After the determination of NIH – US National Health Institute – of retiring all chimpanzees who belong to it and are distributed in various institutions of biomedical research, which were torture centers for these unfortunate for over 50 years, a dilemma is being openly debated, typical of an extreme capitalist country.

At the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, of University of Texas, associated with Anderson Cancer Center, which is now called Keeling Center for Comparative Medicine and Research, dozens of chimpanzees are waiting impatiently for their transfer to a Sanctuary, where they will be forever away from needles, scalpels, anesthetic and heavy drugs of all kinds.

There is only one official sanctuary in the United States – the Chimp Haven – in Louisiana, where chimps can enjoy a more similar environment to their habitat, living in enclosures with outdoors and where medical torture will never be practiced.

The great number of chimpanzees who, until 2012, were subjected to experimental treatments for HIV, Hepatitis, Diabetes and dozens of other diseases – treatments which had zero results, only pain and death of many of them and the deterioration of their health, causing them to seem elders at 35 years old – are a source of income for Anderson Center, which charges $ 57 per day to maintain each of the NIH primate.

As NIH has not provisioned the necessary funds to expand Chimp Haven, as was the commitment in order to receive more than 200 primates awaiting the transfer, the Faculty of Veterinary, near Bastrop in Texas, which owns the facilities where the now retired chimpanzees live, with hundreds of other monkeys – these still active and generating income for their medical use – proposes that Keeling Center is classified as a sanctuary, so the chimpanzees would stay there, in the same place they have lived a lifetime.

When we were in Bastrop, over 10 years ago, they were building large cages with metal domes, which reduces the chances of runaways but also greatly reduced the space for chimpanzees, do not letting them enjoy an environment similar to their habitat, as a Sanctuary allows.

Christian Abee, Director of the Keeling Center, reported that the risk of death for the chimpanzees to be transferred to a different environment is high, and from the last 12 transferred, four were euthanized or died at the Chimp Haven sanctuary after a few weeks of their arrival.

The staff of the Texas claims that chimpanzees are elders, or geriatricians, since they are over 35 years old. In most of them, however, the cause of poor health in reality is not the age, since a well-kept 35-year-old chimpanzee is like a human, in the middle of life. The reasons for poor health are the tortures to which they were submitted and that weakened their bodies, which can die from contamination or alteration of the environment.

The debt that NIH and the US Government have with the species Pan (Homo) troglodytes is immense. The least they should do is to invest the necessary funds – not more than 5 to 10 million dollars, which are a drop in the ocean of the US Treasury spending, to expand Chimp Haven quickly, to receive all retirees. Only with the savings to be made from not having to pay $ 57 per day per chimp, this small investment will be paid, and the torturers will never able to put their gloved and bloody hands on  the defenseless bodies of these innocent.

THE GOVERNMENT OBAMA HAS THE WORD!

Dr. Pedro A. Ynterian

President, GAP Project International