“We’re looking at a jungle: noise, stink and the possibility of diseases,” said Penny Reynolds, who lives across from the land set aside for the facility in Bainbridge.
Safer Human Medicine has assured residents that it would take every precaution to make sure all waste would be contained in its facilities and sent to the city wastewater treatment plant. It also said that most noise would stay within the facility and that there wouldn’t be a “noticeable smell.”
Greg Westergaard, the CEO of monkey breeder Alpha Genesis, says a lot goes into setting up monkey breeding facilities.
“There’s a lot of training involved; there’s a tremendous amount of infrastructure involved,” he said. “It’s going to smell, and you’re going to have runoff from the cleaning.”
Bainbridge residents have pointed to the backgrounds of some of Safer Human Medicine’s executives — two of whom previously served in leadership positions at companies that have come under scrutiny — as reasons to doubt their commitment.
Safer Human Medicine CEO Jim Harkness was the chief operating officer of Envigo, a company that pleaded guilty last week to neglecting thousands of dogs and agreed to pay a record $35 million fine. Chief Operating Officer Kurt Derfler left his job at Charles River Laboratories last year, just months after the Justice Department subpoenaed it as part of its investigation of possible wild monkey smuggling from Cambodia. Charles River Laboratories said at the time that any concerns about its role were “without merit.”
Neither Harkness nor Derfler was individually charged in relation to those cases.
Safer Human Medicine declined interview requests. It said by email, “Envigo was operating during unprecedented circ*mstances brought on by the pandemic.” It added, “We have been committed to operating responsibly and ethically for decades in this field and we will continue doing just that.”
Safer Human Medicine said it wouldn’t be using wild-caught macaques — which can carry viruses like herpes B. The macaques would come from Asia, it said, without specifying where.
The community organizing in Bainbridge has moved the needle. Rick McCaskill, the executive director of the Development Authority of Bainbridge and Decatur County, said that what was once billed as a “tremendous investment” of almost $400 million and 260 jobs quickly turned sour. After backlash from the community arose, Bainbridge leaders voted in February to rescind their support for the Safer Human Medicine project.
“We felt like the divisiveness and the unrest in the community was outweighing the benefit of the project,” McCaskill said.
Research monkeys are bred at the seven National Primate Research Centers, each with its own breeding colony, as well as other facilities across the country. The National Primate Research Centers often use rhesus macaques, while pharmaceutical companies tend to use long-tailed macaques — the type Safer Human Medicine plans to breed.
There has been some movement away from animal testing for drug development, which was once required by the U.S. In 2022, President Joe Biden signed the FDA Modernization Act 2.0, allowing for alternatives to animals when possible. This year, several members of Congress introduced a bill to take it a step further —and facilitate a move away from animal research.
“It’s likely going to be a collection of alternatives, from AI to computer models to organs on a chip,” said Jim Newman, the communications director for Americans for Medical Progress, a group that advocates for medical testing on animals when needed. “But what we currently have available can only reduce animals by a certain amount.”
For now, researchers still depend on monkeys for some testing, and some animal researchers say the U.S. is experiencing a shortage of long-tailed macaques —reporting a more than 20% drop in imports in 2020 after China cut off its exports. They say prices for long-tailed macaques are skyrocketing.
Safer Human Medicine says it sees its planned facility as an answer to the shortage. It said it would start out with 500 to 1,000 monkeys and scale up. It said the money to build the facility would come from industry and private funding within the U.S. It wouldn’t share names.
It’s not entirely clear how much of the community is against the facility. Some local politicians who campaigned on opposing it didn’t win in recent elections, though it’s not apparent that their losses had anything to do with those positions.
Still, Faircloth said her group has no plans to back down.
“If we don’t stand up for our rights, then we’re just going to be rolled over,” she said. “We just can’t let that happen.”
Kayla Steinberg
Kayla Steinberg is an associate producer for NBC News NOW.
A plan to build a massive monkey-breeding facility that could eventually house 30,000 long-tailed macaques
long-tailed macaques
The crab-eating macaque (Macaca fascicularis), also known as the long-tailed macaque and referred to as the cynomolgus monkey in laboratories, is a cercopithecine primate native to Southeast Asia. A species of macaque, the crab-eating macaque has a long history alongside humans.
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Crab-eating_macaque
in a small Georgia city has sparked a multipronged legal battle pitting residents against a company whose executives have faced scrutiny for their past handling of animals destined for medical research.
Safer Human Medicine, the company behind the project, says the long-tailed macaques will be bred and sold to pharmaceutical companies, universities and laboratories for medical research. The company hopes to finish construction and welcome its first monkeys later this year.
Over the next 20 years, the facility will assemble a mega-troop of about 30,000 long-tailed macaques, a species native to south-east Asia, in vast barn-like structures in Bainbridge, Georgia, which has a human population of just 14,000.
A company called “Safer Human Medicine” is proposing to build a monkey breeding warehouse in the small town of Bainbridge, Georgia. At full capacity, the proposed facility, at a significant cost to taxpayers, would be the largest in the U.S., holding up to 30,000 long-tailed macaques bred for experiments.
You cannot own a monkey in Georgia. Primate ownership is banned in that state, and there are severe penalties for possessing a monkey because it's a public health risk and because keeping a monkey as a pet is de facto animal abuse.
Dr. Paul Johnson, the director of the Emory National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, said monkey research helped develop Covid vaccines, an HIV vaccine that's in clinical trials and belatacept, a drug used in kidney transplantation. The testing can be traumatic for the monkeys.
American and Russian scientists utilized animals—mainly monkeys, chimps and dogs—in order to test each country's ability to launch a living organism into space and bring it back alive and unharmed. On June 11, 1948, a V-2 Blossom launched into space from White Sands, New Mexico carrying Albert I, a rhesus monkey.
Walk, watch and be AMAZED as the endangered monkeys live as they would in the wild. Situated in an ancient Staffordshire forest Trentham Monkey Forest is the perfect day out for all ages. *Visitors cannot touch/feed.
Although humans are the longest-lived members of the order, the potential life span of the chimpanzee has been estimated at 60 years, and orangutans occasionally achieve this in captivity. The life span of a lemur, on the other hand, is about 15 years and a monkey's 25–30 years.
The idea behind this behavior is that people prefer to gamble when the outcome is framed as a bonus than when it's framed as a loss, even when the payoffs for either outcome are identical. To test for this bias in capuchins, the researchers positioned two types of traders in the monkey marketplace.
Use monkey business to describe what your sneaky, mischievous little brother gets up to when no one's watching him. Climbing on top of the refrigerator or filling the sugar bowl with salt could both be described as monkey business.
They're potentially dangerous - while they might look cute, they can become aggressive when they mature and have been known to bite and attack their owners. Not suitable house pets - primates need space, companions and mental stimulation - not what you find in someone's living room.
Capuchins, like other primates, don't make good pets. They're unhappy in a home environment and can become aggressive. They need the company of other capuchins and lots of space for exercise, which they simply can't get in a home environment.
A peaco*ck is actually legal to own in all 50 states. They come in multiple subspecies, but the blue peaco*ck is more adaptable, tamer, and less aggressive than other types, making it the best and most common peaco*ck pet.
The most meat they eat is usually a piglet or a monkey, both by chimpanzees. gorillas and orangs prefer to eat smaller animals: insects, eggs, worms, etc. Primates do eat other primates sometimes: chimpanzees eat galagoes and hunt colobus as coordinate units.
The monkeys have been under the care of the hom*osassa Riverside Resort. They are fed twice a day from a menu designed specifically for them, including green leafy vegetables, bananas, oranges, sweet potatoes, raw peanuts, and monkey chow.
Hobby: Flower arranging, Yo-yoing, Tai chi, Rowing, Macrame, Urban exploration, Knife making
Introduction: My name is Madonna Wisozk, I am a attractive, healthy, thoughtful, faithful, open, vivacious, zany person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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