According to the annual report filed with the USDA by the University of Kansas Medical Center, this facility experiments on and/or holds captive about 150 primates per year, a relatively small amount. The report which contains this statistic is a bland one page document which belies the cruel reality that it represents.
A cross-section of the lives of these animals is represented by a stack of documents which is just over a foot tall. The existence of these highly intelligent animals has been reduced to so much paper and ink. Their identities represented only by numbers, their passing marked only by the word “euthanized.”
The University of Kansas Medical Center has become known for violating the Animal Welfare Act. In fact, recent inspections for the period from September 2007 to June of 2009 catalogue 58 pages of violations, many of which involve primates and their deaths. The USDA inspectors who wrote these documents uncovered heinous acts of cruelty which prolonged the pain these animals endured.
One monkey was allowed to deteriorate so severely that his/her weight dropped by 26.8%, or just over ¼. Another primate, whose skull had been opened to have a recording chamber put into place, did not receive anything close to adequate treatment. These recording chambers can harbor serious bacterial infections which can lead to brain abscesses, and so they are supposed to be cleaned regularly. The chamber of one animal at this facility had not been cleaned for three weeks. It is amazing that s/he was still alive.
Another monkey who died during 2008, #0A0, lost 22% of his body weight, which should have been sufficient to qualify for euthanasia. However, the suffering of this animal was allowed to continue. The USDA report states: “He was sitting curled up on his perch while I was hosing his cage and would make a screeching sound. I gave him a cereal bar, but he was having difficulty picking it up. …
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