WHAT’S TO BECOME OF A BARREL OF MONKEYS?
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1998:
MADISON, Wisconsin––Virginia Hinshaw, dean
of graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin in Madison,
on February 3 gave Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk until
March 2 to find a way to keep 100 rhesus macaques and 50
stump-tailed macaques at the Vilas Zoo, their longtime home.
The Vilas Zoo has long housed the macaques under
contract to the Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center,
funded by the National Institutes of Health. American Zoo
Association policy has discouraged the use of zoo animals in
research since 1986, but the Vilas Zoo arrangement, dating to
1963, predated the policy.
The macaque colonies are descended from those who
provided subjects for the notorious isolation experiments of the
late Harry Harlow, who moved his work to the University of
Arizona in 1971 and died in 1981. They are the oldest stable
breeding colonies of macaques in captivity. About 1,300 kin
are at separate facilities on the university campus.