Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest

Hope. Love. Home. Sanctuary

biomedical research

Monkeys in the News

by

Monkeys, specifically monkeys who are being used in biomedical research, have been in the news frequently lately.

A few years ago, I wrote about a truck carrying 100 monkeys that overturned in Pennsylvania, spilling crates of primates onto a highway. I would not have guessed then that “escaped lab monkeys” would become almost commonplace in the years following that incident.

Late last year, 43 young female rhesus macaques at Alpha Genesis Primate Research Center in Yemassee, South Carolina left their cages and the perimeter fence of the facility when a gate was left open. Some of them survived for months outside, with the last one captured in January.

More recently, on October 28th, a pickup truck pulling a trailer containing 21 crated macaques overturned in rural Mississippi. The initial news reports indicated that no one claimed ownership of these monkeys who were apparently being transported from one facility to another. Finally, almost a week after the crash, PreLabs, LLC released a statement confirming that the monkeys belonged to them.

In that statement, they also cleared up misinformation that had been spread about the health status of the monkeys. Apparently, the county sheriff initially described the monkeys as dangerous and carrying diseases based on what the driver of the truck told him. Citizens took this warning to heart–two of the monkeys were shot and killed when residents spotted them.

I want to first raise the question of whether it’s even appropriate to describe any of these monkeys as “escaped” when their being “loose” was the result of errors or accidents on the part of human beings. Virtually nothing in their lives has been their choice, including ending up on the side of a highway. In a very interesting in-depth New Yorker article focused on the Yemassee Alpha Genesis facility, the author shares the opposite point, characterizing monkeys in captivity as being preoccupied with getting out of the cages they are confined to, so there’s certainly different ways of looking at the volition of the monkeys who end up in the news as escapees.

Though there has been an uptick in these incidents in the last few years, lab monkeys on the loose is not an entirely new phenomenon.

There is a colony of vervet monkeys living freely today in Florida who were genetically traced to monkeys originally from Africa who “escaped” from the Dania Chimpanzee Farm in the 1940s where they were being sold for biomedical and military research.

The recent incidents have shined a light on a the industry using monkeys in invasive research, which is a good thing. People are asking where these monkeys are coming from and how are they being used within these facilities. There have been investigations into how the demand for monkeys in the United States for medical testing has led to the illegal capture of monkeys from the wild. The solution from within the industry to this problem has been a call to increase the breeding of monkeys within the U.S., but the proposed construction of new breeding facilities has thankfully been met with push-back.

Things are changing.

In April, the FDA announced that it will phase out all animal testing for certain drugs and therapies, replacing animal testing with more sophisticated methods. And just last week, the CDC announced it will no longer use monkeys in the research that it conducts.

It’s important to note that the FDA announcement is significant and unprecedented, but still cautious in its approach and it doesn’t equate to the end of animal testing for all drugs.

The CDC announcement appears to impact 200 macaques reportedly currently in use by the CDC. That’s a very small number of monkeys compared to the tens of thousands being used across other government agencies and private institutions, but it is indicative of the shift that is happening.

It’s an open question where these monkeys being used by the CDC would go, though the article states that Peaceable Primate Sanctuary was contacted by the agency and is willing to work on a solution, given enough funding.

As I said back in 2022, we will be providing a home for monkeys in the future, like other sanctuaries are now. And maybe, just maybe, that day when we can all celebrate the last monkeys in biomedical research in the U.S. going to their sanctuary home will come much sooner than I dreamed.

This photo J.B. took today of a rainbow over Jody’s statue seemed to be the perfect visual accompaniment to this news.

I will bet you anything that there’s a rhesus macaque named Jody in a lab right now who was used as a breeder and research subject.

She deserves sixteen years of sanctuary life just like our Jody had.

 

 

Phantom Nesting and Coconut Cracking

by

I hope you enjoy the video above and think about the different ways that primates (including human primates) learn.

I was searching for other blog posts where we talked about phantom nesting and found this video from way back in 2010 that shows Burrito and Foxie phantom nesting. It goes with this blog post, which includes some interesting comments. Anecdotally, I’ve talked with a caregivers at another sanctuary who said that they see phantom nesting mostly in chimpanzees who came from the same laboratory where Foxie was born.

I find the phantom nesting fascinating, but also incredibly sad, so I thought I’d lighten the mood a bit with the coconut cracking.

