Sanctuary buys Coulston chimps NIH chimps to go to Chimp Haven

ALAMOGORDO, New Mexico; SHREVEPORT, Louisiana--Two months of rumors that the Center for Captive Chimpanzee Care had purchased the Coulston Foundation buildings, equipment, 266 chimpanzees, and 61 monkeys for $3.7 million were confirmed on September 14 when CCCC founder Carole Noon took physical possession of the facilities.

Frederic Coulston, 87, told the Dallas Morning News that the transaction involved 288 chimpanzees and 90 monkeys, apparently including 22 chimpanzees and 29 monkeys who are out on lease or loan to other institutions. The deal puts Coulston entirely out of the business of buying, selling, and managing primates for laboratory use, after 72 years.

Another 300 chimpanzees now owned by the National Institutes of Health but formerly under Coulston control are to be retired to Chimp Haven, a 200-acre site under construction in Caddo Parish, Louisiana, the NIH and Chimp Haven announced two weeks later. Chimp Haven is to receive the first 200 chimps in early 2004, with the rest to follow.

The privately funded Center for Captive Chimpansee Care will retire the former Coulston chimps from research permanently and unconditionally.

Chimp Haven, contracting with the NIH under the terms prescribed by the Chimpanzee Health Improvement, Mainten-ance, and Protection Act passed by Congress and signed into law by former U.S. President Bill Clinton just before he left office, could be obliged by the NIH to return some chimps to research if the NIH ever deems this necessary. This condition caused the members of The Association of Sanctuaries and the American Sanctuary Association to reject the opportunity to bid on the NIH contract.

Chimp Haven founder Linda Brent (a.k.a. Koebner) told ANIMAL PEOPLE in January 2001 that although she does not like the idea of ever having to return any chimp to a lab, she welcomes the chance to give 300 chimpanzees a much better life than they would otherwise have. While the chimps are in her care, she added, she can ensure that they do not breed, since young and healthy chimps would be much more vulnerable to recall than older chimps who have already been exposed to debilitating diseases and have often suffered repeated invasive surgery.

While the Chimp Haven agreement with the NIH was known to be in negotiation for more than two years, the Coulston buy-out by the Center for Captive Chimpanzee Care was kept secret until it was a fait accompli­­almost.

ANIMAL PEOPLE first received word of the deal, which eventually proved accurate in almost every detail, on July 27. CCCC founder Carole Noon did not return repeated calls, however, when asked for confirmation, and other informed sources were unwilling to go on the record while Noon, Coulston, and the major Center for Captive Chimpanzee Care funders were still negotiating over last-minute aspects of financing and liability for World War II-vintage toxic waste purportedly buried under the Coulston site.

ANIMAL PEOPLE did manage to confirm that Frederic Coulston had apparently tried to interest Wildlife Waystation founder Martine Colette in bidding against Noon, after no institution within the biomedical research field wanted the property assets of his bankrupt foundation. Colette told ANIMAL PEOPLE that while she thought the Coulston property could have been renovated into a comfortable retirement home for the chimps and monkeys, the required investment would have been approximately equal to the purchase price, and there was no way she could raise that kind of money, even if she had any interest in entering into a bidding competition which she believed was not to the advantage of the animals.

At least seven national animal advocacy organizations declared victory as Coulston left the laboratory primate supply business, but In Defense of Animals and the Center for Captive Chimpanzee Care were the major players: IDA for sustaining pressure against Coulston as his effort to monopolize the lab chimpanzee market failed, and the CCCC for developing an exit path that Coulston could take.

An assist could go to Primarily Primates founder Wally Swett, who broke important ground in getting Coulston to talk to sanctuarians, after acquiring 31 former NASA chimps from the Air Force in 1997. Taking advantage of opportunities to talk with Coulston while arranging to collect the chimps at Holloman Air Force Base, Swett talked Coulston into including several more chimps in the deal. Swett was not asked to bid on the Coulston Foundationt, he told ANIMAL PEOPLE, guessing that this was probably because Coulston knew he didn't have the resources that acquiring and maintaining hundreds of chimps would require.

Involved in primate research since age 15, Coulston took over management of the former NASA chimp colony at Holloman Air Force Base in 1963, as an Air Force subcontractor, and went on to build the Coulston Foundation in nearby Alamogordo. His idea was to fund his own disease research on chimpanzees by supplying chimps to other laboratories.

In 1993 the Coulston Foundation subsumed Coulston's original for-profit company. Ex-pecting laboratory demand for chimps to soar with as AIDS research expanded, Frederic Coulston within two years took possession of chimp colonies from the Air Force, New York University, the National Institutes of Health, and New Mexico State Univ-ersity, seemingly disregarding mounting evidence that chimps rarely develop the human form of AIDS, and take so long to manifest symptoms, even when they do, as to be of little use to researchers competing to be first with a marketable cure.

