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SAN ANTONIO––The
Primarily Primates sanctuary north of San Antonio has agreed to take in 156
cotton-top tamarins, bred for colon cancer research at the University of
Tennessee Marmoset Research Center in Oak Ridge but declared surplus last year
due to budget cuts. |
Photograph courtesy the
Santa Ana Zoo
Double-click the image above to view a video clip of
cotton-top tamarins. This 895-kb file takes approximately 8 minutes to download
at 28.8 bps |
More than 30,000
cotton-tops were taken from the Columbian rainforest during the 1960s and 1970s,
but just 236 survive in zoos, along with under 100 at other research facilities
and fewer than 2,000 in their remaining wild habitat, much diminished by logging
and farming.
"In early 1997," Stephen Rene Tello and Laura Joan
of Primarily Primates recounted in a joint release, "Primarily Primates
accepted 26 of the Oak Ridge cotton-tops and helped secure the placement of the
remaining 130 at another facility in California. Then on April 15 we received an
urgent call from University of Tennessee researcher Neal Clapp, who explained
that the cotton-tops were now literally being evicted. He had only two weeks to
place the animals and prevent their destruction. On April 22 the California
facility stated it was unable to accept the animals before the deadline."
Primarily Primates then agreed to accept the rest––and with them, an
obligation to raise $80,000 to build the necessary housing. (Cash help
is welcomed at POB 207, San Antonio, TX 78291.)
The world pioneers
in sheltering former research primates, Primarily Primates also maintains 14
ex-research chimpanzees, accepted just last year, and many other surplused
ex-lab animals. But as primate research winds down under a combination of public
pressure and fiscal restraint, the need for such facilities far outstrips the
availability. Terminations of primate experiments are now announced often,
including the April 22 NASA withdrawal from the much-protested primate
experiments undertaken as part of the BION space research partnership with
Russia, after the death of one of two monkeys sent into space for two weeks last
winter. Both survived the flight, but one died under post-flight anesthesia
during an operation to remove tissue samples.
Wildlife Waystation, a
160-acre sanctuary on inheld land within the Angeles National Forest, best known
for taking in exotic cats and bears, began handling lab primate retirement cases
in October 1995, eventually taking 16 chimps and five baboons from New York
University. Founder Martine Colette wanted to take 47 more chimps and the Oak
Ridge cotton-tops, too, but surveying errors placed part of a new seven-acre
chimp facility outside the Wildlife Waystation property, and redesign and
reconstruction have boosted the projected cost to 50% more than the budgeted
$500,000-plus. In mid-May Colette tearfully announced that for the first time in
the 20-year history of the sanctuary she had been forced to turn down animals.
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| Chimps, the
biggest, strongest, and most intelligent of the primates being retired from
research, are also the hardest to place responsibly. |
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Chimpanzee |
The National
Chimpanzee Sanctuary, coordinated by Washington D.C. attorney Michael McGehee, "is
a coalition of animal protection groups organized to establish a national policy
on chimpanzee retirement and to set standards for the sanctuaries that would
care for them," Roger and Deborah Fouts of the Chimpanzee and Human
Communication Institute at Central Washington University explain in the currentPsychologists
for the Ethical Treatment of Animals newsletter. Once the project is
defined, the coalition hopes to be funded by Congress––but as the
Fouts acknowledge, "NCS has not yet reached a consensus" even on "general
procedures and philosophy." E.g., "Some members feel that the
sanctuaries should breed chimpanzees and supply the infants to the biomedical
community. Others see this as completely unacceptable."
In the interim, the easy way out for many labs is to sell or lease surplus
chimps to the Coulston Foundation, run by Frederick Coulston, 82, who keeps as
many as 450 chimps and 800 macacques at two sites in New Mexico, acquiring
collections from other users and brokers as they leave the primate supply
business.
Surplus primates are also becoming available from Canada. The
Health Canada primate breeding center in Ottawa recently sold 500 monkeys "in
an effort to bring the colony to a more manageable size," says the Canadian
Federation of Humane Societies, but about 720 cynomolgus monkeys reportedly
remain in small steel cages, and budget cuts imposed April 1 may force the
facility to close altogether.
A formerly popular alternative for smaller primates was simply turning
them loose on an island or within a large fenced enclosure, to lead a semi-wild
life and be recaptured as needed. This was the modus operandi for more
than 20 years at Lois Key and Raccoon Key, south of Florida, where Charles River
Laboratories maintained as many as 1,200 rhesus macacques––but Florida
governor Lawton Chiles on April 29 put muscle behind years of warnings by
authorizing state lawyers to evict the macacques and Charles River, a subsidiary
of Bausch and Lomb, as an environmental hazard.
As many as 600 Japanese
macacques, many of them descended from retired research specimens, still roam
freely at the Southwest Texas Primate Observatory. STPO, however, was forced to
relocate to larger quarters last year, with much more secure fencing, by some of
the same concerns for public health and safety that underlie the Florida Keys
eviction. Unlike the Florida macacques, some of whom reputedly carry
hepatitis-B, the STPO macaques are apparently all healthy––but
nonhuman primates, once exposed, can become immune carriers of some little
understood diseases that may kill people. |
| The risks involved
in bringing nonhuman primates from uncontrolled environments into contact with
humans are also a factor in discouraging primate research. The Ferlite
Scientific Research Farm in Calamba, the Philippines, was forced to kill 600
monkeys and close in late January, after killing 300 monkeys last year failed to
halt an outbreak of Reston Ebola virus found in two Ferlite monkeys
among a group sold to a Texas laboratory. |
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Photograph courtesy CNN |
| But the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases on April 29 announced perhaps the
most promising lead yet in the search for an AIDS cure: an AIDS vaccine based on
a genetically modified edition of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) which
appears to have protected chimps at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania
against the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV). Research is underway to find
out if a weakened form of SIV can protect humans from HIV. |
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Zimbabwe, in
addition to claiming an overpopulation of elephants and the fastest-growing
timber industry in Africa, also argues that it also has too many baboons. “The
industry is currently losing millions due to the big baboon population,”
Forestry Commission general manager Edward Mutsvairo recently told Agence
France Presse. “We are currently looking at ways to keep them from
destroying the trees. Maybe we will settle for the use of birth control
injections.” |
Photograph © Tim
Knight |
Logging is closely associated
with the slaughter of nonhuman primates for meat in much of Africa, and with
outbreaks of the lethal Ebola virus, which generally infects humans through
consumption of monkey meat. But logging also causes chimpanzees to kill each
other, Wildlife Conservation Society biologist Lee White reports from Gabon.
About four out of every five chimps die whenever one displaced tribe invades
another’s territory, New York Times science writer William K.
Stevens explained May 13, citing White’s research.
Gabon recently had
about 50,000 wild chimps, according to White––a third to half of the
world population. Current logging plans, White predicted, will cut the number to
10,000. |
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