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By Laura Bonar
Program Director, Animal Protection of New Mexico
Truly heart-wrenching news from Alamogordo: The National Institutes of Health has shipped 15 chimpanzees to Southwest National Primate Research Center in Texas for use in invasive research. Just exactly when they were removed from their home at Alamogordo Primate Facility, which chimpanzees were shipped, and whether they were flown or driven across the desert is still unknown to the public.
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Flo, a chimpanzee born in 1957, has lived through many phases of chimpanzee research in New Mexico. Here she is shown in an outdoor enclosure at the Alamogordo Primate Facility. Animal activists want the center to be converted to a sanctuary.
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The Albuquerque Journal’s July 16th editorial crisply details the moral, fiscal and scientific reasons why pursuing research with these chimps is a “lose-lose-lose deal.” In 2010, permanent retirement from research is what the Alamogordo Primate Facility chimpanzees should be experiencing.
This May I visited the Alamogordo Primate Facility and met the oldest resident, a chimp named Flo. Born in 1957, Flo has lived through many phases of chimpanzee research in New Mexico: The space program; high velocity crash tests for seat belts; testing of industrial solvents, pharmaceuticals and insecticides; and intentional and accidental infection with HIV and hepatitis viruses, which includes weekly “knockdowns” (anesthesia by dart) for blood and liver biopsies.
As part of my recent Alamogordo Primate Facility tour with state representatives and staff from some congressional offices, a lab spokeswoman detailed to her attentive human audience the diligent care given to lab chimpanzees. Flo rushed out and spat water at us.
Research has taught us about chimps, though perhaps these findings seem common sense. According to the Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, “Given that chimpanzees and humans share an array of qualities … including consciousness, self-awareness, social bonding mechanisms, memory, compassion, strategic thinking and humor … both species are vulnerable to trauma.”
I wonder what the shipment to Southwest felt like for those 15 chimpanzees, who had been free from invasive research in Alamogordo since 2001.
Their new “home” at Southwest, one of the largest biomedical research centers in the United States, warehouses many thousands of animals. U.S. Department of Agriculture inspection reports detail numerous citations and violations of the Animal Welfare Act. For example, federal employees performed a necropsy (animal autopsy) on a male baboon while he was still alive (see the report here).
National Institutes of Health has decided for New Mexico, and all Americans, that the remainder of the Alamogordo Primate Facility chimpanzees — estimated at 188 — will be shipped to Southwest in early 2011, once renovations can accommodate them.
The win-win-win we need is permanent retirement from research and sanctuary care for all Alamogordo Primate Facility chimpanzees, including the unfortunate 15 who were shipped to Southwest. This ethical solution simultaneously provides jobs to New Mexicans and a stream of federal dollars into the state to care for the chimps. Your U.S. senators and representative can change our legacy with chimpanzees, but they need to hear it matters to you.
Posted with permission from the Albuquerque Publishing Company.
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