Covance
Covance, Inc. is an international company based in Princeton, New Jersey specialised in the business of drug development. It is a 1997 spin-off from Corning, Inc. Covance is a leading company in the field of remittance research and animal experimentation.
Under the name of Covance Research Products (CRP, Inc.) based in Denver, the company also deals with laboratory animals. Covance is the single largest importer of primates in the US with an approximate number of 14000 individuals mostly from China and Vietnam. Still, most of their primates come from their own breeding. CRP is world's largest breeder of laboratory dogs, and owns two dog breeding facilities, two primate centers and a rabbit breeding facility.
The name Covance has had bad press coverage ever since German journalist Friedrich Mülln, through working undercover at a German Covance facility in Münster, managed to obtain photographs, video, and other evidence of abuse and cruelty against monkeys and other animals. It has subsequently become the target of the "Close Covance"/"Covance Schliessen" animal rights campaign.
The laboratory in Münster belongs to the Covance Laboratories GmbH and is specialised on reproduction toxicology and primate toxicology — this includes animal testing on pregnant mothers. Thus, Covance Münster is responsible for approximately half of the primate experiments in Germany.
After parts of the footage were shown on German television and in major newspapers, Covance filed a lawsuit, leading German court to forbid further distribution of the material. This lawsuit resulted in major protest, not only from the side of animal rights advocates, but also from free speech supporters and censorship opponents. A first ruling confirming Covance's claims was partially reverted by a higher instance, stating that the right of the public to be informed on the subject prevails over the company's privacy rights. The video footage may now be displayed publicly, albeit not in the form of the existing TV edition and — unexplicably — not by a specific animal rights group.
On top of the fundamental criticism of animal testing, and of the severe breaches of animal protection laws shown in the video, Friedrich Mülln further reproaches that the staff at Covance consists mostly of untrained assistants — most assistants have only been prepared in a three-day workshop to their task of dealing with the animals.