![\"Peter](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/5007589ee5e35bf578da8cd4e47dc1b24b7f7930.png\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
February 8, 2026 \u2014 5:00am<\/p>\n
Save<\/p>\n
You have reached your maximum number of saved items.<\/p>\n
Remove items from your saved list<\/a> to add more.<\/p>\n Save this article for later<\/p>\n Add articles to your saved list and come back to them anytime.<\/p>\n Got it<\/p>\n AAA<\/p>\n Veteran ABC journalist Tony Jones has just returned from the Sundance Film Festival where his documentary Sentient<\/a> \u2013 an expos\u00e9 on the reality of animal testing in laboratories, and the impact it has on both animals and testers \u2013 had its premiere to strong reviews. <\/p>\n Fitz: Tony, good to chat. I assure you I won\u2019t ambush you in this interview, much, by first getting you onto the sad demise of Q+A, but do you miss it?<\/p>\n TJ: I do, from time to time. But actually, to be honest, I think the country misses it, not just me. It was a such a unique program on Australian television, a chance for ordinary folk to come and sit in an audience and ask really serious questions to a great range of people, including the highest-level politicians.<\/p>\n Fitz: Oh go on, throw me one sausage! Why did the most agenda-setting program on Australian television crash and burn after you left?<\/p>\n TJ: I don\u2019t know. Maybe it had come to its natural end. I really don\u2019t quite understand why that happened. I feel very sad about it.<\/p>\n Fitz: You\u2019re being very diplomatic.<\/p>\n TJ: [Laughing.] That\u2019s the role of a Q+A moderator, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n Fitz: I\u2019ll take that as a comment. [TJ: (Eyeballs roll.)] Meantime, I couldn\u2019t help noticing your executive producer on this documentary was none other than your fine wife, the ABC\u2019s 7.30 host, Sarah Ferguson<\/a>. What was that like at the first production meeting? Did one or the other say, \u201cHang on, don\u2019t I know you? Haven\u2019t we had breakfast together for the last 35 years? Haven\u2019t we raised three fine sons together?\u201d<\/p>\n TJ: [Laughing.] Sarah\u2019s role as an executive producer was profound, and right from the beginning of the project. Working with her has been one of the great pleasures of my career. So, for me, becoming a kind of late-career film director has been quite something. To be able to do it with your beloved wife even better. And it was fantastic being together at Sundance<\/a>, on the press line, as people threw questions at us. There are 16,000 films submitted for consideration to be in competition at Sundance, and we were obviously one of the very lucky few who made it into competition in the World Cinema Documentary Competition<\/a>. We didn\u2019t win, but we won by being there.<\/p>\n Fitz: The reviews certainly said so. I particularly agree with the take of that influential publication, The Playlist<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the best possible way, director Tony Jones has created the documentary version of a car crash; you don\u2019t want to look, but you can\u2019t bring yourself to look away. [A+]\u201d.<\/p>\n Where did the idea to do it come from?<\/p>\n TJ: A few years ago, one of the guests on Q+A was the famous Australian philosopher and ethicist from Yale, Peter Singer<\/a>, who also wrote the most influential text for the animal rights movement, called Animal Liberation<\/a>. On the program he said, \u201cSometime in the future, we will come to see how we treat animals today in the same way that we look at slavery in the 16th, 17th and 19th centuries.\u201d Everyone gasped, but I went away and started to do research into the sentience of animals, the new science as to how much animals feel \u2013 not how they think or how smart they are, but what they feel.<\/p>\n Fitz: People like me, who eat chicken, lamb, steak and fish, don\u2019t want to think about the animals our meals come from, but if we do, choose to believe they are not particularly sentient. The real premise of your documentary is not only that terrible, terrible things are happening around the world to tens of thousands of animals in laboratories \u2013 particularly macaque monkeys<\/a> \u2013 not as a quick death at an abattoir, but over many weeks and months. Is that a fair summation of your doco?<\/p>\n TJ: Yes. The way we set it up is through the life of a woman called Dr Lisa Jones-Engel<\/a>. I would describe her as the Jane Goodall of macaque monkeys, because she\u2019s trying to do what Jane Goodall did for chimpanzees, which is have them taken out of cages and experimental laboratories. But before that, she spent a whole life working with apes and monkeys, and she got to know very well the nature of these creatures.<\/p>\n Fitz: She makes a strong case that in so many things, these monkeys are just like us, and spend shocking lives of not just being effectively tortured themselves, but with the added distress of seeing it happening to all those around them, including family members, and are suffering terribly.<\/p>\n TJ: Yes, and she maintains that we are complicit in their suffering, as pretty much everything that goes into our bodies is tested on animals \u2013 and the primary animal, the one closest to us since they took chimpanzees out of the equation in 2015, is indeed the macaque monkey.<\/p>\n Fitz: I found some of the footage very upsetting, most particularly some of the old footage you got from archives of a mother chimp fighting to protect her three babies, who keep clinging to her, even after she is felled by a needle, only to be torn from her breast. The horror, oh, the horror. If we saw someone do that to humans, they\u2019d be put in prison, but this kind of thing is now done on an industrial scale across the world. The footage you have of the monkey farms in Cambodia, with 80,000 monkeys in a single facility \u2013 were you shocked by the scale of it?<\/p>\n TJ: Absolutely. It\u2019s a hidden industry, a massive one, and one that involves billions and billions of dollars in order to source the monkeys for laboratories run by these large pharmaceutical companies. Over time, they\u2019ve strip-mined the forests for macaque monkeys. People go and capture them and bring them to these facilities, to add to the ones bred there. So from there, they\u2019re put in these coffin-like boxes and transported to airports. They sometimes spend 20 to 30 hours on aircraft, and then they land at the other end, at the facility that\u2019s bought them.