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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS
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SEPTEMBER 2005
UW seeks to block opening of antivivisection museum
MADISON––The Primate Freedom Project and Alliance for Animals on July 4, 2005 announced plans to create a National Primate Research Exhibition Hall in a complex of dilapidated buildings presently used as a bicycle warehouse, located between the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center and the Harry H. Harlow Primate Psychology Building.
Owned by the University of Wiscon-sin, the two primate labs have housed some of the most infamous experiments ever.
Harlow from 1930 to 1970 drove generations of baby macaques mad there, plunging them into stainless steel “pits of despair,” subjecting them to deliberately cruel robotic “mothers,” and allowing mothers driven insane by his experiments to abuse and kill them.
Primate Freedom founder Rick Bogle likened the proposed National Primate Research Center to “having the Holocaust Memorial at the gates of Auschwitz in 1944.” He had a nine-month purchase option on the site, he said, which he hoped would be time enough to raise the $675,000 purchase price of the warehouse site, assessed at only $150,000 for tax purposes.
But there was a catch.
“The parcel, owned by Roger Charly of Budget Bicycle Center, has long been coveted by UW officials as part of long-range campus plans,” reported Bill Lueders of The Isthmus, the UW newspaper. University Research Park chair Mark Bugher told J.R. Ross of Associated Press that he had already been negotiating to buy the property for 18 months. Roger Charly told Aaron Nathans of the Madison Capital Times that the university had offered $1 million for the site, and that he expected to accept the offer, partly to avoid misuse of the location by radical activists. The Isthmus published a collection of some of Bogle’s more incendiary remarks, compiled by the Wisconsin Association for Biomedical Research & Education, a pro-research group begun in 1986.
“We've known right from the beginning that UW would try everything in their power to stop us," Bogle said. Bogle added that Charly “could find himself in a world of hurt if he keeps signing contracts and is unable to comply with them." Bogle mentioned that both Primate Freedom and UW might find reason to sue Charly.
Meanwhile, the dismal record of the primate research facilities got worse when Bogle and colleague Jeremy Beckham released six pages of documents showing that UW professor of pediatrics Ei Terasawa was suspended from animal experiments in 2003 and a technician was fired following three monkey deaths during or just after Terasawa’s experiments in 2001-2002.
Terasawa was studying delayed-onset and early puberty in female macacques who were confined to restraint chairs while chemicals were injected into their brains to either stimulate or block neurons from firing.
One monkey died while the technician was on an unauthorized lunch break.