A laboratory transport truck crashed in Mississippi last month resulting in eight monkeys escaping, seven of whom were shot and killed after surviving the initial crash. Tragedies like this happen too often. Over the past two decades, there have been more than 15 publicly reported lab monkey escapes, both during transportation and directly from labs, including from the California, Southwest, and Oregon National Primate Research Centers.
In 2022, a truck carrying 100 long-tailed macaques crashed in Pennsylvania en route to a quarantine facility after arriving from Mauritius. Last year, 43 monkeys escaped the Alpha Genesis breeding facility in South Carolina after an employee neglected to lock an enclosure. According to a whistleblower, the latter was part of a pattern of incompetence resulting in monkey injury and death.
Closer to home, some may recall that nine monkeys escaped from the Oregon National Primate Research Center, one of seven such centers funded publicly by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). A worker had forgotten to latch an enclosure. Earlier this year, whistleblowers shared that escapes from enclosures are frequent at the center and that employees are discouraged from formally reporting incidents that put animals in danger.
I toured one of these centers earlier this year and can assure you that their public image is highly curated. The tour was limited to outdoor enclosures and questions about the animals in laboratories were skirted. As an attorney and animal research policy expert, I know that accountability for animal research facilities often only comes after whistleblowers come forward or lawsuits are filed.
It has been nearly three weeks since the accident in Mississippi, yet Tulane University and the USDA continue the veil of secrecy; we still don’t know where these monkeys were headed or for what purpose.
Despite the national and international headlines, Americans are largely in the dark about what goes on behind closed doors of monkey breeding and research facilities. Perhaps this is why most Americans do not support it. A Morning Consult poll conducted one year ago found that 85 percent of U.S. adult respondents agreed that animal experiments should be phased out in favor of more modern and reliable research methods.
Transparency is a key tenet of accountability. As taxpayers, we should be able to easily access information about publicly funded animal research. The number of animals used and dollars spent are impossible to obtain, even with mountains of records requests.
A recent effort in Congress could improve transparency. The Federal Animal Research Accountability Act, a bipartisan bill introduced earlier this year, would direct the NIH to report the number of each animal species used in government-funded research, oversight that is already standard in other countries. I am hopeful that my congresswoman, Rep. Maxine Dexter, will support this bill.
Another simple change to NIH’s public grants database, called RePORTER, could go a long way toward greater animal research transparency. Information about a project’s vertebrate animal use is already collected in grant applications and could easily be included in RePORTER entries, providing the public a picture of NIH spending on animal experiments.
Not only does the conduct of animal research operate outside the public eye, the global trade to support this research does too. Reports have emerged from breeding facilities in Asia that claim biologically impossible birth rates, pointing to high numbers of illegally wild-caught animals. Later this year, at the Conference of the Parties for the Convention on International Trade and Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), parties will decide whether to enact a total ban on the sale of Cambodian long-tailed macaques.
Long-tailed macaques are one of the two macaque species already listed as endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species due to significant declines in their wild populations because they are used in research. As a party to CITES, and a large importer of monkeys for use in research, the U.S. should support the proposed ban to protect this vulnerable species.
With exciting advances in human-based research technologies, it’s time to start phasing out monkey research. But until they are no longer used, we need to know more about what goes on within the walls and cages of publicly funded animal research facilities and protect the animals captive there, including here in Oregon. The FARA Act, changes to RePORTER, and trade bans on vulnerable species would provide much needed transparency, oversight, and accountability.
Mikalah Singer is an attorney and science policy specialist.
