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| Chimpanzees are extremely intelligent animals and are, along with bonobos, human’s closest living relatives. © istock.com |
Nearly six months after a chimpanzee named Tony was shot and killed following his escape from a biomedical research facility, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has fined the facility for violations of the Animal Welfare Act.
On March 12, Tony, an 18 year-old chimpanzee, was shot ten times by a University of Texas police officer after Tony escaped by jumping more than 15 feet to a perimeter wall in an outdoor enclosure located at the Michale E. Keeling Center for Comparative Medicine and Research, in Bastrop, Texas. Staff at the facility were attempting to catch Tony when the incident occurred. The facility houses approximately 2,000 primates and is affiliated with the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center
Tony's escape and death was one of three separate incidents involving chimpanzee escapes at the facility over a six month period. On Nov. 9, 2007, three chimpanzees escaped from an outdoor roofed enclosure and were recaptured. One of the chimpanzees, named Jake, was not recaptured until nearly three hours after his escape. On April 3, less than a month after Tony's death, Jake again escaped and was recaptured.
"We certainly welcome the attention to these incidents by the USDA, but would have liked to see more meaningful penalties" said Kathleen Conlee, director of program management for animal research issues at The HSUS. "These incidents are yet another demonstration that chimpanzees are clearly extremely intelligent and resourceful and simply cannot be kept humanely in laboratories."
The Keeling Center was fined nearly $3,000 for multiple violations incurred during the six month period, including a failure to maintain secure enclosures and a failure to handle animals in a manner that does not cause them harm. The USDA opened an investigation after receiving a complaint from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).
Relatives Used in Research
Approximately 1,200 chimpanzees—some who were captured from the wild, used by the entertainment industry or kept as pets—live in nine biomedical research and testing laboratories in the United States.
The Great Ape Protection Act, currently pending in Congress, would phase out invasive research on the chimpanzees remaining in laboratories, stop the breeding of chimpanzees for invasive research, and retire the approximately 600 federally-owned chimpanzees to permanent sanctuary.
The U.S. is the only country that continues large scale use of chimpanzees in research. New Zealand, United Kingdom, Sweden, Austria, New Zealand, Australia, Japan and the Netherlands already forbid or severely limit experiments on chimpanzees.