"In August 1995, Coulston was riding high, boasting of becoming the 'sole source' of chimpanzees after gaining control of 650, nearly half the U.S. population in labs," Eric Kleiman and Suzanne Roy of In Defense of Animals wrote in a "total victory" annoucement distributed by Animal Protection of New Mexico.

"At the time," Kleiman and Roy continued, "the lab was flush with millions of dollars in NIH and industry funding, and was looking to expand the use of chimps with a $40 million primate aging center."

The next several years brought a crash. Realizing the limitations and liabilities associated with chimp research, far more institutions sought to dump chimps than to buy or lease them. Having cash flow problems, Coulston allegedly cut back on vet care and maintenance.

From 1997 on, the Coulston Foundation was charged four times in four years with "multiple and repeated" Animal Welfare Act violations. Nine chimps died as result of alleged Animal Welfare Act violations between March 1998 and August 2000, including Ray, 10, who according to IDA was "sick for days without veterinary care," and Donna, who according to IDA "died from a massive infection and uterine rupture after carrying a large dead fetus for up to two months."

In August 1999 Coulston settled a three-year accumulation of Animal Welfare Act charges by agreeing to divest the foundation of 300 chimps by January 2002. But there were no takers for the chimps within the research community. By March 2000, IDA claimed in a press release that, "Coulston is teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, with at least $800,000 in unpaid bills and $2.6 million in outstanding loans."

The NIH baled Coulston out temporarily in May 2000 by reclaiming title to 288 chimpanzees, including most of the 200 chimps who are eventually to go to Chimp Haven. This meant that the NIH took over the $2.5-million-per-year task of feeding and looking after the chimps, after having paid Coulston $10 million to feed and house them during the preceding seven years.

"Given the Coulston Foundation's record, relieving it of half its chimps might seem like a good idea," wrote Shannon Brown-lee for the Washington Post. "But instead of relief, there is frustration. There is nowhere else to send hundreds of chimps who are no longer needed for research."

The Center for Captive Chimpanzee Care and Chimp Haven will have nearly 600 chimps between them, but as many as 300 more of the estimated 1,300 to 1,600 federally owned or supported chimps in U.S. labs are believed to be eligible for retirement, by reason of age, past use, chronic conditions, and the likelihood that they will not be used in further experiments or breeding.

 

Both the CCCC and Chimp Haven have major fundraising to do to get from where they are now to where they need to be in order to fulfill their newly accepted obligations.

The Center for Captive Chimpanzee Care was designed to house up to 150 chimps. The first 11 arrived from the former NASA colony at Holloman Air Force Base in April 2001­­the deal that put founder Carole Noon and Coulston in touch. Another 10 chimps from the NASA colony came later.

Now Noon must prepare to house more than 10 times as many chimps, twice as many as the original estimated CCCC capacity. Although she could keep some or all of the Coulston chimps where they are, her goal is to relocate all of them to Florida as soon as possible, where the climate is more like that of the parts of Africa that chimps normally inhabit.

Chimp Haven as yet has no chimps, and has $6 million to raise just to qualify for the NIH matching funds that will enable it to build $14 million worth of facilities.

The Coulston saga, meanwhile, has at least a few more episodes to run.

"Largely because of the Coulston Foundation's hideous animal care record, the New Mexico legislature amended the state's felony animal cruelty law in March 2001, removing exemptions for intermediate handlers, carriers, and research laboratories," the IDA victory statement noted. Though Coulston is out of business, the amendments could eventually have precedental value in bringing other research institutions to account.

In addition, New Mexico attorney general Patricia Madrid confirmed that in response to a complaint brought by Animal Protection of New Mexico, "My office has been looking into the way the Coulston Foundation spent the trust funds held in the foundation's Chimpanzee Endowment Policy," formed by the NIH and New Mexico State University to guarantee lifetime care of specific chimps delivered to Coulston.

"The Coulston Foundation has chosen to sue my office rather than comply with our requests for information," Madrid said.

Yugoslavia-born AIDS vaccine researcher Victor Toma, M.D., 65, now living in South Africa, startled delegates to the recent World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg by taking out a newspaper advertisment seeking investors in a scheme to illegally capture wild chimpanzees and experiment on them "on a farm in northern Zambia."

