Shocking news
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To the surprise and shock of everyone who protested the Nepal 'monkey business' during the past five years, The Himalayan Times on November 18 announced that soon 25 monkeys from the Lele breeding centre will be send to the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research in Texas. A Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation member stated that, "[m]onkeys born in the centre are their personal property. We cannot oppose experiments on them".
This completely contradicts an earlier announcement by the Department. In a letter to diplomatic missions written in August the Department stated it would not allow monkeys to be exported for biomedical research.
The coalition will oppose the shipment both in Nepal and overseas. Letters have been send to the President and Prime Minister, as well as the airlines. A demonstration will be organized in front of the government office, and a press conference will be called. We will NOT allow innocent living beings to undergo terrible suffering in US labs!
Letters & Quotes
We at the International Primate Protection League urge our friends in Nepal to fight the plans to capture and incarcerate monkeys. If the monkeys of Nepal had a choice of where they would live, not one would vote to be shipped overseas. Please, people of Nepal , do not let foreign money seduce you into abandoning your nation's monkeys. Let them live free as they have done for thousands of years.” – Dr Shirley McGreal, Founder International Primate Protection League
“The trend of importing monkeys is dangerous for countries like Nepal . Monkeys can easily be exported illegally, as Nepal has been infamous in the world for illegal wildlife trade.” - Mangal Man Shakya, Chairman of the Wildlife Watch Group
“The proposal is faulty (and) ambitiously yields to the international experts and their funds which it says will bring sustainability. It is wrong.” - King Mahendra Trust for Nature Conservation in 2001
"Where… a few years ago you might have paid $2,000 for a rhesus monkey, now the price can be anywhere from $5,000 to $12,000." - John P. Hearn, primate researcher and vice chancellor of the Australian National University
"This is not a conservation effort that will benefit the local community or bio-diversity. This kind of breeding is purely for bio-medical research where our monkeys undergo enormous suffering as they are observed for physical and psychological responses to untested drugs." - Prahlad Yonzon, president of Resources Himalaya
"Our monkeys should not be allowed to be used as guinea pigs." - Gopal Guragain, a journalist specialising in wildlife and conservation issues
"It's a type of bio-piracy to collect blood samples from wild animals without the permission of DNPWC." - Dr Ravi Sharma Aryal, a PhD on CITES in India and Nepal
"Right now the monkeys live a beautiful tribal life deep in the high mountain forest, much the same as my relatives who inhabit the Langtang region. They don't bother anyone, they are not in the way...they are not numerous. They are an integral part of the land's eco-system and surely are important to the balance of life in that area, which contains people living in harmony with nature. Why tempt the people with large amounts of money to give away their heritage, the beautiful natural environment that supports them in so many ways....but not through the extinction of it's monkey families." - Willow Lama, singer and educator
In their book Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan tell of actual laboratory experiments in which monkeys were forced to choose between electroshocking other monkeys and doing without food themselves. Almost all of the monkeys went hungry for up to two weeks rather than shock others. Sagan and Druyan: "These macaques -- who have never gone to Sunday school, never heard of the Ten Commandments, never squirmed through a single junior high school civics lesson -- seem courageous in their moral grounding and their resistance to evil…If the situation were reversed, and captive humans were offered the same deal by macaque scientists, would we do as well?" - Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan