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The Primate Laboratories are refusing to answer specific questions concerning individual monkeys. Here are some suggestions if you do not receive answers to your questions.
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Species commonly used in research |
Crab-eating Macaques
Rhesus Macaques
Squirrel Monkeys
Chimpanzees
Learn about their lives in the wild and in the laboratories where they suffer day after day.
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Tulane National Primate Research Center
(TNPRC)
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The Tulane Regional Primate Research Center competes with the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research for the dubious "honor" of imprisoning the largest monkey population among the eight National Institutes of Health's Regional Primate Research Centers. Tulane has over 4,500 monkeys of eleven species. Rhesus macaques form the overwhelming majority with at least 3,500 on hand.
A drive through the facility offers a rare glimpse of caged research monkeys with only a hedge and a barbed-wire fence separating acres of pens from the road.
In mid October of 1998, two dozen rhesus monkeys escaped from cages in this outdoor area. Tulane officials were quick to assert that the monkeys were not infected with any disease and posed no risk to the public. But consider the Blanchard report below. At least 70% of the TRPRC's monkeys are infected with herpes-B, a disease fatal to humans. This disease has been used as a club against macaques for some time. In Wisconsin, primate center officials used the high incidence figures (common in all captive macaque colonies subjected to regular high stress) to argue that the macaques at the county zoo were a grave risk to the public's health and could not be safely maintained on public display. More recently when rhesus monkeys escaped from an island in Florida, Kirk Boehm, a Wisconsin primate center minor official, once again publicly asserted that macaques pose a risk to the public. The NIH RPRC officials want it both ways. When the public is worried, the monkeys pose no risk; when the public is concerned for the monkeys' well-being, the monkeys are too dangerous to have around. This is the mentality and logic consuming our limited tax dollars and subjecting thousands of monkeys annually to grievous suffering.
LEARN ABOUT the experimentation being funded by the National Institutes of Health conducted at the TNPRC. Most researchers (e-mail addresses provided) are conducting many studies at any one time.
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