Shameful trade in primates

The most recent piece on this disgraceful trade outlines how the long-tailed macaques – some of whose transport crates appeared to be smeared with blood – had ‘endured journeys of up to 25 hours from Mauritius and Vietnam, transported in cramped wooden crates too small for them to stand upright.’ The article went on the explain ‘After quarantine in the Netherlands, the macaques were driven to Brussels airport before being flown to Manchester airport.’ The bewilderment and distress of these animals is hard to comprehend. All of this injury, distress and anguish is before they have even arrived at the place where they will be intentionally harmed and killed.

The horrific trade in these intelligent and inquisitive animals, at a time when science is proving how unreliable animal experiments truly are, is shocking. We should never use any animal, against their wishes, in experiments. No animal would volunteer to be injected with toxins, gassed, to have cancer cells injected into their bodies, to be restrained in a chair or force-fed chemicals – the list of injustices is endless.

We want to see an end to every animal being used in experiments so we have written our ‘Roadmap to phase out animal testing’. The roadmap focusses only on the experiments for ‘regulatory toxicology’ and outlines five steps which would see an end to the cruel and unreliable experiments which are required by law. We will be writing further roadmaps to address other areas of animal experiments.

According to figures from 2023, a total of 1,694 procedures were conducted using long-tailed macaques for regulatory purposes. These included ‘repeated dose toxicity’ tests for up to 28 days (379 procedures) between 29 and 90 days (461 procedures) and more than 90 days – almost three months of daily dosing –  (630 procedures.)