Speaking of lightening the mood, one reason this blog post is a bit tardy is because I was tuned into the end of the Sweet 16 Online Auction. There were so many items in Bid Wars! To add to the excitement, there was an anonymous donor who put us well over our goal with a super generous donation to “top things off” as she said.

I am so grateful for all of the incredibly talented artists who donated items for this auction and to everyone who participated in the auction by bidding and donating. Big congratulations to the winners. I’ll be in touch about getting your art to you!!

Why Them?

by

There’s an image from the news last month that I can’t get out of my mind. I’m betting many of you saw it too. It was a photograph, shared in this New York Times article, among many other publications, of wooden crates strewn across a highway, some of them upright, some of them on their sides. There are stickers on the crates that say “Live Animals” and “Do Not Tip”.

We know from the reporting that these crates held cynomolgus macaques, often referred to as “cynos” by caretakers in biomedical laboratories, and commonly called both crab-eating and long-tailed macaques. We know that there were around 100 monkeys on the truck that crashed in Pennsylvania and that they were being transported from John F. Kennedy airport to an undisclosed biomedical facility. The main headline was that several of the monkeys “escaped” when the truck crashed, and that the public was asked to stay away from the area and avoid contact with the monkeys.

We also know that these macaques were shipped from Mauritius to JFK. Mauritius is a small island country in the Indian Ocean, off the eastern coast of Africa, 500 miles east of Madagascar. From my brief background searching, I found that Mauritius is a beautiful island with an interesting political and economic history that has resulted in a diverse religious and ethnic population, with many of the human residents decedents of indentured servants used to farm sugar plantations. Like a lot of the world, it was under the control of different European nations over the years and is now independently governed.

Macaques are not native to the island. They were thought to have been brought there in the 1600s by sailors. Wild populations of these macaques now thrive on the island and are considered to be an invasive species. Starting a few decades ago, wild macaques were captured and captive-breeding programs began specifically to export their offspring to biomedical laboratories primarily in the United States and the U.K. Mauritius supplies as many as 10,000 cynomolgus macaques per year to U.S. laboratories.

More recently, and controversially, laboratories are being developed on the island to do research there rather than only relying on the export of the monkeys to labs in other countries. If you type “Mauritius monkeys” into any search engine, you will find a lot of information about the monkey trade there and the animal activism that has resulted from that trade.

It’s still difficult for me to cognitively comprehend the scale of biomedical research using non-human primates. It is estimated that there are around 75,000 monkeys used each year in biomedical research, including breeding programs and holding facilities, in the United States alone.

Even those of us who know a little bit about biomedical research on monkeys are rarely confronted with the reality of all of this primate research. The crates that were tossed from the transport truck during the accident and the monkeys who got out of their crates to briefly roam Pennsylvania, I imagine in a terrified mental state, were a tiny reminder of all the individual lives that are sacrificed for biomedical testing.

Of course the news cycle is quick, and I doubt many people who read the original headlines are still thinking about those monkeys or the tens of thousands of their kind they represent.

You might be wondering at this point what happened to the escapees. Some of the stories I saw just mentioned that they were “accounted for” within a few days, though the Associated Press expanded upon that and said that three were “euthanized” once they were found. Further reporting specified that the macaques were shot with firearms.

The airline that initially shipped the monkeys, Kenya Airways, has since publicly stated that they are ending their contract with the undisclosed company that had the monkeys shipped to the U.S. Perhaps the CEO of Kenya Airways, like me, can’t get that image of those crates in the highway out of his mind.

We at Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest have plans for the future that include building and caring for monkeys, perhaps monkeys that are now part of biomedical research. It’s very unlikely that the sanctuary community will ever be large enough or have the funds to retire all monkeys from biomedical testing, and there are currently no restrictions on “euthanizing” non-chimpanzee primates for purely management or financial reasons (chimpanzees hold a unique place in the biomedical research field for this practice of not being killed when they are no longer useful).

I often think about the chimpanzees who lived their entire lives in laboratories. The ones who were part of the system long before sanctuaries existed, and the ones who are still part of the system because they have been deemed ineligible for retirement.

There’s no just reason for particular chimpanzees to have been given the opportunity of a different kind of life in a sanctuary while others were not, and the same will hold true for monkeys.

