One of the spots they found was a place in Newcastle called Mindy’s Memory Primate Sanctuary. Linda Barcklay is the founder of Mindy’s Memory. She says, “The joy is beyond description. I’m so proud to be able to take these monkeys and give them a safe secure habitat the rest of their lives with the best food they’ve ever had.” The eight new residents bring the total number of monkeys at Mindy’s Memory up to 87.

Scotlund Haisley is the President of IDA and says he feels good making a promise to the animals to provide them with a better life and end their suffering. He helped deliver the young monkeys to Barcklay and says, “They’ve known nothing but captivity and been poked and prodded and experimented on their entire lives.”

The ones now living here in Oklahoma aren’t the only monkeys going to new homes. IDA rescued 55 monkeys in all. The others will be delivered in Texas to three separate sanctuaries on Saturday.

They range in age from two to five and their medical conditions vary. The people who care about them put in a lot of effort and spent a lot of money moving them. They say the price tag is nothing compared to the priceless feeling they get from providing them with a new place to play.

Read the entire article here.

I worked for two years undercover inside Oregon Health & Science University’s primate research center, and what I saw inside that lab changed me forever. I came to recognize the social, intelligent monkeys at the facility — more than 4,000 remain there today — as individuals, and that they were being treated like little more than furry test tubes.

Although OHSU tells us most are now socially housed, its monkey census has grown by a stunning 68 percent in the 10 years since I was there, still leaving roughly 1,000 monkeys living alone in stark, stainless steel cages.

When I hear scientists who conduct this research claim these animals are “not allowed to suffer,” as was expressed in a recent commentary by Nancy Haigwood, OHSU’s director for the Oregon National Primate Research Center, I want to protest the phrase itself — for its overuse and therefore its uselessness, for its throttling of the very thing it asks us to be cognizant of: human ethics.

Long before any surgery or experiment is conducted, the monkeys at OHSU suffer. Even as fragile babies, a leather-gloved hand rips them from their mothers forever, and as adults they are left alone in cages for years on end. We now know how similar these monkeys are to humans, and their emotional need for love and companionship runs just as deep. Isolation is considered among the worst forms of human torture. A U.S. military study of almost 150 naval aviators returned from imprisonment in Vietnam reported that they found social isolation to be as torturous and unbearable as any physical abuse.

But in research labs, it’s just standard husbandry practice. What I witnessed and videotaped were the resulting widespread and bizarre behaviors of that isolation: hair pulling, infant abuse, the smearing and eating of feces, self-mutilation and depression, all consequences of research that resembles a factory farm for monkeys.

In the name of science, animals are routinely injected with or forced to consume toxins, addicted to drugs, intentionally inflicted with disease, subjected to invasive surgeries and procedures, burned, shocked, starved, deprived of water, isolated and immobilized for hours, weeks, even months on end. How is it that they don’t suffer?

Claims of strict regulation in federally funded labs are just as hollow. Ninety-five percent of all the animals used in research — mostly rats and mice — are afforded no protection under the Animal Welfare Act. At OHSU, the U.S. Department of Agriculture visits as rarely as a few days a year, and Oregon’s inspector at the time I was there, Dr. Isis Johnson Brown, quit in frustration because her supervisors didn’t support her efforts to enforce the law.

The other multiple layers of “oversight” are all in-house or research industry-based. And with the country’s recent financial conflagration, self-regulation has been exposed to be a dangerous proposition at best.

And all this suffering to what end? OHSU recently reported a monkey study that “proves” that exercise helps monkeys lose more weight than dieting alone. No surprise — this was previously observed in human subjects. And much of this research is just that — research for research’s sake — with little or no human benefit. The more the public sees, the more skeptical it will become of outdated, wasteful, often ridiculous and fraudulent taxpayer-funded animal experimentation, and the sooner its abolition will come.

And that’s why I protest.

Matt Rossell is Northwest director of In Defense of Animals.

“Squirrel monkeys would receive a level of radiation similar to what an astronaut would encounter on a Mars mission,” the BNL statement explains.

“The monkeys would then live out the remainder of their natural lifetime at McLean [Hospital], while researchers there would observe them for subtle changes in behavior and performance.”

Researchers from McLean Hospital, a psychiatric facility of Harvard Medical School, would conduct the study at a NASA facility on the Brookhaven Lab premises.

Opposition

Several animal protection groups oppose the study. In Defense of Animals (IDA) and International Primate Protection League (IPPL) have filed a complaint with NASA and BNL.

“NASA’s proposed experiments would inundate these tiny monkeys—only a foot tall—with one massive burst of gamma radiation equal to a three-year journey to Mars and back,” said IDA researcher Tony Carr in a media release.

“Since the 1950s, thousands of primates have been exposed to various dosages of radiation including radio frequency, microwave, X-ray, gamma, electron, proton, neutron and other particle radiation,” said Carr. “Studies have already shown that gamma radiation can cause depressive behavior, immobility, hyperirritability, convulsions, vomiting, diarrhea, weight loss, hair loss, open sores, skin hemorrhages, and even death.

“Previous research has also proven that animals of different species—even of different strains of the same species—react differently to radiation, which calls into question the experiments’ scientific value in advancing protection for human astronauts.”

Celebrities Speak Out

IDA reports that celebrities including Woody Harrelson, Zachary Quinto, Alicia Silverstone, James Cromwell, Allison Janney, Kristen Bell, Emily Deschanel, and Elizabeth Perkins have signed on to an IDA-drafted letter to U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden, Jr., and BNL Director Dr. Samuel Aronson.

“NASA has already committed $1.75 million in taxpayer money to the experiments,” said Carr. “NASA wants BNL—a lab run by the U.S. Department of Energy—to conduct the radiation portion of the experiments. BNL has not yet decided to proceed. Experiments are being reviewed by BNL’s safety, science, and animal welfare committees.”

The BNL statement adds, “All studies at the NASA facility require approval by multiple review committees.”

To sign on to the IDA’s letter:

https://secure2.convio.net/ida/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=1371

To comment on the proposed NASA squirrel monkey experiments:

Brookhaven National Lab
P.O. Box 5000
Upton, NY 11973-5000
Tel. (631) 344-8000

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