu would prefer to be doing than playing a computer game with an accountant from Derby (such as, like, being a normal chimpanzee), but the widely reported story does show, yet again, just how intelligent primates are, and just how overwhelmingly hideous it is that it’s still legal to throw them in cages, pump them full of drugs, and dispose of them once we’ve gotten what we wanted out of them. I’m thinking specifically of you guys right now, Covance.

Not to be a total downer or anything, but here’s hoping that this story at least helps a few more people to make that connection.