washingtonpost.com
For Chimps, Some Space To Live Out Golden Years
La. Retirement Sanctuary to House Ex-Research Animals
By a Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 1, 2002; Page A19
Finally, after more than four decades of public service, it's retirement time for Rita.
The 47-year-old chimpanzee, brought to the United States from Africa by the Air Force in the 1950s, is a prime candidate for a new retirement home to be built near Shreveport, La. The facility is expected to cost at least $35 million, most of it federal money, to build and operate over a 10-year period.
Under a $19 million contract awarded yesterday by the National Institutes of Health, Chimp Haven Inc., a nonprofit group based in Shreveport, will operate "a sanctuary system for all chimpanzees retired from federal biomedical facilities," the group announced. In addition, Chimp Haven said it plans to contribute $6 million in matching funds.
NIH said the sanctuary "will provide lifetime care for federally owned or supported chimpanzees that are no longer needed for biomedical research."
The chimpanzee retirement community is to be built on 200 acres of forested land donated by Caddo Parish, La., and is scheduled to open by spring 2004. NIH said it also plans to provide about $10 million to fund construction of the sanctuary, including administrative offices, infrastructure, utilities, an education center, quarantine facilities and what Chimp Haven described as "indoor and outdoor housing" for 200 chimpanzees. Eventually, the sanctuary is to be expanded to accommodate more than 300 chimps.
The sanctuary will be run by a staff of about 25 people, including a full-time veterinarian, and will feature "non-climbable walls" and moats to keep the chimps from leaving their forested preserves, said Linda Brent, president of Chimp Haven.
"After these chimpanzees have endured years in medical research laboratories, society owes them a tremendous debt," said Larry Hawk, president of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Proponents of the project said it will save taxpayers money in the long run because the cost of keeping chimpanzees in research labs is about double the cost per animal of harboring them in the sanctuary. According to chimpanzee advocates, there are 1,300 to 1,600 federally owned or supported chimpanzees in biomedical laboratories, including 600 to 900 who are eligible for retirement because they are no longer used for research.
Most of the federally owned chimps are kept in labs in Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. Fewer than 40 are in the Washington area, and none of those are now eligible for retirement because they are still being used for research into infectious diseases, said John Strandberg, director of comparative medicine at NIH's National Center for Research Resources.
Chimpanzees have been used to develop a vaccine for hepatitis B and for research into the virus that causes AIDS. Starting in the early 1980s, they were "aggressively bred" in the United States for AIDS research, but they turned out to be of limited use because they did not get sick from the virus, Brent said.
Among those formerly used for breeding is Rita, who was one of the original chimps brought in by the Air Force for the U.S. space program. She was kept at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico until 1969, then sent to a lab in San Antonio.
"She's real pretty," said Brent, who works at the lab.
Since the animals, an endangered species with a lifespan of up to 60 years, are not euthanized or used for "terminal studies" that can result in their death, many live out their days in 5-by-5-foot cages, she said.
"Some of them have never climbed a tree or walked on grass before." For them, Brent said, the sanctuary means "giving back to the chimps a little bit of their own natural history." |