Otherwise, the global trend is toward retiring chimps from research. In April 2002, for example, the Dutch Parliament voted unanimously to disband the last research chimp colony in Europe. Of the population of 99, 34 healthy chimps and 23 who were experimentally infected with potentially lethal viruses were awarded to the Stichting Aap sanctuary. The 34 healthy chimps are to be relocated to a care-for-life sanctuary built by Stichting Aap near Alicante, Spain. The 23 infected chimps will remain in a new Stichting Aap facility in the Netherlands designed to provide a combination of natural habitat and hospice care. The remaining 42 chimps were to be allocated to zoos throughout Europe.

The only new great ape research site currently under development in the U.S. is the $10 million, 197-acre Iowa Primate Learning Sanctuary, scheduled for groundbreaking near Des Moines in December­­and founder Sue Savage-Rumbaugh does not plan to do invasive work there. The facility is to house eight bonobos she has been working with in learning studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

"The bonobos will show off their athletic skills, their cooking, and perform plays. They love to put on costumes and masks," Savage-Rumbaught told Tom Sur of the Des Moines Register.

But while chimp use in invasive research is sharply down, monkey use is up. Monkey imports into the U.S. for lab use soared from 9,327 in 1995 to 15,620 in 2001, with increases every year except 1997. The Lafayette New Iberia Research Center in Louisiana in August announced that it plans to increase its present population of 5,000 monkeys to 6,000 within a year, to meet increasing pharmaceutical research demand. Monkey-breeding for reseaxch use is also reportedly expanding in Australia.

In Defense of Animals is trying to brake the trend, making points against a primate research institution just a few miles from the IDA headquarters in Mill Valley, California, the San Francisco Examiner reported on August 28. Freelance Debra Mao observed that the University of California at San Francisco has received "more than 8,000 letters and postcards" as result of the ongoing campaign against studies on rhesus macaques conducted since 1981 by UCSF researcher Stephen G. Lisberger.

The work Lisberger does is apparently similar to work done on longtailed macaques at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which created a furor when exposed by undercover videography broadcast by the TV news program Five with Oshrat Kotler in November 2001. The Lisberger studies also have some seeming resemblance to studies of induced brain damage in marmosets done at Cambridge University in England, extensively exposed in May 2002 by the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, after a 10-month undercover investigation.

Between them, the Hebrew Univer-sity and Cambridge University investigations produced hours of some of the most shocking documentation of primate vivisection to emerge since laboratories became guarded about releasing visual images produced for their own purposes in the early 1980s.

The IDA campaign against Lisberger has yet to produce comparable video, but the IDA printed materials are equally gruesome.

"To create public furor," Mao wrote, "IDA offers graphic details of Lisberger's experiments: the implantation of metal plates, steel cylinders, and electrodes into the skulls of helpless monkeys. IDA buries any scientific justification for these procedures in heaps of propaganda. But beneath the surface of the half-truths, hidden facts have also come to light. It was reported last month that medical personnel at the UCSF Medical Center had conducted experiments on human patients without acquiring legal consent.

"And behind the locked doors UCSF, which collects roughly $300 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health each year, has maintained a deplorable laboratory animal care track record," documented by repeated USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service citations for violations of the Animal Welfare Act.

One violation brought UCSF a fine of $2,000 in January 2000, Mao reported.

"UCSF remains one of only two research facilities in California not yet accredited by the American Association for Laboratory Animal Care," Mao noted.

The USDA lacks the authority to close research institutions, but funding for work producing more liabilities than useful information could be cancelled by either the NIH or the univeristy.

IDA and other activist groups have hit even harder at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, which receives only $35 million a year from NIH, but in February 2002 agreed to pay $129,500 in fines and change animal care procedures in settlement of Animal Welfare Act charges brought in March 2001.

A similar campaign directed by PETA against alleged Animal Welfare Act violations and other shortcomings at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has resulted in an NIH review of research funded at a current level of about $236 million a year.

Undercover video made by PETA investigator Kate Turlington "showed one researcher saying he ignored rules requiring him to ice mice before snipping off their heads," and "showed live mice cannibalizing a corpse in a dead animal bin and overcrowded animal cages," wrote Raleigh News & Observer staff writer Catherine Clabby.

An internal review of the PETA allegations resulted in a report to the NIH Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare that, "All instances of unanesthetized decapitation described in the log or shown on PETA videotapess were performed under protocol."

However, wrote Clabby, "because the taped researcher appeared prepared to disregard a protocol, and sprayed animals with alcohol without approval, he was disciplined, along with another scientist in the same lab."

The internal review "concedes that UNC-CH should have reported more lapses in care of animals to NIH than it has," Clabby continued. "It [also] discloses that in a case unrelated to the PETA complaint, UNC-CH forbade two scientists in one lab from working with animals for three months, because their experiments depended on every rodent dying, which is forbidden." ­­M.C.