The Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center

The Vilas Monkey Debacle

The Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center (WRPRC) is part of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. WRPRC is largely funded with public monies. WRPRC is at once a state institution and a quasi-federal institution. This is beneficial when it needs a place to hide.

Distrust of the federal government became a reality for the average citizen after the Watergate break-in and cover-up were exposed. Today, awareness that politicians are prone to lies and deceits has become part of the fabric of skepticism wrapped around our view and opinions of our officials. Beginning in 1989, the WRPRC began telling a series of lies to the public that challenged any remaining belief that the pervasive lack of integrity in government had somehow bypassed the biomedical research community. Every assertion made by the biomedical vivisection community must be viewed through a lens of knowledge that members of the community will never act honorably toward the animals they hold in such demonstrated contempt, nor honestly toward those who would attempt to speak for the victims of their pastimes.

When the WRPRC was being constructed in the early 1960's on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison one researcher thought it would be a good idea to have a public display of monkeys for public education. This researcher was Harry Harlow, a psychologist with an interest in the psychological torture of infant monkeys.

Under the guise of investigating the maternal/offspring bond and the psychological effects of solitary confinement on infant monkeys, the University of Wisconsin-Madison sanctioned a career-long series of experiments devised and conducted by Harlow. Even today, WRPRC defends the Mengele-like horror visited upon baby monkeys in the name of Science with a memorial to Harlow in the entrance to the Harlow Primate Psychology Laboratory.

(Harlow's work has been written about and criticized extensively, but for the naive reader I will give a brief overview of Harlow's "accomplishments." I qualify accomplishments because it is unfair to characterize Harlow’s demonstrations as either accomplishments or discoveries. Demonstrating what is commonly known is not discovery.)

Harry Harlow's experiments started out being only typically cruel. He discovered that an infant rhesus monkey would cling to a soft mannequin monkey rather than to a wire mannequin monkey even when the wire mannequin supplies the baby with milk. But Harlow's genius was that he could push the questions always further. His work would have been impossible without a supportive university willing to pay for his investigations.

Harry and his students designed a variety of monkey mannequins. One was equipped with metal spines that could be ejected and retracted. When an infant was clinging to its surrogate mother the Scientists would eject the spines and the infant would be painfully pushed away from its "mother". They discovered that when the spines were withdrawn the baby would return and cling again. Another mannequin was designed with a series of tubes under the cloth covering that ice water could be circulated through. Again the baby was repelled by the "mother's" rejection but returned to cling again when the "mother" returned to normal.

In Harlow's most creative experiments he placed infants in V-shaped stainless steel boxes he termed the "wells of despair." When locked in these small vaults the infants were unable to see any other living creature including the person who replenished their food and water. And then he left the monkeys in these boxes for up to two years.

After they were removed from these prisons. Harlow "discovered" that they had few social skills and seemed unable to interact with more normal monkeys. Never one who was satisfied that he had created enough hell, Harlow then impregnated some of these socially and emotionally crippled monkeys. When their babies were born Harlow documented all the many ways they killed their own children.

Harlow had great prestige and clout when the WRPRC was being constructed, and over the objections of the National Institutes of Health, $189,000 was spent building a 5000 square foot monkey house at the Henry Vilas Park Zoo in Madison.

The University of Wisconsin (UW) entered into a twenty-year lease with the city of Madison for the land under the monkey house for $1 a year. The lease was to expire in 2003 but could be renewed for ten-year intervals. The UW paid for the care of the building and cared for the monkeys housed at the zoo facility, which came to be known as the "round house" due to its architectural design.

Business at the WRPRC continued normally until the late 1980's when a group of citizens began questioning whether it was proper for the public to observe animals who were destined to be tormented by experimental surgeries and other diabolical procedures. Theirs was not a unique view and since 1986 the Aquarium and Zoological Association (AZA) has stated that zoos should not become biomedical lab animal breeding farms - apparently the AZA realized that such an arrangement would be an affront to public sensibilities.

After trying to discuss the situation with UW officials and being ignored, laughed at, and derided, the citizens' group began a series of demonstrations to change university policy. Though publicly ignored by the UW, the protests were successful in raising public awareness and embarrassing the zoo; the UW was forced to admit that it had no understanding of what might be appropriate for public display. The WRPRC entered into an agreement with the zoo's operator, Dane County, which stipulated that the zoo monkeys would be safe from harmful experimentation.

As WRPRC staff changed through the years, the agreement and the policy it represented was reaffirmed.

In 1995, the WRPRC was continuing to maintain this position through correspondence with the zoo director.

Almost every contention made in these three letters turned out to be a blatant lie.

The protection from invasive experiments on the zoo monkeys seems to have been a policy well understood and affirmed by many WRPRC staff members. But in the summer of 1997 a whistle blower came forward with documentation that monkeys had been secretly removed from the zoo, experimented on in the Center’s labs, and sold for experimentation to other labs around the country over a nine year period - throughout the time WRPRC was asserting through correspondence with the zoo that the monkeys were off limits.

At first, the university officials denied the facts, but eventually, as details and documents were made public, they were forced to admit that they had been lying all along.

It is worth noting that the acting director of WRPRC during this period of public discovery was Joseph Kemnitz. A newspaper reporter had contacted Kemnitz about the secret experimentation on the protected monkeys. Kemnitz first denied that any such experiments had taken place, then changed his story to say that it had happened only once, then twice, and finally refused to talk about the situation once his assertions were repeatedly exposed as incorrect. Also of interest is the fact that Henshaw claims that the new director they were seeking would be able to clean up the problem and promote public confidence. The person they chose was Joe Kemnitz.

