Action for Primates
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Action for Primates |
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The following are take action items we have posted in 2025. See elsewhere for take action alerts from other years. In addition to the Take Action entries below, you can click here for petitions you can sign and share to help non-human primates around the world.
Index of action alerts; select date & title to access:
10 January 2025: Airline alert: urge SmartLynx Malta to stop January monkey transport
Action for Primates has been alerted that SmartLynx Malta is scheduled to transport hundreds of long-tailed macaques – in January 2025 – as cargo from Vietnam, destined for laboratories in the USA. Torn from their families and friends, these intelligent, sentient and complex beings will be forced to endure a traumatic and frightening ordeal, each confined to a small, single crate. Subjected to unimaginable stress and anxiety, they will be loaded into cargo holds to be shipped thousands of miles across the world, involving many hours and multiple stop-overs. This is an inhumane and immoral trade in monkeys' lives. In the past few months, SmartyLynx Malta has transported thousands of Endangered long-tailed macaques from Mauritius and Vietnam to non-human primate dealers and laboratories in the USA and Europe.
SmartLynx Malta is a Latvia-based charter airline, and part of SmartLynx Airlines which, in turn, is part of the Avia Solutions Group, a large aviation services provider with its headquarters in Dublin.
As a result of public concern and opposition, many airlines and cargo carriers, including American Airlines, British Airways, United Airlines, South African Airways, Delta Airlines, Eva Air, Air Canada, China Airlines and Kenya Airways, made the decision to end their involvement in the cruelty and suffering caused by the international trade in non-human primates, by refusing to transport these animals destined for the research industry. More recently, Air France stopped in 2023, after decades of transporting long-tailed macaques from Mauritius and Vietnam to the USA and Europe.
Please join our call to SmartLynx Malta and the Avia Solutions Group to stop their involvement in the brutal trade in macaques for the global research and toxicity (poisoning) testing industry.
What you can do to help:
6 January 2025: Rhesus macaques subjected to brutal brain damage and death in USA
Rhesus macaques had part of their brain removed, followed by virtual social isolation, and then death, in research done at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), a branch of the National Institutes of Health in the USA (Eldridge et al 2024). This brutal treatment of these macaques was approved by the NIMH animal use committee and was stated to have followed the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals. It was paid for by the US taxpayer through the Intramural Research Program of the NIMH.
Three adult male rhesus macaques were housed singly in metal cages. Although they might have been able to smell, hear or see each other, they were not allowed meaningful social contact, which at a minimum includes the ability to touch, groom and interact directly with others of their kind. This constitutes extreme privation, something that not only is severely detrimental to their welfare and well-being, it also has profound effects on their brains, which means potentially serious confounding of any results sought by the researchers.
Each macaque was subjected to highly invasive brain surgery. After preparing the head, the researchers made an incision through the skin and underlying tissues in order to expose the skull. Bone was sawed through and a portion removed. The thick membrane covering the brain (dura mater) was cut and pulled aside. A suction apparatus was inserted deep into the brain and an entire side of what is known as the orbitofrontal cortex (an area of the brain that controls emotion and behaviour) was aspirated
(sucked out). After this mutilation, the surgical wound was closed.
The macaques were allowed to survive for at least four weeks after surgery, at which time they were killed (euphemistically referred to as euthanized
by the researchers) in order to obtain their brains for further study. The researchers did not even bother to determine the effects such brain damage had on the macaques' short lives.
The goal of this brutal, inhumane research was to determine the distribution of a particular class of nerve fibres which might be involved in certain aspects of brain function. The researchers claimed they were trying to resolve conflicting findings in studies on other macaques. They pointed out, however, that there were data already available from studies on human beings, in particular those who had naturally occurring damage to the same area of the brain being studied in the macaques! The results in the macaque study will have no meaning for humans and are not necessarily even relevant to other macaques (Petticrew & Smith 2012).
Despite protestations to the contrary by the research industry, non-human primates continue to be used in archaic and extremely inhumane research that has no direct relevance to people. If funding agencies would only fund innovative, humane and human-relevant studies using human patients and volunteers, researchers would stop concocting these archaic experiments and concentrate on truly helping humans. We join with experts in primatology in calling for an end to these experiments (Padrell, et al 2021).
What you can do to help:
Cited information:
Here, we will review previous studies showing that primates have complex behaviour and cognition, and that they suffer long-term consequences after being used in invasive research.
Although some invasive studies have allowed answering research questions that we could not have addressed with other methods (or at least not as quickly), the use of primates in invasive research also raises ethical concerns. In this review, we will discuss (i) recent advances in the study of primates that show evidence of complex behaviour and cognition, (ii) welfare issues that might arise when using primates in invasive research, (iii) the main ethical issues that have been raised about invasive research on primates, (iv) the legal protection that primates are granted in several countries, with a special focus on the principle of the 3Rs, and (v) previous and current attempts to ban the use of primates in invasive research. Based on this analysis, we suggest that the importance of a research question cannot justify the costs of invasive research on primates, and that non-invasive methods should be considered the only possible approach in the study of primates. [emphasis added]
Primatologists themselves have warned repeatedly about over-generalising from primate data to human societies...the data may not even be generalisable between similar species of monkey, as comparative research and field studies suggest that there are striking differences in group composition, social spacing, dominance and aggression between species...The social and hierarchical behaviour of Macaca fascicularis, the species used in many of these studies, may not therefore even be representative of all of its own genus, which raises doubt about extrapolation to higher primates.
Information on NIH grant support (funding) is taken verbatim from relevant publications. If you have difficulty with any links provided, you can do your own search through the NIH RePORTER site: https://reporter.nih.gov/, by copying and pasting the grant number into the Search field on the form.
Be aware that some grants include funds for more than experiments on non-human primates.
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