Wenka, 55 years of torture

posted in 26 May 2009

EMORY UNIVERSITY

Last May 21 was a common day for a chimpanzee whose face is not known for us, but whom we know that is held at the basement in Yerkes National Primate Research Center, of Emory University, in Atlanta, United States. Wenka knows that she lives for a long time at Yerkes, but she does not know how to count days and years like humans. She can only think that she has been able to survive. And it has been 55 years.

Wenka also knows that the babies she has given birth to disappeared a few hours after the delivery. She never was able to breast feed them. She also knows that the great number of injections in her veins, with a lot of different substances – from alcohol to hormones – disturbed her metabolism, but she managed to survive.

Wenka does not know what love is, or the hug of other chimpanzee and it’s far beyond her memory the two years that she lived, after her birth, in another laboratory (the one that came before Yerkes, at Ornage Park, Florida). At this time she was treated like a human child at a person’s house. Wenka lived all her life at a laboratory. There is a chance that she had only been touched by a synthetic glove, and never by a human hand. She faced pain in different forms. In the day she had been born she was pulled out from her mother’s breast and a first experiment had been made, in a dark room, about problems in human vision.

Wenka is alone. She only has us, who even being far away, share the horror of what human beings are capable of doing with other living beings close to them. PHD and scientists tortured, with no mercy or shame, the whole life of an innocent being.

Project R&R, which fights for the retirement of all chimpanzees in North American torture centers, is asking for Wenka. GAP Project gets together in this appeal. She must be retired, she must have the chance to see the stars, walk in earth, to love someone.

Sign the petition that Project R&R is promoting and write – in any language – to President of Emory University, Dr. James W. Wagner, and ask, claiming for feelings remained in the hearts of these people, that they send Wenka to a sanctuary, that gives her freedom before it is too late. Wenka can not die in a laboratory. She has the right to see, at least, THE SUN LINGHT!

Read more: http://www.releasechimps.org/chimpanzees/their-stories/wenka/
http://ga1.org/campaign/wenka

Dr. Pedro A Ynterian
President, GAP Project International

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