Georgia Plans to Open the Largest Monkey-Breeding Farm In the US
A long-tailed macaque at a breeding facility in Cambodia. Image supplied to Species Unite
Plans for a huge monkey-breeding facility in a small town of Georgia have drawn criticism from local residents and animal welfare groups.
City and county officials in Bainbridge, southwest Georgia, are reportedly already in the process of trying to secure the construction of the facility, by agreeing to more than $58 million in handouts including a 20-year tax abatement scheme and 200 acres of public land.
If built, the breeding facility will be capable of holding up to 30,000 monkeys - twice the human population of Bainbridge. The site is set to cost $396 million, and once up-and-running, will breed long-tailed macaques who will be sold to pharmaceutical companies that use the animals in animal tests and experiments.
“In a bid to attract a few jobs - many of them low-paying and risking exposure to zoonotic diseases - city and county officials have rolled out the red carpet for an unethical plan by some questionable characters that could spell ecological disaster and potentially spark the next pandemic,” PETA primate scientist Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel, said in a statement.
A long-tailed macaque at a breeding facility in Cambodia. Image supplied to Species Unite
The company behind the plans, Safer Human Medicine, is led by former executives of other key companies involved in sourcing animals for animal testing. These include Charles River Laboratories, which is currently under civil and criminal investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, after it was revealed that monkeys in U.S. labs had been illegally caught from the wild and smuggled from Cambodia.
Environmental and Health Risks of Farming 30,000 Monkeys
PETA, along with local residents, are among those voicing their concerns about the project. Not only are there ethical concerns about raising tens of thousands of monkeys to be used in controversial animal tests, but the huge site itself would also raise environmental and human health concerns.
“The cost that this community is going to bear when they drop 30,000 monkeys into an environment that has no business holding 30,000 monkeys. It’s their tax dollars, it’s their backyards, it’s their environment. They’re the ones bearing the risks,” explains Dr. Jones-Engel.
Macaques huddled together at a macaque breeding facility, Laos, 2011. Credit: Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals
PETA points out that at full capacity, the proposed facility would produce more than 444,000 gallons of wastewater including the feces, urine and other fluids from 30,000 caged monkeys. The landsite is just half a mile from the Flint River, which provides water for crop irrigation and ultimately flows into the Gulf of Mexico.
Last year, an outbreak of tuberculosis was uncovered in monkeys at a Michigan laboratory, which some residents worry could indicate that harmful and deadly pathogens could spread from the breeding facility’s monkeys over to humans in the local area. And at a city council meeting this week, locals expressed frustration that their property value will be negatively affected by having the country’s largest monkey-breeding facility in their town.
There is also no precedent for a breeding-facility of this size in the U.S., with the next largest similar facility, located in Texas and cages between 6,000 to 11,000 monkeys.
Plans for the facility continue to progress, but PETA says it won’t stop fighting against the proposals. “PETA urges Bainbridge officials to withdraw their support and shut down this project before a shovel hits the dirt”, Dr. Jones-Engel.
Deadly diseases, illegal trafficking, and species extinction, are just some of the some of the issues that are plaguing America’s controversial reliance on the use of long-tailed macaques in medical research. Species Unite spoke with someone who has spent years working in biomedical laboratories with primates, Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel, but is now PETA’s Senior Science Advisor. Listen to the podcast episode here to learn more about the industry, and why it could be the beginning of the end for importing primates for experimentation.
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