Tag Archives: farming animals

Farm-bred Monkeys, Real Monkeys and Drug Testing

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While many of us would prefer not to give it much thought, monkeys are often used in laboratory tests during the development of key medical products such as the Covid-19 vaccines. Sadly, the global trade in nonhuman primates can involve murky dealings, including smuggling of illegal animals. The resulting blowback is of great concern to America’s world-leading medical research. Due to rising biomedical-research needs—and the limited supply of long-tailed macaques from breeding farms in Southeast Asia—there has long been a black market for monkeys caught in the wild. Rampant smuggling was a key reason behind the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s decision in 2022 to change long-tailed macaques’ status from “vulnerable” to “endangered.”

The U.S., the world’s largest importer of the animals, finally is doing something about it, but coordination among various government agencies has been faulty. Federal prosecutors in November  2022  charged eight people with running an international operation to poach wild monkeys. Among those charged were two Cambodian wildlife officials, one of whom was arrested in the U.S.—while traveling to an endangered-species conference. The largest U.S. monkey importers have received subpoenas as part of the probe, leading them to temporarily halt shipments from Cambodia.

The crackdown is exacerbating a shortage of nonhuman primates for research in the U.S. About 60% of the 30,000 biomedical-research monkeys imported annually to the U.S. used to come from China, but Beijing banned those exports during the pandemic, forcing American companies to pivot to Cambodia. The Chinese move, many in the industry say, was designed to give that nation an edge in the biomedical field in the midst of a pandemic and a trade war between the two superpowers… The shortage has driven up the cost of a nonhuman primate to more than $30,000 in 2023, from about $2,500 prepandemic, according to Elizabeth Anderson, an analyst at Evercore ISI.

The shortage is leading to a scramble to find different sources for research primates. But raising monkeys for laboratory testing takes years, so there is no immediate fix, even though alternate sources are growing in places like Mauritius, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines.

Excerpts from David Wainer, Monkey Business Threatens U.S. Drug Discovery, WSJ, Mar. 3, 2023

Should We Boil Lobsters Alive?

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If the UK joins a handful of other nations to recognize the sentience of invertebrates, such as cephalopod mollusks and decapod crustaceans, by, for example, prohibiting the boiling of live lobsters, this will be based on evidence that emotions and felt experiences (i.e., sentience) are not limited to animals close to humans, such as the mammals.

Over a decade ago, the same debate revolved around fish. Do fish feel pain? …This debate was settled when fish were found to learn from encounters with negative stimuli by avoiding dangerous locations. The best explanation is that fish remember these locations because they felt and neuronally processed aversive experiences. The same logic has been followed for arthropods, such as crabs, which in experiments learn to avoid locations where they have been shocked…

For example, the face—the proverbial window on human emotions—expresses emotions through similar muscular contractions…indistinguishable between humans and chimpanzees. Obviously, increasingly distant species have increasingly different expressions of the emotions, but research has found that, for example, physiological changes, lowered temperature of the extremities, and activation of the amygdala during fear are notably similar in fearful rats and fearful humans…. 

Bees subjected to vigorous physical agitation (shaking) to simulate a predatory attack proved less willing to explore new tastes, and hence were negatively biased by their experience. They also showed reduced amounts of hemolymph dopamine, octopamine, and serotonin. Changes in these neurotransmitters mark anxiety or depression in humans.

 It is not hard to see that the denial of animal emotions, and by extension animal feelings, has been morally convenient during human’s history of animal exploitation. Conversely, their recognition is bound to shake up our moral decision-making…If crabs experience emotional states, then they have an interest in these states being positively valenced. Current research indicates that a wide range of animals have interests in avoiding felt pain, and that they would not consent to painful procedures if given the opportunity….

When the medical community recognized infant pain in the 1980s, it was because the evidence was so overwhelming that physicians could no longer act as if infants are immune to pain.

Excerpts from Frans BM de Waal and Kristin Andrews, The question of Animal Emotions, Science, Mar. 25, 2022

Relentless Efficiency: the View of Pigs

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Gestation crates for pigs are typically about two feet wide and prevent sows from turning around, maximizing use of available space. Some producers say it also prevents the pigs from harming one another. Breeding pigs can produce seven or more piglets per litter, totaling well over 60 piglets in consecutive pregnancies over a few years. Widespread use of gestation crates began in the 1970s as pork producers gave priority to efficiency. A 1978 article in the industry publication National Hog Farmer suggested producers consider the sow “a valuable piece of machinery whose function is to pump out baby pigs like a sausage machine.”

“Under that mind-set, the industry went, no pun intended, hog wild into moving pigs into gestation crates,” says Matthew Prescott, senior director of food and agriculture for the Humane Society, who has been focused on eliminating the crates since 2002.

Excerpt from Cara Lombardo, Relentless Wall Street Billionaire Has a Secret Cause, WSJ, Feb. 8, 2021