Monkey wars
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1995:
The German airline Lufthansa, the world’s leading
international wildlife hauler, announced May 11 that it will no
longer book cargoes of monkeys and apes destined for labora-
tory use, and will entirely cease transporting nonhuman primates
for laboratory suppliers as soon as it is authorized to do so by the
German transport ministry––probably by mid-June. The decision
was attributed to humane concerns, and comes after years of
protest over alleged high death rates among monkeys flown to
Europe and the U.S. from Indonesia, the Philippines, and Africa.
The British Union Against Vivisection charged in 1992 that the
transport mortality rate for monkeys from Indonesia averaged 19%,
while mortality among monkeys from the Philippines averaged 6%.
Monkey shipments from Africa dwindled after 1989 due to concern
over the accidental importation of the Ebola virus to a laboratory in
Reston, Virginia. While the Lufthansa announcement made no
mention of Ebola virus, it did coincide with rising global concern
over the current Ebola outbreak in Zaire. It also came six weeks
after two monkeys en route to the U.S. from Sudan were found to
have both AIDS and tuberculosis upon arrival in New York, and
were flown back to Cairo, Egypt, before being euthanized.
The USDA has charged the New York University
Medical Center with multiple violations of the Animal Welfare
Act carrying fines which could total up to $378,000, for alleged-
ly neglecting monkeys used in drug addiction experiments by
research psychologist Ronald Wood. The heaviest charges pertain
to the deaths of three monkeys from post-operative infections after
multiple surgeries, and purported failure to provide adequate water
to monkeys, some of whom were deprived of the opportunity to
drink for all but three hours of the day, without approval of the
NYUMC Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. The situ-
ation earlier caused NYUMC IACUC members Jan Moor-
Jankowski and James Mahoney to resign in protest of the universi-
ty’s failure to remedy the monkeys’ conditions and take discipli-
nary action against Wood. Instead, the university disaffiliated
itself from Moor-Jankowski’s
renowned Laboratory for
Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates upon his pending
retirement, and attempted to transfer the 225 chimpanzees in
LEMSIP custody to controversial primate research contractor
Frederick Coulston (See “LEMSIP’s last stand,” April 1995).