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Fitz: And there, they are divided up into four groups. First group gets none of the new drug. Second group a small dose. Third group of a big dose. Fourth group gets an overdose. Now, pass the clipboard, let\u2019s observe closely what happens to all of them \u2026<\/p>\n TJ: That is exactly the process of testing. And with those massive overdoses, they\u2019re trying to find what would happen if you gave a human this level of this particular substance. So to do it, you have to poison the fourth group, in a serious way. And none of the animals survive this process. Even the ones that get nothing are taken at the end to what they call necropsy, the place inside these testing laboratories where the animals are killed and they take their organs for further examination.<\/p>\n Fitz: \u201cKilled\u201d?? They\u2019re not \u201ckilled\u201d, Tony. Please. They\u2019re \u201ceuthanized for scientific purposes\u201d!<\/p>\n TJ: Indeed. I don\u2019t think anyone\u2019s seen anything like this in terms of what we might call undercover footage.<\/p>\n Fitz: And yet you are very careful in the whole documentary to present the case for this testing to go on. Most compelling was from one of the pioneers of the industry, Professor Jim Mahoney, who said: \u201cDo we have a right? No, but we have a need.\u201d<\/p>\n TJ: Yes, he said that when he\u2019s a younger scientist. But when he retires, years later, he decides he made a mistake there. He says it\u2019s all wrong, and it went wrong from when we put them in cages in the first place.<\/p>\n Fitz: Indeed, as we now have macaque monkeys \u2013 used to having a habitat larger than 700 football fields \u2013 actually living in a space no larger than a telephone booth, before being tortured to death and then killed. But then you give a big platform to Dr Cindy Buckmaster<\/a>, an animal testing industry leader, who says: \u201cDon\u2019t talk to me about the ethics of testing on animals. Talk to me about the ethics of not testing on the animals.\u201d Her point is that if we don\u2019t test on these animals, people are going to die of cancer and terrible diseases that they don\u2019t need to. If not for those animals, we wouldn\u2019t have so many vaccines that save so many lives.<\/p>\n TJ: Yes, Dr Buckmaster worked for many years as a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry, for the biomedical industry, so she goes around the country talking to groups of workers about how what they\u2019re doing is for the greater good of humanity. She says, \u201cYou are heroes. You\u2019re the reason that a six-year-old with leukemia gets to be seven.\u201d<\/p>\n Fitz: You have indeed presented both sides of this whole story. But let me take you back to that famous journalistic aphorism: \u201cIf someone says it\u2019s raining, and another person says it\u2019s fine, it\u2019s not your job to quote them both. It\u2019s your job to look out the f—ing window and find which one is true.\u201d So my final question to you, is it right to do this kind of industrial level animal testing, or is it wrong?<\/p>\n Related Article TJ: Well, Peter, I\u2019m going to disappoint you slightly, but one of the things that the Sundance audience was most surprised about is that the film is balanced. It tries to allow both sides to put their arguments for and against animal testing, and then we leave it up to the audience to make their own judgement.<\/p>\n Fitz: Fair enough. But now I am asking you for your judgement. You put it together, and have no doubt left more appalling footage than a mass audience can stomach on the cutting room floor. Is it right or wrong?<\/p>\n TJ: [Singularly long pause.] The answer requires some soul-searching. It would be hypocritical of me to say that I will stop taking medicines which I now know have been tested in these appalling and confronting circumstances. But what happens in these testing labs is the industry\u2019s darkest secret. That\u2019s why they refuse to allow cameras in to record what happens there. Our film pulls back the curtain on that. For our own good and for the sake of the abused creatures we see in our film, we need to demand that these companies urgently invest in the new science that will inevitably replace the use of animals.<\/p>\n Fitz: That works for me, thank you, and in the meantime I look forward to seeing you and Sarah over a leg of lamb, shortly.<\/p>\n Sentient appears at Antenna Documentary Film Festival (5-15 February), and will stream exclusively on DocPlay later in 2026.<\/p>\n Start the day with a summary of the day\u2019s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter<\/a>.<\/p>\n Save<\/p>\n You have reached your maximum number of saved items.<\/p>\n Remove items from your saved list<\/a> to add more.<\/p>\n![\"Tony](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/8c8c3ed805e27e5c547be1a853b065313f003e58.jpeg\")
Tony Jones on the 10th anniversary of Q+A in 2018. Wolter Peeters<\/p>\n![\"Sarah](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/f63f9045c818f52caadc75973eb6d47323517b06.jpeg\")
Sarah Ferguson and Tony Jones attend the \u201cSentient\u201d premiere during the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.Getty Images<\/p>\n![\"Taika](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/52c6063c85535b59dc4359f8f2c70d3f17deef48.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Peter](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/1770505750_728_5007589ee5e35bf578da8cd4e47dc1b24b7f7930.png\")
Peter FitzSimons<\/a> is a journalist and columnist with The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via X<\/a>.From our partners<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"February 8, 2026 \u2014 5:00am Save You have reached your maximum number of saved items. Remove items from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":465263,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,134,344],"class_list":["post-465572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=465572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465572\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/465263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=465572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=465572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=465572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}