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HOUSE OF LORDS BACKS MEASURES TO END WILD MONKEY CAPTURE AND RESTRICT MONKEY EXPERIMENTS
Wednesday, 11th November
Every year thousands of monkeys are torn from the wild and their families to restock breeding colonies in factory farms in Asia and Mauritius that supply European laboratories. A new report published by the House of Lords EU Committee has this week backed proposals by the European Commission to end the practice.
Animal Defenders International (ADI), who gave written and oral evidence to the Lords EU Committee inquiry into the revision of the EU Directive 86/609 on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes, has welcomed this and several other recommendations by the Lords.
Earlier this year, following intense lobbying by primate suppliers and primate experimentation facilities, the European Parliament seriously weakened European Commission proposals to end the wild capture of monkeys by dealers and to restrict primate use.
The House of Lords, who received submissions from laboratories, including Huntingdon Life Sciences, and monkey suppliers involved in wild capture, have backed restricting experiments on monkeys to life-threatening and debilitating human diseases and supported a phase out of the use of monkeys born of wild caught parents, albeit “monitored closely”.
Tim Phillips, ADI Campaigns Director who gave evidence to the Lords’ Committee, said: “10,000 monkeys are used in experiments in Europe every year, most of these are born of parents snatched from the wild. Europe is therefore continuing to fuel the capture of thousands of wild macaque monkeys to stock breeding farms in Asia – a region where the species is now in widespread and rapid decline. We have filmed undercover with the monkey trappers, exposed conditions inside the factory farms that feed the labs, and revealed how monkeys live and die inside British laboratories. This is an industry of almost unparalleled animal suffering. We would have liked the Lords to have gone further, but this is clear recognition of the problem. ”