A plan to build a large-scale monkey breeding center in a small Georgia town that could eventually house 30,000 long-tailed macaques has sparked a wide-ranging legal battle pitting residents against a company whose executives have come under scrutiny for their past dealings with animals intended for medical research. .
The facility’s fate rests in the hands of the Georgia Court of Appeals, which will consider Thursday whether to overturn the validation of a bond the city of Bainbridge promised to Safer Human Medicine, a company founded by animal research industry veterans . It received the bond after Bainbridge leaders greenlighted the project in December.
But in the following months, residents, with the help of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, began to oppose the project.
“It feels like someone dropped a bomb in the middle of everything we’ve worked and built,” said June Faircloth, a lifelong Bainbridge resident. “We can’t just sit back and let it happen.”
It’s not the first project to face local opposition — with support from PETA — at a time when researchers say there are running out of monkeys available for medical testing. Long-tailed macaques are among the most common monkeys used in research in the US, and although monkeys are used in a fraction of a percent of animal studies, researchers say they are critical.
A monkey breeding facility planned by Charles River Laboratories in Brazoria County, Texas, was suspended this year after local opposition emerged, aided by PETA. PETA also pushed back after a Chinese-owned company bought land in Florida for a possible primate facility a few years ago — the plan was ultimately scrapped.
The fighting highlights how animal rights activists, along with residents, have achieved some success in resisting new facilities, despite the continued needs of scientists.
Animal testing for research purposes has a long history, as does the opposition to it. And while many scientists have called for more humane treatment of animals used in research, they have also warned that stopping such research would seriously hinder much medical progress. Animal testing is regulated in the US by the Animal Welfare Act of 1966.
Dr. Paul Johnson, the director of the Emory National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, said monkey research has helped develop Covid vaccines, an HIV vaccine in clinical trials, and belatacept, a drug used in kidney transplants.
The testing can be traumatic for the monkeys. Some are euthanized, while others cycle through studies.
“We study monkeys because their brains are wired like humans,” Johnson says.
In Bainbridge, a city of about 14,000 in the southwestern corner of Georgia, residents began turning against the macaque project after the December vote.
Faircloth, one of the key organizers of the Bainbridge pushback, turned her interior design firm into a hub for community members fighting to, in their words, ‘Stop the Monkey Farm’ – with signs, flyers and hats interspersed between floors and fabrics. Many protested and spoke at town halls. Some set up a website and a Facebook group that has now grown to more than a thousand members. And every Tuesday evening they come together and pray.
Residents have raised concerns about the facility itself and the possibility of monkeys escaping – which has occasionally happened at other facilities in the US, including one at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, although there have been no reports of damage to local residents.
“We’re looking at a jungle: noise, stench and the potential for disease,” said Penny Reynolds, who lives across the street from the land set aside for the Bainbridge facility.
Safer Human Medicine has assured residents that it will take every precaution to ensure that all waste is stored at its facilities and sent to the city wastewater treatment plant. It also said that most noise would remain within the facility and that there would be no “noticeable odor.”
Greg Westergaard, the CEO of monkey breeder Alpha Genesis, says there is a lot involved in setting up monkey breeding facilities.
“There is a lot of training involved; there is a huge amount of infrastructure involved,” he said. “It’s going to stink and there’s going to be water coming out of the cleaning.”
Bainbridge residents have pointed to the backgrounds of some Safer Human Medicine executives — two of whom previously held leadership positions at companies under scrutiny — as reasons to doubt their commitment.
Jim Harkness, CEO of Safer Human Medicine, was the chief operating officer of Envigo, a company that last week pleaded guilty to neglecting thousands of dogs and agreed to pay a record $35 million fine. Chief Operating Officer Kurt Derfler left his job at Charles River Laboratories last year, just months after the Justice Department subpoenaed it as part of its investigation into possible smuggling of wild monkeys from Cambodia. Charles River Laboratories said at the time that any concerns about its role were “unfounded.”
Neither Harkness nor Derfler were individually charged in connection with these cases.
Safer Human Medicine declined interview requests. The email said: “Envigo was operating under unprecedented circumstances due to the pandemic.” It added: “We have been committed to operating responsibly and ethically in this area for decades and we will continue to do so.”
Safer Human Medicine said it would not use wild-caught macaques – which can transmit viruses such as herpes B. The macaques are believed to have come from Asia, it said, without specifying where.
The community organization in Bainbridge has moved the needle. Rick McCaskill, executive director of the Development Authority of Bainbridge and Decatur County, said what was once billed as a “tremendous investment” of nearly $400 million and 260 jobs quickly deteriorated. After community resistance emerged, Bainbridge leaders voted in February to withdraw their support for the Safer Human Medicine project.
“We felt that the division and unrest in the community outweighed the benefits of the project,” McCaskill said.
Research monkeys are bred at the seven National Primate Research Centers, each with its own breeding colony, as well as at other facilities across the country. The National Primate Research Centers often use rhesus macaques, while pharmaceutical companies often use long-tailed macaques – the type that Safer Human Medicine plans to breed.
There is some movement away from animal testing for drug development, which was once mandated by the US. In 2022, President Joe Biden signed the FDA Modernization Act 2.0, which allowed animal alternatives where possible. This year, several members of Congress introduced a bill to go one step further – and facilitate a move away from animal research.
“It’s likely to be a collection of alternatives, from AI to computer models to organs on a chip,” said Jim Newman, communications director for Americans for Medical Progress, a group that advocates for medical testing on animals when necessary. “But what we currently have available can only reduce the number of animals by a certain amount.”
For now, researchers are still relying on monkeys for some tests, and some animal researchers say the US is experiencing a shortage of long-tailed macaques – reporting a more than 20% drop in imports in 2020 after China halted exports. They say prices for long-tailed macaques are skyrocketing.
Safer Human Medicine says it sees the planned facility as an answer to the shortage. It was said that it would start with 500 to 1,000 monkeys and then scale up. It said the money to build the facility would come from industry and private financing in the US. It wouldn’t share names.
It’s not entirely clear how much of the community opposes the facility. Some local politicians who campaigned to oppose it did not win recent elections, although it is not clear that their losses had anything to do with those positions.
Still, Faircloth said her group has no plans to withdraw.
“If we don’t stand up for our rights, we will just be overthrown,” she said. “We just can’t let that happen.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com