Volkswagen abused monkeys for exhaust fumes tests

This video from the USA says about itself:

26 January 2018

Volkswagen accused of rigging experiment on monkeys prior to Dieselgate

According to The New York Times, citing details from an ongoing lawsuit brought against Volkswagen in the United States, in 2014, a few months before the Dieselgate scandal broke, VW was engaged in an effort to prove that the emission of their newest car models were cleaner thasn ever before and didn’t cause cancer.

Translated from Dutch NOS TV today:

The car corporation Volkswagen has apologized for animal testing in the USA where monkeys had to breathe in exhaust fumes. “We are convinced that the chosen scientific method was wrong and we apologize for the misconduct”, says a statement.

Commotion arose in Germany when, in the aftermath of the diesel fraud scandal, it became clear that monkeys had been used in America in 2014 in an attempt to show that modern VW diesel cars are much less polluting than older Beetles.

For the tests long-tailed macaques were used …

Disgusting and absurd

“Making ten monkeys willfully breathe exhaust fumes for hours is disgusting and absurd,” said Prime Minister Stephan Weil of Lower Saxony. That German federal state is a major shareholder in the car corporation. He demanded from Volkswagen that no such animal testing would ever be done again.

In the investigation report on the affair, the US American researcher Jake McDonald says that the monkeys were put in an air-tight room for four hours, where they breathed in emissions of diesel cars. To keep the animals quiet, cartoons were shown during the test. “They liked these”, said McDonald. …

The animal tests did not provide clear evidence of more modern diesels being ‘cleaner’.

Volkswagen was not the only manufacturer that used monkeys to test the emissions of diesel cars. The organization that funded the research was also sponsored by BMW and Daimler-Benz.