ew York Times gave space to a defender of the torture with chimpanzees, John L. VandeBerg, director of the Southwest National Primate Research Center, a known breeding and torture center of chimpanzees. Hypocritically, he complains that the ban on NIH – National Institute of Health – to use more chimps in biomedical research will end up with vaccines needed to the own primates.

This gentleman, who is at an institution that has profited for years, and continues to have this daily profiting – $ 56 per day per chimpanzee – to keep them in their facilities (while, in our sanctuaries, where they are better treated and fed, they cost less then $ 10), uses a fallacious argument, talking about possible and potential vaccines that could be developed to protect the primates, as a reason to come back to torture them in their facilities and others similar.

At no time in the past, during these more than 50 years of torture of chimpanzees, biomedical research, funded by NIH and conducted by all these institutions, including the U.S. Air Force (which also has tortured and killed dozens of chimps), was directed to develop vaccines to protect large primates.

If this gentleman and his partners in the various torture centers are willing to pay a small part of the debt they have with the killing and suffering of hundreds of chimpanzees in their facilities, they should invest part of the immense profits made and taxes paid to protect the habitat where a tiny population of chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans still survives – in the contact with humans, they are decimated by our diseases for which they have no immunity developed.

NIH has reserved 50 unfortunate chimpanzees, from the 451 that the government owns, as a strategic reserve in case of emergency. This torturer still have the shamelessness to complain that it is too little for the research that is ongoing, which the results achieved absolutely nothing, but produce pain, suffering and generate profit for these primates’ killers.

Dr. Pedro A. Ynterian
President, GAP Project International