Residents of Hendry County, Florida have for years been disturbed over several large monkey breeding facilities in the region. An announcement of yet another one to come has spurred community anger and opposition.
Click the form above to send a letter opposing the expansion.
In November 2014, the Animal Legal Defense Fund filed a lawsuit against Hendry County for approving the new facility without any public hearings or notification, a violation of state law.
New information continues to expose the ugly reality of monkey “farming” for use in research. The 3,200 primates in Hendry County monkey facilities are captured from the wild in Vietnam, Cambodia, China and Mauritius, torn from their families, and transported thousands of miles under harsh conditions that cause many of them to die before reaching the U.S.
Once here, they are housed and bred to be sold for use in research at a price of $3,200 each.
A former vet tech turned whistleblower who worked at one of the facilities, Primate Products, told a local TV news station how they regularly performed C-section abortions on pregnant female monkeys to remove the fetus, then package it for sale to buyers.
“The internal organs were then taken from the fetuses and freeze dried and sold to pharmaceutical companies,” said former employer David Roebuck. “After that was done, the mothers were still lactating so they collected their milk and sold them to another pharmaceutical company.”
Disgusted, Roebuck quit after two days. “When I got involved in that, I knew I just couldn’t live with myself if I was going to be doing that.”
Local TV news station WINK obtained documents from the USDA confirming that approximately three experiments were performed each day on the monkeys during 2014, totaling 1,148 procedures.
Hendry County Administrator Charles Chapman told WINK News he had no idea the company was doing anything but breeding monkeys.
Under agricultural zoning regulations, the county prohibits the facilities from carrying out experiments on the monkeys, though they are allowed to breed monkeys.
Concerned about the reports from USDA, county officials have contacted Primate Products for a full explanation. A ruling from the county on the future expansion is expected in a few weeks.
Please contact the county administrator to ask him to refuse the company’s expansion and continue the investigation into the operations at these monkey facilities. If they are in violation of law, they should be shut down.
With over 23,000 primates imported into the U.S. in 2014 alone, we don’t need more monkeys imported. Already more than 70,000 monkeys are used in biomedical research in the U.S. and a substantial number, estimated to be around 50,000, are housed in breeding colonies before being assigned to research.
Citizens for Alternatives to Animal Research (CAARE), is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, established to highlight and promote research without animals.
CAARE’s mission is to reduce animal suffering by disseminating information about the power and progress of research without animals. Please help us by sharing this message with a friend and liking us on Facebook.
