International Primate Day: Exposing The Horror Of The Primate Experimentation Industry
12 years ago
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Posted
1st September, 2012 11h50
This year’s International Primate Day (Saturday, 1 September) will be used by Animal Defenders International (ADI) to highlight the suffering of primates in laboratories around the world.
ADI is releasing shocking details of experiments from around the world and urging the UK Government to take immediate steps to start eradicating experiments on primates.
ADI President, Jan Creamer: “On International Primate Day, we want people to remember that these monkeys suffering in laboratories are some of our closest relatives in the animal kingdom. When they are torn from the wild and their families, when they are caged, when they are strapped down and experimented on, they suffer as you and I would.
“Five years ago, following an ADI campaign, the majority of Members of the European Parliament signed a Declaration calling for a timetable to end all primate experiments. We need that call to be acted on across the world now.”
Later this year the Government will introduce measures under the transposition of the new European Directive on animal experiments (Directive 63/2010) that would enable monkey experiments to be severely restricted and a rapid phase out of monkeys born of wild caught parents. But ADI and the National Anti-Vivisection Society fear it will be business as usual in the UK’s monkey labs.
UK: At government lab Porton Down, the lungs of marmoset monkeys bled after they were forced to inhale a deadly pathogen for ten minutes. They were then dosed with a drug to try and counteract the effects with animals either dying from the disease or being killed.
USA: Unborn baby monkeys were dosed with ketamine, exposed in the womb, killed, and their brains analysed at the Oregon National Primate Research Center. The researchers did not even mention the trauma of the mothers.
Colombia: Owl monkeys were dragged screaming from the jungle, placed in sacks and taken to a laboratory. In one experiment 18 were injected with malaria infected blood and used to test an experimental vaccine.
ADI’s major undercover investigation of the laboratory primate trade exposed the nightmare of this global industry.
- ADI field officers tracked the monkey trappers up the Amazon and filmed owl monkeys being torn from the wild.
- The monkeys were then trailed to a malaria lab in Colombia – with our team securing footage inside the barren cages.
- ADI infiltrated Nafovanny in Vietnam filming the macaque monkeys in small, filthy, broken cages – images the huge dealer of monkeys to the USA and UK denied were on their premises – until we proved otherwise.
- An ADI field officer worked for 18 months in the primate toxicology laboratory of notorious firm Huntingdon Life Sciences. We filmed the animals strapped down, struggling, reaching out as they were experimented on. The monkeys were supplied by Nafovanny
- Our team have filmed in monkey dealers and monkey laboratories all over the world.
Watch
ADI’s Save The Primates video that helped secure the European Union’s latest measures to restrict monkey experiments, ban experiments on apes and wild caught monkeys, and to end the trapping of wild monkeys to stock laboratory monkey factory farms – these are currently being transposed into national laws.
(ADI Save the Primates video also available in French, Spanish, Italian, German and Polish)
Founded in 2005 by ADI, International Primate Day is a day on which the global threats to primates are highlighted, specifically those in laboratories and entertainment and taken for bushmeat and the pet trade.
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