Housing animals properly is a thorny subject for experimenters because of the cost that a decent housing entails and the private and public sectors are reluctant to face with it.

On 15 July 1999, the U.S. Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), which is part of USDA, published a draft policy regarding primate welfare. APHIS is charged by law with improving the welfare of captive primates at laboratories, animal dealers' compounds and exhibitors' facilities. The document related to primate psychological well-being was entitled 'Final Report on Environment Enhancement to Promote the Psychological Well-being of non-human Primates.' Criticisms stormed at the proposals and one particular comment was that Dr. Jane Goodall viewed favorably early separation of young primates from their mother, something she never said. In contrast, she always emphasized the importance of the mother-infant bond. The document stressed social grouping or housing with the opportunity to have sensory contacts (e.g. visual and auditory stimuli) with other individuals especially important for species like apes and gibbons. Moreover, the social need of infants were discussed and namely that "infants should not be permanently removed from the care giving parent(s) before an age that approximates the age of infant independence in nature, except when necessary for the health and well-being of the infant." Finally the paper highlighted the necessity of foraging opportunities and the space provided for the chimps to permit normal upright resting postures without restriction of tail position or placement of the tail outside the enclosure.

The National Association for Biomedical Research responded that the statement that infants should not be permanently removed from the care given by parents before an age that approximates the age of infant independence in nature was impractical for research settings. They also pointed out that infants of many species may stay with their mothers until 4-6 years of age and that it was not necessary as Jane Goodall, among others, had found. Similarly, the American Society of Primatologists stressed that the cost of implementing some of the recommendations in the new policy may be considered excessive. In addition, the separation from the mother at an age that corresponds to only 25-50% of the completed weaning age may have no adverse impact as long as there is a strong social component to the subsequent housing. Housing rooms would have to be designed to accommodate the larger cages and the costs could be enormous. Finally, they warned that such regulation would encourage surgeries, such as a tail docking that could be detrimental to the primates. From such arguments, there is little doubt that convenience and costs are sufficient reasons to neglect animal welfare. (7 and 8)

Companies and the corporate scientists who perform the dirty work are not shy to take shortcuts in terms of animal welfare. We know that laboratory animals experience boredom and suffer from fear and isolation and despite the guided effort to hide animal suffering in highly secured facilities, some information happen to leak.

The story started in November 2000, when the Daily Express reported shocking animal experiments conducted by a Cambridge-based company, Imutran. For some unknown reasons, confidential documents leaked to the media and analysis revealed that animal suffering had become evident in the words of some British officials. At that time, thousands of pigs and baboons had been euthanised, after the termination of the procedures in the past 5 years, and published papers excluded critical information relative to the scientific data. The missing pieces were indeed present in the confidential documents that fell into the hands of journalists. The unofficial data showed that suffering was underestimated, deaths were not reported properly, and procedures were sloppy and over one-quarter of the animals died within a few days due to technical problems. The documents reported that one particular monkey had to be euthanised because the surgeon realized that the organ, that was about to be transplanted in the poor animal, was mistakenly frozen. Heterotopic transplantation consists in grafting a tissue to an unusual region where the tissue is normally not found. Another monkey had a pig heart implanted in the neck and the animal was observed holding it while the transplant was "swollen" and "seeping yellow fluid." The company's best achievement was the survival of a transplanted monkey (Baboon X201M) for 39 days after surgery.

Imutran has been using the service of the infamous Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) research center based in the same area to perform 400 transplants on primates. Imutran's parent company is the Swiss drug giant, Novartis (9). A few days later, reactions started to flow. The British government shut down the project and Imutran announced the relocation of its activities to a country where vivisection, as long as it promises good return on investment, is more welcomed. According to Novartis's head of global research, Paul Herrling, Imutran was packing while Novartis was continuing pumping money to reestablish its subsidiary in co-operation with Biotransplant in the United States. (10)

• 1. JAMA vol 282(7) (1999)
• 2. Newsletter of the Great Ape Project International: "UK Bans Experiments on Great Apes!" Fall / Winter 1997, http://www.greatapeproject.org/newsletters/BtG2xtra.html
• 3. Gregory Mthembu-Salter. "Tanzania's Grim Baboon Trade" Mail and Guardian November 10, Johannesburg (2000)
• 4. Mammalian Models For Biomedical Research Compiled by the National Institutes of Health
• 5. Ton Kos. "The use of non-human primates in biomedical research, now and in the future." The ethics of animal experimentation. Proceedings of the European Congress held 17-18 December 1996 at the Palais des Congrès, Brussels. European Biomedical Research Association. Edited by Philip N.O. Donoghue
• 6. Crawford D., et al. "The use of non-humane primates for research- a report of the situation in France." London: European Coalition to End Animals Experiments (1996a)
• 7. U.S. Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. "Final Report on Environment Enhancement to Promote the Psychological Well-being of non-human Primates." Docket No. 98-121-1 (1999)
• 8. Martin Stephen. "Maternal Deprivation Experiments in Psychology: A critique of Animal Models." American, National and New England Anti-Vivisection Societies, Boston (1986)
• 9. Lucy Jonhson and Jonathan Calvert. "Terrible despair of animals cut up in the name of research." Daily Express, 21. 09 (2000)
• 10. Paul Gallagher. "The tortuous decline of Huntingdon Life Sciences has been claimed by animal rights activists as a moral victory and a triumphant end to a five-year protest campaign." The Scotman, 10. 01 (2002)