Here’s the tiny bit of hope, though:

We will keep working for those chimpanzees still in laboratories. We will continue to try to give the chimpanzees in our care a true sanctuary life. We will continue to share their beautiful faces and personalities with you, like these photos I took today of brother and sister Cy and Lucky:

Cy
Lucky

And you will continue to remind others that their lives are important.

There are some monkeys that are being retired from biomedical testing to other sanctuaries now. One day we will join them in providing a home for monkeys. It won’t be all the monkeys who deserve retirement, but for those who come here, we will give them a true sanctuary life and we will share their beautiful faces and personalities with you. Because their lives are important too.

Some day in the future, I can’t even begin to imagine when, but some day, there will be a celebration for the last monkeys in biomedical research in the U.S. going to their sanctuary home.

An Unlikely Story About Honey B

by

This is a story I first told at our gala in June. Though now it has a very exciting ending or maybe more of a beginning of an ending. It’s a lot of words… feel free to skim and skip down to the photos of Honey B I took today.

PREFACE

I don’t myself believe in fate, but I could see how this tale might be interesting for those who do believe in predestination.

CHAPTER ONE

The story begins when I was working at a sanctuary called the Fauna Foundation in Quebec, Canada. The fifteen chimpanzees that I worked with at Fauna had all been used in biomedical testing at a laboratory called LEMSIP in upstate New York. When LEMSIP was closing in the late 1990s, there was a scramble, led by LEMSIP’s head veterinarian, to get the chimpanzees into sanctuaries instead of being shipped to the Coulston Foundation, a laboratory in New Mexico that was ill-regarded even within the laboratory community and had amassed numerous animal welfare violations.

The sanctuary world was very small at that time and there were not many places for chimpanzees. Gloria Grow, founder of the Fauna Foundation, had never cared for chimpanzees before, but she had a sanctuary for wayward farmed animals and she wanted to do something more.

A former LEMSIP employee had given Gloria a list from 1993 of all of the chimpanzees who lived at LEMSIP. We would pour over that list, looking for relatives of the 15 chimpanzees who arrived at Fauna in 1996. She helped to identify where some of the other chimpanzees went, whether to other sanctuaries or to Coulston.

Over the course of the three years I worked at Fauna, I spent hours looking at that list with Gloria’s handwritten notes on it. I wondered about the personalities behind all of those names. I wondered if they were okay.

I don’t know why, but some of the names just stuck with me. Honey B was one of the names on that list.

I had heard that Honey B was the half sister of Jethro, a large adolescent guy at Fauna who loved to play chase. I knew that Jethro, Honey B, and another chimpanzee at Fauna, Binky, had all been together in the “nursery” at LEMSIP after they were taken from their mothers.

 

CHAPTER TWO

In 2005, I found myself outside of New Orleans at a shelter that was taking care of dogs and cats that had been left behind after Hurricane Katrina. This was a few years after J.B. and I left Fauna for other academic and professional adventures. We were living in upstate New York at the time, and there was no way (well, maybe there was a small way) I was planning on bringing home a dog to our peaceful feline household.

But a dog at the shelter adopted me and her owners did not want her back. She was not the dog I would have chosen if I had been deliberately searching for a pup. She chased cats and didn’t want anything to do with other dogs, or other people for that matter. But she decided I was her person, and I accepted this without questioning it for very long. I broke the news to J.B. over the phone and he also didn’t question it.

Now, we needed a name for her. The name that I landed on was Honey B. Not Honey Bee, though I’m sure that’s what most people thought of when I mentioned her name. No, this somewhat surly Chow Chow from Louisiana that was my new best friend was named after a chimpanzee I had never met.

 

CHAPTER THREE

Honey B the dog, J.B., me, and our three cats (Cuba, LouLou, and Peanut) moved from our Victorian house in upstate New York to work at Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest in 2008, just a month before Annie, Missy, Jody, Jamie, Foxie, Burrito, and Negra arrived from Buckshire, the laboratory holding facility where they had lived for decades. Buckshire leased out the chimpanzees they owned to different laboratories, including LEMSIP before it closed down.

Buckshire provided us with some of the medical records of the seven chimpanzees who now called Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest and Cle Elum, Washington their home. I was looking through Missy’s record, and lo and behold, I discovered that she was the mother of the chimpanzee Honey B! I dug up the old LEMSIP list that for some reason I had moved with me from Quebec to Massachusetts to New York to Washington and confirmed this information.