Perhaps Hinshaw believed she had finally put the matter to rest. She admitted that many monkeys were used in ways contrary to the UW's agreement with the county zoo, and she promised it would never happen again and would put procedures in place to make sure her decisions were followed. She seemed to be trying to be very professional about the whole affair.

But lies had been used to cover-up deceit. On August 19, The Capital Times newspaper reported:

An interesting relationship exists between the regional primate research centers and the National Institutes of Health. Since the centers are nominally part of a university, the NIH can defer decision making to them when it suits their purpose; but since NIH built the centers and continues to provide an overwhelming percentage of each center's funding, it can call the shots when it wishes.

Since the NIH pays for research projects using thousands of monkeys a year and the cost of housing tens-of-thousands of monkeys a year, one might suppose that the fate of one hundred fifty zoo monkeys would be of little consequence to them. But such was not the case. Whether NIH officials acted independently or in collusion with the WRPRC is unknown, but what is abundantly clear is that NIH correspondence with WRPRC put the monkeys on the fast track to hell.

A couple important points emerge from this press release. Hinshaw had informed NIH about the breach in August, and it took NIH six months to reply. Hinshaw apparently knew that the NIH would not fund the Vilas Zoo colony, yet waited six months to say so. In spite of her earlier statement of November 19:

"I would also like to address concerns about the future of the center's monkey colony housed at the zoo. The center's lease at the zoo is expected to expire in 2003, and we are currently working to find a long-term home that is best for the welfare of the animals and are committed to supporting the animals financially. But there is no quick resolution to this issue and finding an appropriate arrangement for the colony may take several years."

She was now saying, "The change in funding means that we have to work rapidly to find options for the colony." Apparently, Hinshaw's earlier assertion that: "…we are currently working to find a long-term home that is best for the welfare of the animals and are committed to supporting the animals financially," simply disappeared into the same black hole of expediency that had swallowed the WRPRC's earlier pledge to protect the monkeys.

And finally, the date of this press release was November 19, just a week before Thanksgiving and the vacation season that effectively shuts down schools and government until after New Year's.

I heard this news on TV and posted the following message to a couple of animal advocacy internet bulletin boards:

The UW, which had been talking about the time needed to find a safe home for the monkeys, had decided to send them to Gerone. In documents procured through Wisconsin's open records laws it seems clear that a sanctuary for the rhesus monkeys was never considered by the WRPRC.

Notice the date of this message: November 10, 1998. But the move to Tulane was not announced until January 9.

Sometimes one is struck by the seemingly lithic insensitivity of public officials charged with making decisions affecting the weakest members of society. The UW announced on January 9, that in less than thirty days the one hundred rhesus monkeys they had promised to protect were going to be sent to Tulane. (This number turned out to be one hundred forty-three but throughout hearings with Dane County the WRPRC never tried to correct the number of monkeys involved. It turned out that nearly fifty monkeys from the zoo were in the labs.)

The decision had been made on or before November 10 or 11, two months before the WRPRC's disclosure. To the primate center staff, monkeys are junk; the monkeys' inner experiences of life are beneath the dignity and not worth the time of the researchers and administrators to consider for the briefest of instants.

Beside the decade of lies to the community, it later came to light that the WRPRC was violating their federal NIH grant. On page 1291 of their NCRR (National Center for Research Resources - the arm of NIH suckling the animal based labs) base grant it states:

" . . . by agreement with the zoo's director, there are limitations on the types of research performed on monkeys born at the facility even after they are transferred elsewhere." (emphasis added).

In hours of public testimony to Dane County officials the WRPRC staff asserted that the monkeys it intended to send to Tulane would be protected by the original, yet repeatedly violated, agreement. Tulane's director, Peter Gerone, went on record stating that the monkeys would be used as any other lab monkeys.

In the end, the University of Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center continued to lie and contort the truth. In their 1997 annual report to NIH they wrote:

The zoo monkey situation . . . generated negative media and animal rights activism attention for the Primate Center. However, the negative press was concentrated in one local paper with a low circulation (20,000), and ongoing, consistent public opposition directed toward the Primate Center came from a very small number of individuals.

But this covers up the fact that school children raised money to protect the monkeys, every TV station covered the story, three county sub-committees voted unanimously to help the monkeys, the county government overwhelmingly passed a resolution intended to help the monkeys, the governor's wife recorded a public service announcement to help the monkeys, and no one who attended public meetings spoke against the monkeys other than Primate Center staff.

Nearly one hundred fifty rhesus monkeys born at the zoo were sent to the Louisiana Regional Primate Research Center on March 4, 1997 where they endured ninety days of solitary confinement which Tulane termed quarantine. Their family groups were destroyed. Some have been placed into breeding situations, some have died (at least one during its solitary confinement), and others have been placed into research. This, in spite of three written agreements, promises by the graduate school dean, and limitations written into their federal grant.

No one was ever held accountable for the two hundred one monkeys who were secretly stolen over the nine-year period.

The university had the monkey house bulldozed to the ground.

This has been a very brief accounting of the situation. WRPRC told so many lies to so many members of the public that a full accounting would fill a book. It is my belief that WRPRC is not unusual in its willingness to lie baldly. Such behavior appears to be the accepted and expected norm. For such lies, the NIH rewarded them handsomely.

It is worth noting that, for some reason, perhaps just hope, that people who shake their heads or shrug their shoulders or even spit in disgust upon learning about the lies, the deceits, the choreographed manipulation of the public’s trust by the NIH and the primate vivisectors, seem willing to suspend their disbelief when told by the same liars that the tax monies they are consuming, the animals they are hurting, the experiments they are performing will somehow lead to their disease-free immortality.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

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