![]() ![]() In 2000, Congress passed the Chimpanzee Health Improvement, Maintenance, and Protection Act which established a national sanctuary system to relocate the surplus chimpanzees from research facilities to sanctuaries, which would provide lifetime care for those animals. taxpayers were paying to maintain approximately 1,500 chimpanzees, some of which were not even government-owned, in research laboratories. Many of those animals were considered “surplus,” meaning that they were not needed for breeding or for scientific research, yet the government was paying to warehouse them for lack of a better long-term care plan. As of 2007, there were approximately 850 federally owned or supported chimpanzees housed in six research laboratories throughout the U.S., which cost the taxpayers more than $11 million dollars a year to maintain. According to recent estimates, it will cost taxpayers about $1.85 billion dollars to maintain those animals in research laboratories for the remainder of their lives. While that number may seem high, it actually represents a marked decrease in the number of chimpanzees that were maintained by the federal government for scientific research during the prior decade. taxpayers pay millions of dollars each year to federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, just to maintain chimpanzees for research purposes. That amount does not include the costs of developing and conducting the research experiments. Today, every other country in the world, with the possible exception of Gabon, has stopped using chimpanzees for biomedical research, yet in the United States the practice continues. While the country remains divided on the ethical implications and scientific utility of using chimpanzees as research subjects, there is a general national consensus that the costs to maintain chimpanzees for scientific research are extremely high. Yerkes, a Harvard-educated psychologist, was rallying the scientific community to establish a primate research institute in the U.S. By 1930, he had garnered enough support from Yale University, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Carnegie Foundation to establish the first dedicated primate research facility in the United States. The Yale Laboratories for Primate Biology, which was located in Orange Park, Florida, was the first of many research facilities that would house, breed, and conduct controversial biomedical research experiments on chimpanzees over the next 80 years. Although private researchers and some federal agencies had already been conducting research experiments on chimpanzees, the practice gained momentum in 1960 when Congress established the Nation’s regional primate centers. ![]() IntroductionĬhimpanzees have been used for scientific research in the United States since the early 1900’s. The remainder of the discussion provides a detailed analysis of the Chimpanzee Health Improvement, Maintenance, and Protection Act and an overview of the current status of the national chimpanzee sanctuary system. ![]() research facilities and the actions that the government has taken to reduce the number of chimpanzees that are maintained in those facilities. ![]() The following discussion outlines key events from the recent past that led to the surplus of chimpanzees in U.S. ![]()
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