The company insists the monkeys will be kept in highly secure conditions and won’t spread disease in the local area. They’ll also be fed fresh local produce.
In an open letter to the Bainbridge community, Safer Human Medicine wrote: “In the aftermath of the pandemic, we learned the hard way that our researchers in the US need reliable access to healthy primates to develop and evaluate the safety of potentially life-saving drugs and therapies for you, your family, your friends, and neighbours.
“Many of the medicines in your medical cabinets today would not exist without this essential medical research and without these primates, research comes to a halt.”
But Kristina Martin, a local Bainbridge resident and member of the Facebook group ‘No Monkey Breeding Bainbridge’, has raised her concerns after discovering that top dogs running the company used to work for two other firms involved with providing animals for testing.
One such firm faced serious questions last year when it was found out they had wild monkeys brought in from Cambodia.
Martin couldn’t believe her eyes when plans for the monkey breeding facility cropped up on her home turf of 14,000 people.
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She said: “[We] were outraged, frustrated, and shocked to find out that this monkey breeding facility deal was an underhanded deal by our local officials and we immediately began our fight.
“[The proposal] risks of waste and disease contaminating our aquifer, our wildlife, and our crops. The risk of contaminating our beautiful Flint River. Our farmers stand to lose everything, buyers are not going to buy from our farmers knowing that they’re only a few miles from a monkey breeding facility.
“The fact that everything our town has worked for will be no more, there won’t be visitors from all over coming to our beautiful downtown, to bass tournaments on our beautiful river, coming for tennis tournaments.”
Dr Lisa Jones-Engel from PETA (The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals organisation)joined the fight against the monkey breeding facility.
She said: “Primate experimentation in the US is part of the global wildlife trade in endangered species and it is paid for with taxpayer dollars. This industry is greedy, unspeakably cruel, violent, and deadly. PETA was approached by citizens in Bainbridge.
“They had read about the work we had been doing with the landowners and citizens in Brazoria, TX to stop Charles River Laboratories from building a monkey importation and quarantine facility on 500+ acres of environmentally sensitive land that the company had secretly purchased in March 2023.”
Dr Jones-Engel believes the chances of the industry “igniting the next global pandemic” will “vastly outweigh any theoretical benefits they bring to human healing.”
She added: “If the industry is as innovative as it claims to be, it will stop these endangered monkey factory farm plans and bring its science and ethics into the 21st century by switching to human-relevant, non-animal research methods.”
Kathleen Conlee from the Humane Society of the United States called the monkey farm plan “alarming” and a “major step backwards.”
She exclusively told The Mirror: “This proposed facility, or any facility that proposes breeding a massive number of primates for experimentation, is alarming. It is not only harmful to the individual animals but to the species, particularly as long-tailed macaques are considered endangered, with biomedical use by countries like the US a driving factor in their decline.”
“This is a major step backwards and we are at a fork in the road, we should be taking this opportunity to invest these resources in non-animal alternatives.”
Residents are filing a lawsuit against the local council, school district and tax assessors. Locals, along with PETA, are asking the city to follow county officials’ lead by voting against the monkey farm project.
The city released a joint statement confirming to residents they’ve asked Safer Human Medicine to locate elsewhere.
