A decision to move 186 chimpanzees from a southern New Mexico facility to Texas is pitting government officials and scientists against a coalition of elected officials and animal rights advocates, including New Mexico’s governor and famed primate researcher Jane Goodall.
The chimps have spent the past decade undisturbed by medical researchers. However, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has decided to cut government costs by moving the animals to a San Antonio primate facility, where animal rights activists worry they will be improperly poked, prodded and stabbed in the name of science.
New Mexico Govenor Bill Richardson and others would prefer to see the chimps’ current home — a former biomedical research lab at Holloman Air Force Base — converted into a chimpanzee sanctuary. After visiting the site on Tuesday, the governor said the animals are in excellent health and he suggested the New Mexico lab could instead become a behavioral research facility.
However, the director of the Texas facility maintains opponents have it wrong. The chimps will have outstanding care and live in quality surroundings as they undergo testing that can include injections and, in some cases, the use of a needle to remove a small liver sample, he said.
“These are mostly clinical procedures that are also done with human beings,” Southwest National Primate Research Center director John VandeBerg said. “We are doing them with chimpanzees to develop drugs and vaccines that can be used in human subjects.”
VandeBerg said the research is “ethical and imperative” if scientists are to develop vaccines to prevent the suffering and deaths of millions of people worldwide from Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C and HIV.
Chimps share up to 96 percent of their DNA with humans, making them the only animals that can be tested.
VandeBerg said researchers also use chimps to study osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease, osteoarthritis and other aspects of aging.
The colony of chimps traces its roots to the space race and Project Mercury. Their home near Alamogordo, New Mexico, was once a biomedical research lab operated by the Coulston Foundation. However, the foundation turned over the colony to the NIH in 2000 as part of a settlement of animal welfare violations.
The NIH then hired a private company, Massachusetts-based Charles River Laboratories, to manage the facility. The agency decided to send the chimps to Texas after its current 10-year contract with Charles River runs out at the end of next year.
Richardson visited NIH headquarters in Maryland last month, asking officials to reconsider the decision. Goodall wrote in July seeking to have the chimps retired.
However, the NIH maintains the move will save taxpayers US$2 million a year — money that VandeBerg argued could be invested in additional research to combat illnesses — and federal officials are showing no signs of plans to alter course.
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