by A plan to build a massive monkey breeding facility that could house 30,000 long-tailed macaques in a small town in Georgia has sparked a multifaceted legal battle pitting residents against a company whose executives have come under scrutiny for its handling of animals. was destined for medical research in the past. .
The fate of the facility is in the hands of the Georgia Court of Appeals, which will decide Thursday whether to validate a bond the city of Bainbridge pledged to Safer Human Medicine, a company started by animal research industry veterans to cancel. He got the bond after Bainbridge leaders green-lighted the project in December.
But in the following months residents, with the help of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, began to push back against the project.
“It feels like someone is going to drop a bomb in the middle of everything we’ve worked for and built,” said lifelong Bainbridge resident June Faircloth. “We cannot sit back and let it happen.”
This is not the first such project to meet local opposition – backed by PETA – at a time when researchers say they have few monkeys for medical testing. Long-tailed macaques are among the most commonly used monkeys in research in the United States, and although monkeys are used in a fraction of one percent of animal studies, researchers say they are vital.
A monkey breeding facility in Brazoria County, Texas, planned by the company Charles River Laboratories, was put on hold this year after local opposition helped by PETA emerged. PETA also pushed back after a Chinese-owned company bought land in Florida a few years ago for a possible primate facility — the plan was ultimately scrapped.
The battles highlight how animal rights activists, along with residents, have succeeded in opposing new facilities despite the constant demands of scientists.
Animal testing for research purposes has a long history — as does opposition. And while many scientists have advocated more humane treatment of animals used in research, they have also warned that halting such research would seriously hinder many medical advances. Animal testing is regulated in the US by the Animal Welfare Act of 1966.
Dr. Paul Johnson, director of Emory’s National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, said monkey research helped develop Covid vaccines, an HIV vaccine that is in clinical trials and bealacept, a drug used in kidney transplants.
The test can be traumatic for monkeys. Some are euthanized, while others cycle through studies.
“We study monkeys because their brains are wired a lot like human brains,” Johnson said.
In Bainbridge, a town of about 14,000 in the southwest corner of Georgia, residents began turning to the macaque project after the Christmas vote.
Faircloth, one of the main organizers of the Bainbridge pushback, turned her interior design office into a hub for community members fighting to, in her words, “Stop the Monkey Farm” — with signs, flyers and hats scattered in mix flooring and fabrics. Many protested and spoke at town halls. Some of them set up a website and a Facebook group that grew to more than a thousand members. And every Tuesday night, they come together and pray.
Residents of the facility itself have expressed concern about the possibility of monkeys escaping – something that has happened occasionally at other facilities in the United States, including one run by Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, though not any reports of injury to nearby residents.
“We’re looking at a jungle: noise, stink and the possibility of disease,” said Penny Reynolds, who lives across from the land set aside for the facility in Bainbridge.
Safer Human Medicine assured residents that it would take every precaution to ensure that all waste was contained in its facilities and sent to the city’s wastewater treatment plant. He added that most of the noise would remain within the facility and there would be no “significant odor”.
Greg Westergaard, CEO of monkey breeder Alpha Genesis, says many set up monkey breeding facilities.
“There is a lot of training involved; there is a lot of infrastructure involved,” he said. “It’s going to smell, and you’re going to have runoff from the toilet.”
Bainbridge residents pointed to the backgrounds of some of Safer Human Medicine’s executives — two of whom previously held leadership positions at companies that have come under scrutiny — as reasons to doubt their commitment.
Safer Human Medicine CEO Jim Harkness was the chief operating officer of Envigo, a company that pleaded guilty last week to neglecting thousands of dogs and agreed to pay a record fine of $35 million. Chief Operating Officer Kurt Derfler left his job at Charles River Laboratories last year, just months after the Justice Department announced it was part of its investigation into the smuggling of wild monkeys from Cambodia. Charles River Laboratories said at the time that any concerns about its role were “without merit”.
Neither Harkness nor Derfler were charged individually in connection with those cases.
Safer Human Medicine declined interview requests. He said by email, “Envigo has been operating during unprecedented circumstances caused by the pandemic.” He added, “We have been committed to operating responsibly and ethically for many years in this area and will continue to do so.”
Safer Human Medicine said it would not be using wild-caught macaques – which can carry viruses like herpes B. The macaques would come from Asia, it said, without specifying where.
The community organization in Bankbridge has moved the needle. Rick McCaskill, executive director of the Bainbridge and Decatur County Development Authority, said it was a “tremendous investment” of nearly $400 million and a sharp turn for 260 jobs. After public pushback, Bainbridge leaders voted in February to withdraw their support for the Safer Human Medicines project.
“We felt that the division and unrest in the community was more important than the interest of the project,” McCaskill said.
Research monkeys are bred at the seven National Primate Research Centres, each with its own breeding colony, as well as other facilities around the country. The National Primate Research Centers often use rhesus macaques, and pharmaceutical companies typically use long-tailed macaques—the type that Safer Human Medicine intends to breed.
There has been some movement away from animal testing for drug development, which the US once demanded. This year, several members of Congress introduced a bill to take it a step further — and facilitate a move away from animal research.
“It’s probably going to be a collection of alternatives, from AI to computer models to organs on a chip,” said Jim Newman, communications director for Americans for Medical Progress, a group that advocates medical testing on animals when necessary. “But what we currently have available can only reduce animals to a certain extent.”
Currently, researchers still rely on monkeys for some testing, and some animal researchers say the US is experiencing a shortage of long-tailed macaques – reporting a more than 20% drop in imports in 2020 after China cut its exports to cut They say prices for long-tailed macaques are skyrocketing.
Safer Human Medicine says it sees its proposed facility as a response to the shortage. He said he would start with 500 to 1,000 monkeys and increase. He said the money to build the facility would come from industry and private funding within the U.S. He would not share names.
It is not entirely clear how much of the public is against the facility. Several local politicians who campaigned against him did not win in recent elections, although it is not clear that their losses had anything to do with those positions.
Still, Faircloth said her group has no plans to back down.
“If we don’t stand up for our rights, we just roll over,” she said. “We cannot allow that to happen.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
