Researcher performs sadistic op on wild monkey

November 8, 2008

The ONLY difference between this monster and "real" researchers is that he couldn't get access to do it legally. They're all the same.

November 08, 2008 Edition 2

Sheree Béga

A Free State man who severed the spinal cord of a pregnant wild vervet monkey and removed its foetus for a backyard stem cell research experiment has been slammed as "callous" and "sadistic".

In one of the worst cases of animal cruelty that the National Council of SPCAs (NSPCA) has investigated, the backyard researcher - believed to have been aided by two veterinarians - surgically removed the infant monkey last Friday and severed its mother's spinal cord on the same day in an experiment conducted in the backyard of a Bloemfontein house.

The adult monkey was paralysed from the waist down. The NSPCA said the man apparently caught the monkey in the wild because it was pregnant and of use for the "merciless treatment" - apparently to obtain stem cells from the foetus's placenta.

"This is a callous, sadistic man, and clearly, whoever is part and parcel of this is equally sadistic," Marcelle Meredith, the executive director of the NSPCA, said yesterday, adding this was the first case of its kind they had encountered.

"This is a primate. We know the intelligence of these animals. They have feelings."

The NSPCA heard about the incident from "courageous" informers and pounced on the rogue researcher this week.

The "horrific" and "unjustifiable procedure" had not been approved by an animal ethics committee, the body to which protocols for experimentation on animals must be submitted for consideration.

The man, who cannot yet be named, and who claims to be a doctor in physiology, had apparently been denied access to the Free State University's animal unit to conduct research. "His so-called stem cell research was then carried out of his own accord," said the NSPCA.

"Under no circumstances would this 'experiment' be approved. In addition to the horrific treatment of the animal, the conditions of the homemade backyard experiment were neither clinical nor controlled. What happened was indefensible and unpardonable … How on earth could any stem research like this have any bearing worth it to medical science?" Meredith asked.

The NSPCA has opened a case with the Park Road police in Bloemfontein.

"We'll be laying a charge in terms of the Animal Protection Act, which is criminal legislation, [of] causing unnecessary suffering and failure to render medical attention to this animal," said Meredith.

"These operations were undertaken by two vets. We know who they are and plan to charge them as well under the Animal Protection Act. They undertook operations to paralyse the animal; vets are supposed to heal."

Meredith said the adult monkey was confined to a small cage in the backyard.

Its paralysis left it incontinent, and the cage was cleaned"by spraying it with a hosepipe.

"There was no post-op care for the creature and no painkillers, " Meredith said. "It's terrible and really horrendous. The capture alone would have traumatised the money.

"We have information that he was going to hold her for four months. I'm sure he would have left her to die there in that cage. With such people, if you can do what was done to this creature, anything's possible."

The NSPCA said it decided to euthanase both the mother and her days-old infant, which had survived and subsequently been given away. "After all the trauma we felt it was the right thing," said Meredith.

Este Kotze, manager of the NSPCA's research and ethics unit, said: "It's a horrific case … This man gives researchers a bad name."

http://www.thestar. co.za/?fArticleI d=4702150