Boom in monkey traffic, excerpt from ANIMAL PEOPLE Jan/Feb 2004

[Guest guest]

>From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2004:

 

Aging boomers bring boom in monkey traffic

 

Beijing news media on November 25, 2003 announced the arrest

of lab animal dealer Jia Ruiseng. Called by police the biggest

wildlife trafficker ever caught in China, Ruiseng allegedly bought

2,130 macaques during the year from illegal trappers in central Anhui

province.

China is building a new primate research center at Sun Yat

Sen University, in the southern part of the country, but it will

start with only 100-200 macaques, officials said.

Ruiseng served the export trade.

The Royal SPCA in 1995 won a ban on the import into Britain

of wild-caught nonhuman primates for research use. In August 2003,

however, the Home Office authorized the import of captive-bred

monkeys from the Centre de Recherches Primatologiques in Mauritius,

despite RSPCA video purporting to show " squalid and barren cages that

appear to fall far short of International Primatological Society

guidelines. "

The Medical Research Council, a British government agency,

is reportedly increasing its access to monkeys by starting a macaque

breeding center at Porton down in Wiltshire.

In December 2003 the Supreme Court of Israel upheld an

interim order barring Mazor Farm from importing 60 monkeys from

Mauritius for resale and export. Founded in 1991, Mazor Farm sold

1,362 monkeys to Britain between 1994 and 2000. Contending that the

business violates Israeli law, the activist groups Let The Animals

Live and the Association for Moral Science claimed a significant

victory.

" There are 200,000 monkeys in the world who are being raised

in captivity for research purposes, " Mazor Farm attorney Robert

Fishman testified. " About 100,000 are used annually. "

The U.S. uses nearly half of them: 49,382 in 2001. USDA

records show that from 1973 to 2001, nonhuman primate use rose 17%,

but the jump was in from 1975 to 1987, when use rose 70%. After a

31% drop in the next four years, the annual fluctuations have been

under 10%.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service animal import data collected

and analyzed by Aesop Project founder Linda Howard tells a more

alarming story.

U.S. lab acquisition of monkeys from abroad more than doubled

between 1997 and 2002. Monkey imports jumped 22% over the preceding

year in 1999, 19% in 2001, and 22% again in 2002.

From 1995 through 2002, Howard found, Charles River

Laboratories imported 36% of the monkeys, Covance Research Products

imported 30%, and all of the top 20 importers were labs or lab supply

firms.

The 16 leading sources of monkeys included four suppliers in

China, four in Indonesia, three each in Mauritius and Vietnam, and

two in the Philippines.

In August 2003 the National Institutes of Health awarded a

$6.4 million, five-year grant to the Pittsburgh Development Center

to investigate cloning nonhuman primates, apparently to expedite

domestic captive breeding as an alternative to imports.

PDC researcher Gerald Schatten " has attempted conventional

cloning methods with more than 700 eggs from rhesus macaques and has

transferred 33 early embryos into surrogate mothers, but never

achieved a pregnancy, " Pittsburgh Post-Gazette staff writer Anita

Srikameswaran disclosed after reviewing a paper Schatten published in

Science.

If lab use of nonhuman primates is as steady as the USDA data

indicates, why the surging interest in acquiring monkeys?

Offered Jonathan Amos of the BBC News Online science staff in

July 2003, in an assessment as applicable to the U.S. as to Britain,

" The number of nonhuman primates used in medical research in the U.K.

[3,342 in 2001] is set to rise significantly. The pharmaceutical

industry has acknowledged as much. As science seeks to tackle the

neurological diseases afflicting a 'greying' population, it will

need a steady supply of monkeys on which to test the safety and

effectiveness of its next-generation pills. Experts say the

extremely specific way that these novel pharma products will work

means primates--because their brain architecture is very similar to

our own--will be the only animals suitable for experimentation. "

" We're not talking about a cure for baldness, " Genetic

Interest Group representative Dr. Alastair Kent told Amos. " We're

talking about horrendous conditions--Parkinson's, Alzheimer's,

schizophrenia. "

To do the testing, comparably horrendous conditions must be

inflicted on the test subjects.

And it is not all about drugs.

Transplant research involving nonhuman primates peaked in

notoriety with the macaque head transplants done by Robert White,

1963-1971, and spiked again after the Baby Fae baboon-to-human heart

transplant controversy of 1984. Those experiments, however, were

just parts of the beginning phase of transplant experimentation on

nonhuman primates.

Documents leaked to the British group Uncaged Campaigns in

September 2000 and October 2002 " describe in unique detail harrowing

experiments involving the transplant of genetically modified pig

organs into 500 higher primates, " Uncaged Campaigns summarized in

April 2003, after winning a 30-month court battle against the drug

maker Novartis Pharma, which had sought to suppress publication of

the data.

" The research was conducted by Cambridge-based biotech

subsidiary Imutran Ltd., " Uncaged Campaigns continued, " at the

laboratories of Huntingdon Life Sciences. Imutran, bought by

Novartis in 1996, had hyped pig organs as an imminent solution to

transplant waiting lists. The experiments were a blood-soaked

disaster, causing severe suffering as scientists failed to overcome

the complex barriers to cross-species transplants. "

Implants of mechanical and electronic devices tend to have a

higher success rate than intraspecies xenographs.

Miguel A.L. Nicolelis of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina,

in October 2003 published details of a brain implant that allows

monkeys to control robotic arms with their thoughts. " The technology

could some day allow people with paralyzing spinal cord injuries to

operate machines or tools with their thoughts as naturally as others

today do with their hands. It might even allow some paralyzed people

to move their own arms or legs again, by transmitting the brain's

directions not to a machine but directly to the muscles in those

latent limbs, " enthused Rick Weiss of the Washington Post.

Like the monkeys used in brain research decades ago, the

Nicolelis research subjects have wires sticking out of their

skulls--but Nicolelis is working on wireless signal transmission

technology, Weiss reported.

Such high tech experiments are rapidly superseding some of the older

kinds of primate research.

(continued)

 

--Merritt Clifton

Editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE

 

--

Kim Bartlett, Publisher of ANIMAL PEOPLE Newspaper

Postal mailing address: P.O. Box 960, Clinton WA 98236 U.S.A.

CORRECT EMAIL ADDRESS IS: <ANPEOPLE

Website: http://www.animalpeoplenews.org/

 

Please do not send attachments! - please paste information in

your message.

 

Something to think about: We believe that the Golden Rule

applies to animals, too. We don't accept the prevailing notion

that " people come first' " or that " people are more important than

animals. " Animals feel pain and suffer just as we do, and it is

almost always humans making animals suffer and not the other way

around. Yet in spite of how cruelly people behave towards animals

-- not to mention human cruelty to other humans -- we are supposed to

believe that humans are superior to other animals. If people want

to fancy themselves as being of greater moral worth than the other

creatures on this earth, we should begin behaving better than they

do, and not worse. Let's start treating everyone as we would like

to be treated ourselves.