I thought, “what are the odds of that?!”

Honey B the dog didn’t pay much attention to the chimpanzees, but after the chimps’ two-acre outdoor area, Young’s Hill, was built, J.B. and I would take her on walks around the outside of the perimeter fence. Despite her lack of affection for more than a few (okay, two) people, she was a really easygoing dog in a lot of ways and didn’t need to be on a leash. Every once in a while, she and Missy would run down the hill on opposite sides of the fence together.

 

CHAPTER FOUR

In May of this year, I learned that the chimpanzees at Wildlife Waystation were in need of new homes. I knew that Honey B the chimpanzee, the daughter of Missy and the namesake to my beloved now-deceased Chow Chow, lived there. I had still never met her. Side-note: Missy’s son Josh also lives at Wildlife Waystation.

We were just wrapping up the first phase of the expansion at Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest, expecting to bring three or four chimpanzees in need to (hopefully) expand the chimpanzee family of seven.

After visiting Wildlife Waystation, we knew we could and needed to immediately help at least some of the chimpanzees there. J.B. and I met all of the 42 chimpanzees. They are all wonderful and deserving. Their groups vary in size, but there were only three groups of an appropriate number for us to consider bringing to CSNW. After talking to the care staff about personalities, it seemed clear that Honey B and her group mates Willy B and Mave, would have the best chance of integrating into our group of seven.

Less than three months later, J.B. and I drove down to California and returned with Honey B the chimpanzee and her two friends.

Four days ago, mother Missy and daughter Honey B touched each other for the first time after 30 years of being apart. It was clear from the records we have that Honey B was taken from Missy when she was less than a day old, and there’s no indication that they recognize they are related, but we hope there’s a chance they will become friends.

Left to right: Honey B, Missy, Annie

The Beauty of Jody

by

I have been periodically looking at these photos of Jody on the computer in the chimp house throughout the day today. They just fill my heart with love for her.

All of the chimpanzees are so different from one another in so many ways and each one has qualities that pull you into their personalities.

I admire the way that Jody approaches life in a self-assured way and knows what she wants out of any given situation. She often does her own thing with her confident flair, but at the same time she’s the watchful den-mother of the group.

She has the greatest vocalizations – her happy chimpanzee low-moan we refer to as her “dinosaur noises” because they are so drawn out, and she is the most likely to give a good-night grunt from her nest at the end of the day.

Her big round eyes seem capable of taking in more than anyone’s, and there’s almost always a glimmer of hope or anticipation in them.

 

Autonomy and Confidence

by

Last month I wrote about “missing chimpanzee” Foxie, who has been doing a lot of solo exploring on the hill this summer. In May, Anna shared that Negra had been venturing out further on Young’s Hill than she had ever been before.

Well, we can add Burrito to this growing list of chimpanzees who have suddenly become more confident in the outdoor habitat.

As I was finishing up a walk with Jamie this afternoon, I came around to the front of the building and noticed the figure of a chimpanzee way up on the towers at the top of the hill. To my surprise, it was Burrito who was up there, walking across the shaky bridge, all by himself. I should mention that there was no food forage involved, so his motivation wasn’t tied to finding a snack.

I rushed up to the observation deck and got a few photos as he climbed down from the lookout and slowly walked back toward the greenhouse:

web_burrito_climb_down_tower_yh_dg_img_7650

web_burrito_behind_fall_grass_walk_yh_dg_img_7669

web_burrito_walk_fall_grass_alone_yh_dg_img_7683

As I took these photos, I was grinning like a fool, and I called down to Burrito to tell him how great I think he is.

Like humans, chimpanzees experience varying degrees of anxiety and fear. In some ways, Burrito shows more anxiety than some of the other chimpanzees. It took him a long time to get comfortable in the greenhouse when it was first completed in 2010, even when the ladies were spending the majority of their time out there (read this blog post from Elizabeth from March 2010 and watch the video of Burrito finally making a breakthrough and spending some time in the greenhouse).

And now, this summer, five years after the chimpanzees were given the 2-acre outdoor habitat that we call Young’s Hill, they are still continuing to gradually embrace and explore their autonomy.

I wonder what they will be doing five years from now.