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Forty-three monkeys have broken out of a research facility and are on the loose in Lowcountry, South Carolina. Police have urged residents to keep windows and doors locked and not to approach the animals. All are young female rhesus macaques.
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The monkeys escaped from Alpha Genesis, a company in South Carolina that breeds primates for medical testing and research. They got out when a keeper left a door open in their outdoor enclosure. Yemassee Police Department has said it was told by Alpha Genesis that the monkeys are “too young to carry disease” and too small to have been tested on yet.
The police said that efforts are being made to recapture the monkeys using food and traps. Thermal-imaging cameras and drones are also being used. “Just don’t try to take these things home or pet them,” Yemassee Police Chief Gregory Alexander told the Post and Courier. “We’re getting a lot of that on our social media. [Taking them] is a felony because they don’t belong to you.”
It’s not the first time monkeys have escaped from Alpha Genesis. Nineteen broke out in 2016 before being captured six hours later, and 26 escaped in 2014.
Experimenting on primates
Alpha Genesis provides “nonhuman primate products and bio-research services,” according to its website. It breeds and supplies monkeys and primate tissue samples to research labs.
In 2023, the company took over management of Morgan Island, known as Monkey Island, off the coast of South Carolina. A colony of rhesus macaques was established there in 1979 for use in research. Since then the population has grown from 1,400 to about 3,500. The move made Alpha Genesis one of the world’s biggest breeders of monkeys used for experimentation.
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Animal advocates have long argued that animal testing is unethical and outdated. The primate testing industry as a whole has also been implicated in many scandals. Primate research in the US has been linked to cases of wildlife trafficking, while some experiments have been exposed as completely unjustifiable and cruel. In 2022, it emerged that monkeys had been mutilated and died in experiments by Elon Musk’s company Neuralink.
Read more: Animal Testing: Is It Effective, And What Happens To ‘Lab Animals’?
