10/11/06 Primate Farms for Lab Demands
Animal Friends Croatia organization reports about the shocking BUAV's exposure...
- New Bodyshop Foundation funded undercover investigation shows on video footage grim reality of global lab primate trade
Primate are being factory-farmed on an industrial scale to feed the demand for live experiment fodder in the UK, Europe and the US, a 12 month undercover British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) investigation reveals. According to official figures, over 3,115 primate were used in the UK in 2005, in over 4,652 experiments. About 10,000 are used each year across the European Union.
As a member organization of the European Coalition to End Animal Experimenst (ECEAE), Animal Friends organization shows to the Croatian public the footage of the farm, which supplies the notorious Huntingdon Life Sciences in the UK, and which is failing minimum international guidelines it is required to meet as a UK Government approved supplier.
Evidence collected by the BUAV's deep-undercover investigator over 12 months at the world's largest primates breeding farm owned by a joint Vietnamese and Hong Kong owned company Nafovanny in Vietnam reveals primate are kept in appalling conditions that break many of the international guidelines established for centres of this kind.
These protected wild animals are being forced into tiny, rusted, dangerous cages to breed. The young monkeys should not be separated from their mothers at an early age shorter than one year to 18 months to avoid developing abnormal behaviour, their young are snatched away from their mothers as early as five months only to begin their journey to the next stage of their lifetime of suffering in the UK and other European and US labs.
Commenting on the shocking images, an internationally renowned independent primatologist Stephen Brend said: "The very scale of the operation gives cause for alarm. The whole feel is of an intensive 'farm' which, as with battery chicken farming, is designed with the quantity of output given priority over quality and welfare."
BUAV campaigns director Alistair Currie said: "Life on the breeding farm is just the start of a lifetime of fear, pain and suffering for these intelligent and sensitive animals. We want to see Home Office approval of this supplier revoked immediately but that wouldn't deal with the root cause - the demand that's led to this kind of factory-farming. Because the rules that govern animal experimentation in Europe are being reviewed right now, the UK Government now has an historic opportunity to get all primate out of factory farms and labs by lobbying in the European Union for a ban on all primate experimentation in Europe."
Already 150 UK MPs have signed a BUAV-sponsored EDM calling for a ban, whilst in line with new legislative changes in Croatia, Animal Friends lobbied for a legal ban on primate experimentation in laboratories in Croatia.
Shocking footage and stills from the farms in Vietnam can be seen at
www.buav.org/campaigns/primates/monkeybusiness/flashindex.html.
Animal Friends also wants to present the European Coalition to End Animal Experiments "Save Primates" web site in Croatian, which can be seen at www.eceae.org/saveprimates/cr/flashindex.html.
