Kathy Guillermo

As a senior vice president of PETA, Kathy Guillermo’s many duties include heading up the organization’s work to end the use of animals in nonrequired experiments, leading its campaign calling for reform in the horse-racing industry, overseeing production of The PETA Podcast, and working with national and international news media to publicize PETA’s landmark investigative, legal, and behind-the-scenes corporate work exposing and ending cruelty to animals in the food, experimentation, and entertainment industries.

Guillermo was originally hired to head up PETA’s cosmetics-testing campaign in 1989—a campaign that she still oversees—and went on to head up the organization’s Laboratory Investigations Division. Some of her major victories include pressuring NASA to scrap plans to irradiate monkeys, persuading the U.S. military to end all chemical-casualty training on monkeys, ending the Coast Guard’s shooting and stabbing of goats and pigs in medical trauma training drills, shutting down the construction of a massive monkey-breeding facility in Puerto Rico, and exposing the abuse of animals at a North Carolina product-testing laboratory, Professional Laboratory and Research Services, Inc.—which led to the closure of the facility and the release of hundreds of dogs and cats, who were put up for adoption.

Guillermo’s 1993 book, Monkey Business: The Disturbing Case That Launched the Animal Rights Movement, with a foreword by Oliver Stone, details the cruelty case that launched the then-fledgling PETA into national prominence. The landmark Silver Spring monkeys case also led to the first-ever conviction of an animal experimenter on cruelty-to-animals charges.