For Rapid Launch:
January 12, 2024
Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382
Decatur County, Ga. – A PETA scientist will be a part of native residents on the Bainbridge Metropolis Council assembly on Tuesday, urging council members to reverse course and cease a plan to construct the most important monkey warehouse within the U.S., able to holding 30,000 monkeys—twice the human inhabitants of the city—in addition to risking the unfold of infectious ailments and the potential for ecological catastrophe.
Metropolis and county officers have already agreed to greater than $58 million in handouts—together with a 20-year tax abatement scheme and 200 acres of public land value $2 million—in a bid to safe development of the power that, if constructed, could be the most important monkey-holding facility within the Western Hemisphere.
“In a bid to draw a couple of jobs—a lot of them low-paying and risking publicity to zoonotic ailments—metropolis and county officers have rolled out the crimson carpet for an unethical plan by some questionable characters that might spell ecological catastrophe and probably spark the subsequent pandemic,” says PETA primate scientist Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel, who will attend the assembly. “PETA urges Bainbridge officers to withdraw their assist and shut down this venture earlier than a shovel hits the grime.”
An endangered long-tailed macaque monkey. Credit score: PETA
Safer Human Drugs, the corporate looking for to construct the colossal facility, was solely lately established by former executives from different large gamers within the monkey-supply business: Envigo, Covance, and Charles River Laboratories, which is at the moment underneath civil and felony investigation by the U.S. Division of Justice for doable violations of the Endangered Species and Lacey acts.
The proposed facility targets land lower than half a mile from the Flint River, which supplies farmers with water for crop irrigation and in the end flows into the Gulf of Mexico. It will dwarf the subsequent largest related facility within the U.S., which is owned by Envigo and positioned in Alice, Texas, and cages 6,000 to 11,000 monkeys, creating about 22,000 gallons of wastewater stuffed with feces, urine, and different bodily fluids from the animals every single day.
At full capability, the proposed facility in Bainbridge would produce greater than 440,000 gallons of wastewater a day—sufficient feces, urine, saliva, and different fluids to just about fill an Olympic-size swimming pool every single day. This poses a significant danger of environmental harm to close by land.
PETA lately uncovered an outbreak of tuberculosis in imported monkeys at a Michigan laboratory after the animals had cleared quarantine. Imported monkeys have been arriving within the U.S. with a lethal micro organism that may be shed into the soil and water, authorities paperwork present. Mosquitoes and different bugs prevalent within the space surrounding the proposed facility might feed on the monkeys, spreading pathogens to people.
One other proposed monkey facility, which presents related ecological penalties, is deliberate in Brazoria County, Texas. Native activists have joined with PETA to cease the venture.
PETA—whose motto reads, partly, that “animals should not ours to abuse in any approach”—factors out that Each Animal Is Somebody and presents free Empathy Kits for individuals who want a lesson in kindness. For extra info on PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please go to PETA.org or observe the group on X (previously Twitter), Fb, or Instagram.
