The Public Has Spoken: Chimpanzees Deserve to be Retired

The public has spoken: Seventy-one percent of Americans believe that chimpanzees who have spent more than 10 years in research laboratories deserve to be retired to permanent sanctuary, according to a recent independent public opinion survey.

Despite this public sentiment, nearly 90 percent of the chimpanzees used for research in the United States have been kept in laboratories for more than 10 years.

Chimpanzees are still used in research in the United States even though the practice was outlawed—or simply is not conducted—in almost all other countries. In the United States, which is the only large-scale user of chimpanzees for research in the world, there is an opportunity to send chimpanzees to a national sanctuary system following their use in research, according to the 2000 Chimpanzee Health Improvement and Maintenance Protection Act. The law is unprecedented and unique to chimpanzees, but there is no obligation to send the animals to sanctuary, and researchers decide how long they are kept in labs.  

Currently, there are 15 chimpanzees who have spent more than four decades—almost their entire lives—in the laboratory: Gwen, 54, Susie, 52, Wenka, 52, Cheeta, 47. Eleven others have been kept in research facilities for nearly a lifetime, used either in research or to breed baby chimps for research. Some of these chimpanzees were once pets; some were caught from the wild; others were bred specifically for research. Now, their time is running out. Chimpanzees in captivity have a life expectancy of 50 to 60 years.

High financial and ethical costs are spurring a trend away from using chimpanzees in research.  It has been shown that chimpanzees have a highly developed sense of emotion and intelligence—very similar to that of humans. Research has shown that they experience a range of emotions, including depression, anxiety, pain, distress and empathy. This means that they understand their desolate situation, and they certainly experience suffering. For these reasons, The HSUS seeks to permanently end the breeding and use of chimpanzees in research and testing and to promote instead a lifetime of care in a sanctuary setting. 

Animal protection groups including Project R&R, which commissioned the survey, are working to free the 15 chimpanzees from their laboratory life by asking the officials in charge of the research facilities to finally retire the chimps to long-overdue life in a sanctuary. 

According to Project R&R, The Humane Research Council, a consumer and market research company, conducted the the online independent survey of 1,678 adults, 18 years old and older, in the United States.  To ensure that the U.S. adult population was accurately represented, the Humane Research Council applied controlled sample distribution using census-balanced weighting.  The margin of error was +/- 2.4 percent at a 95 percent confidence level.