Animal Rights Activists Confront Cornell’s Laurie Glimcher Over Abandoned Chimps

When Laurie Glimcher returned to her Upper East Side apartment building after walking her dog, she found 15 activists protesting and informing her neighbors that she left 66 chimps to die in Liberia —  “Depriving Chimps of Food and Water, Laurie Glimcher – Primate Slaughter.”

Glimcher, who served on the board of the New York Blood Center (NYBC) when the organization decided to abandon its surviving former lab chimps, has been targeted by activists with seven protests at her home and at Cornell Medical College, where she is the Dean.

Laurie Glimcher attempts to ignore protesters at her building as she returns from walking her dog, who she presumably does provide with food and water.

In late October, one month after the protests began, Glimcher resigned from the NYBC board in an apparent attempt to extricate herself from the scandal. Activists, however, continue to target her because her resignation did nothing to help the chimps abandoned on her watch.

After a two hour protest, the remaining activists pose for a photo at Laurie Glimcher’s building.

In March, 2015, NYBC cut all funding for the chimps, leaving them to die of starvation and thirst. The organization has attempted to justify its decision on the grounds that the chimps are owned by the government of Liberia. What NYBC has not acknowledged is that it was their researchers who created the group of captive chimps by kidnapping them from the jungle and breeding them at its laboratory in Liberia.

Chimps abandoned by New York Blood Center Board Members, including Laurie Glimcher, Dean of Cornell Medical College

NYBC is now attempting to shift the responsibility for the care of these chimps to animal advocacy groups, which have neither the resources nor the obligation to use their limited funds to pay for long-term care of the chimps. NYBC earned several hundred million dollars in royalties off of the research conducted on these chimps and publicly promised to provide them with lifelong care when the studies concluded.

NYBC states on its website that the charity cannot divert funds from its lifesaving work to “other efforts,” but it can pay its executives hundreds of thousands of dollars?

When news broke that NYBC had abandoned the chimps, the Humane Society of the United States created a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to pay for their care as a stopgap measure.

Please join the Facebook page: New York Blood Center: Do the Right Thing to stay apprised of news and to participate in online actions to pressure NYBC executives and board members to fulfill their promise to provide lifelong care to their laboratory chimps.