PETA’s Monkey Speech Claim Fails

By John M. Simpson.  As we previously reported, animal rights group, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), sued the National Institutes of Health and Mental Health in federal court seeking to compel the defendants to install a live video feed in the defendants’ laboratories so that PETA can receive the communications of the rhesus macaques that are being used in medical research.  PETA claimed a First Amendment right “as a listener” to the live feed and a Fifth Amendment “liberty and property interest” in the same channel of communication.  The court granted the defendants’ motion to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction.  PETA v. Nat’l Inst. of Mental Health, No. 8:25-cv-00736-PX, 2026 WL 39219 (D. Md. Feb. 13, 2026).

The court lacked jurisdiction, first, because defendants had sovereign immunity.  While the Administrative Procedure Act could be the basis for waiving sovereign immunity, it could only do so if the agency action at issue was final.  The action here was not final because “the challenged agency action is neither discrete nor specific, but rather cuts to the very kind of programmatic decisions that would require reconciling needs of the experimenters with the public’s video access of the same.”  2026 WL 39210, at *3.  Nor had PETA shown that the defendants had determined PETA’s rights or obligations.  PETA could cite “neither binding nor persuasive authority” that animal communications implicate a First Amendment right as a “listener” or a Fifth Amendment “’life, liberty, or property’ interest in the asserted ‘open channel of communications.’”  Id.  at *4.  Finally, PETA failed to persuade the court that defendants were required by law to provide the access to the macaques that PETA demanded.  Id.

The court also lacked jurisdiction because PETA had no Article III standing to sue.  PETA’s claimed injury to its First Amendment right to listen “is not, as pleaded, a legally protected interest sufficient to confer standing.”  Id. at *5.  As the court observed:

Nowhere does PETA establish any authority whatsoever for the extraordinary proposition that the macaques’ sounds and movements constitute protected speech to which a companion right-to-listen exists. Rather, PETA relies on a legion of inapposite law concentrating on the public’s right to receive human speech. . . . But PETA gives the Court nothing that comes close to establishing a constitutional right to receive “non-human primate” sounds or behaviors. [Id.]

The court also found PETA’s reliance on the decision in Murthy v. Missouri, 603 U.S. 43 (2024) – in which social media users challenged government censorship during COVID-19 – to be misplaced:

Like the plaintiffs in Murthy, PETA relies on a “boundless” theory of the “right to listen” to animal sounds and behavior. As in Murthy, the scope of this theory is breathtaking; it would confer standing to sue on anyone who claims interest in the sounds and movements that animals use to communicate with each other. This is the very kind of overly broad articulation of “injury” that the Murthy Court eschewed. PETA, therefore, has not pointed to any legal authority which supports a constitutionally protected interest in receiving communications from the macaques.  [Id. at *6].

Whether PETA intends to appeal this ruling remains to be seen.

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