For Fast Launch:
January 12, 2024
Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382
Decatur County, Ga. – A PETA scientist will be a part of native residents on the Bainbridge Metropolis Council assembly on Tuesday, urging council members to reverse course and cease a plan to construct the most important monkey warehouse within the U.S., able to holding 30,000 monkeys—twice the human inhabitants of the city—in addition to risking the unfold of infectious illnesses and the potential for ecological catastrophe.
Metropolis and county officers have already agreed to greater than $58 million in handouts—together with a 20-year tax abatement scheme and 200 acres of public land value $2 million—in a bid to safe development of the power that, if constructed, could be the most important monkey-holding facility within the Western Hemisphere.
“In a bid to draw just a few jobs—a lot of them low-paying and risking publicity to zoonotic illnesses—metropolis and county officers have rolled out the pink carpet for an unethical plan by some questionable characters that might spell ecological catastrophe and doubtlessly spark the subsequent pandemic,” says PETA primate scientist Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel, who will attend the assembly. “PETA urges Bainbridge officers to withdraw their assist and shut down this undertaking earlier than a shovel hits the filth.”
An endangered long-tailed macaque monkey. Credit score: PETA
Safer Human Medication, the corporate looking for to construct the colossal facility, was solely just lately established by former executives from different huge gamers within the monkey-supply trade: Envigo, Covance, and Charles River Laboratories, which is at the moment below civil and prison investigation by the U.S. Division of Justice for doable violations of the Endangered Species and Lacey acts.
The proposed facility targets land lower than half a mile from the Flint River, which gives farmers with water for crop irrigation and in the end flows into the Gulf of Mexico. It might dwarf the subsequent largest related facility within the U.S., which is owned by Envigo and positioned in Alice, Texas, and cages 6,000 to 11,000 monkeys, creating about 22,000 gallons of wastewater full of feces, urine, and different bodily fluids from the animals day by day.
At full capability, the proposed facility in Bainbridge would produce greater than 440,000 gallons of wastewater a day—sufficient feces, urine, saliva, and different fluids to just about fill an Olympic-size swimming pool day by day. This poses a significant danger of environmental harm to close by land.
PETA just lately uncovered an outbreak of tuberculosis in imported monkeys at a Michigan laboratory after the animals had cleared quarantine. Imported monkeys have been arriving within the U.S. with a lethal micro organism that may be shed into the soil and water, authorities paperwork present. Mosquitoes and different bugs prevalent within the space surrounding the proposed facility might feed on the monkeys, spreading pathogens to people.
One other proposed monkey facility, which presents related ecological penalties, is deliberate in Brazoria County, Texas. Native activists have joined with PETA to cease the undertaking.
PETA—whose motto reads, partly, that “animals aren’t ours to abuse in any means”—factors out that Each Animal Is Somebody and gives free Empathy Kits for individuals who want a lesson in kindness. For extra data on PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please go to PETA.org or observe the group on X (previously Twitter), Fb, or Instagram.