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Marking WWAIL 2001—NEAVS' Inside Look at the Grim World of Primate Research

NEAVS launches postcard campaign. PHOTO: Zipporah Films

(Fall 2001)—To mark World Week for Animals inLaboratories (WWAIL) 2001, NEAVS hosted two free special screenings of Frederick Wiseman’s powerful 1974 documentary, PRIMATE, filmed at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta, GA. Following the presentations, former primate caregivers from Yerkes, Rachel Weiss and Jessica Ganas, cofounders of the Laboratory Primate Advocacy Group (LPAG), provided an up-to-date inside look at primate research. They discussed what has changed, what hasn’t, and why it is critically important to keep the research industry under close scrutiny from both inside and out.

“There is no doubt that we achieved our goal of opening hearts and minds to the realities of primate research,” said NEAVS President Theodora Capaldo, EdD. “Audiences were deeply disturbed by the day-to-day realities of living life in steel cages, and they understood on an intensely personal level that the inherent cruelty in all research facilities is confinement. Wiseman’s timeless documentary, coupled with the current, informed, and passionate messages of Rachel and Jessica, made for a powerful reminder of all that needs to be accomplished to end these cruelties.”

“PRIMATE is almost certainly the first and last time a camera was so freely admitted to a research lab anywhere in the U.S.,” Capaldo said in explaining NEAVS’ decision to resurrect and showcase the Wiseman film. “In Wiseman’s film, the institution of animal research is laid bare: the humdrum mentality of the attendants, the grandiosity of the vivisectors and, of course, the jargon necessary to try to convince not just us but perhaps even themselves that their efforts, dollars and blood sacrifices are legitimate. The film and presentation highlighted the importance of NEAVS’ mission: to keep animals out of laboratories, to get them out of laboratories and to watch over them while they are there.”

Capaldo praised Weiss and Ganas for their vision and courage in forming the LPAG. She applauded their commitment to make certain that the animals in the laboratories where they had worked are neither forgotten nor abandoned. “Their mission to end primate research comes from the very painful first-hand awareness of the reality of that research,” she said.

While at Yerkes, Weiss cared for Jerom Chimpanzee, the first chimpanzee to die because of AIDS research. Jerom was purposely infected with three different strains of the virus. Before his death, Weiss made a very personal promise to Jerom that she would work to end research on all chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates.

After working at three primate centers, Ganas’s frustration at watching caring people unable to create change within the system, along with the horror of watching animals suffer, convinced her to leave Yerkes and the field of primate biomedical research forever. “I decided that my path was to effect change from the outside,” she said. “Rachel and I connected through a primate-focused Internet discussion group; realized that there are many, many more who share our views; and the LPAG was born.”

Capaldo told the attendees at the WWAIL 2001 events, “Chimpanzees have been abandoned by the very government and research industries that bred, abused and exploited them. Even the current Chimp Bill is a very limited gesture on the part of our government to provide for these former research ‘subjects.’ Rather than provide them with the absolute guarantee that their suffering at the hands of vivisectors is over, NIH assured researchers that under the Chimp Bill even animals ‘retired’ to so-called ‘sanctuary’ could be brought back into the labs if the biomedical community deemed it ‘necessary.’”

Also as part of WWAIL 2001, NEAVS and the LPAG launched a post card campaign demanding that three research facilities – the USL/New Iberia Research Center (LA), the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center (GA), and the Southwest Regional Primate Research Center (TX) – provide details regarding the housing, and physical and psychological well-being of chimpanzees infected with HIV at their facilities.

And, in support of a campaign by the International Primate Protection League, NEAVS issued a fourth post card calling for immediate action in the “Baby Monkey case” in which a Virginia company illegally imported unweaned baby monkeys from Indonesia. The shipment also contained wild caught monkeys falsely documented as captive-born. (For copies of these post cards, contact NEAVS at 617-523-6020.)

With the work of NEAVS, the LPAG and many other organizations of good intent, intelligence and resolve, nonhuman primates – each and every one a very individual person with needs and fears and uniqueness– will no longer be anonymous stat-istics, crimeless prisoners or potential victims of vivisection.

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