The vaccines for COVID-19, malaria, polio and other global diseases have saved many human lives. But the creation of those vaccines have also cost many animal ones.
As the threat of zoonotic disease spread is heightened, coming off the back of the COVID-19 pandemic, and researchers grapple with the ethics of animal experimentation, a team of researchers, concerned citizens and opposition are banding together to demand the federal government halt the import of long-tailed macaques.
Long-tailed macaques are the most heavily traded for use in primate experimentation and most of these monkeys are imported to Canada from Cambodia. This year alone, Canada has received 2,500 monkeys.
On Oct. 21, NDP MP Alexandre Boulerice introduced a petition in the House of Commons initiated by Manitoban animal rights activist Twyla Francois. The petition calls on the Minister of Environment and Climate Change Canada to immediately suspend all imports of monkeys from Cambodia, after the country was caught laundering wild long-tailed macaques as captive bred.
“The conservation of long-tailed macaques has gone from vulnerable to endangered, and these imports are partly responsible for the stark decrease in their population and an increased risk of extinction,” Boulerice said.
Ken Marciniec, an activist and concerned citizen, is questioning how Canada can continue to import these monkeys when they are endangered.
“I would love for the Minister of the Environment to answer that question. I assume we’re party to some international treaties on this,” he said. “How are we living up to our international obligations here by allowing this?”
“I thought we stopped experimenting on primates a long time ago. But I guess that’s only limited to certain primates,” Marciniec said. “And I’ve learned since and that even in the primate world there’s a hierarchy and so these poor long-tailed macaques and other types of monkeys are still being taken in by the thousands each year to be essentially tortured in labs.”
According to the Animal Alliance of Canada, imports of Cambodian long-tailed macaques to Canada increased by nearly 350 per cent between over the past three years.
Meanwhile, south of the boarder, the United States stopped the import of moneys from Cambodia when authorities found out permits had been falsified.
Marciniec said despite Canada being known as having the “friendlier” government, it is the one continuing to fuel the primate trade.
“What that means practically is we’ve become the monkey chop shop for the US where they come live and whole here to labs, and end up getting sent, as gruesome as it sounds, as bits and pieces back to the US for whatever those scientists there want to do,” he said.
Animal testing has long been used to trial vaccines and new drugs, much to the disdain of animal rights activists. But since the COVID-19 pandemic — which came from a bat in a wet market before spreading across the globe killing over 7 million people — there has been increasing concerns about how animal testing could promote the spread of new zoonotic diseases.
“Primates and bats are the two types of wild animals that are most likely to transfer yet unknown diseases to humans. And so the more we interact with them, the more risk that’s present,” Marciniec said.
And that risk is increased even more when wild monkeys are brought into the mix.
“They are supposed to breed them in captivity,” Marciniec said. “But because demand is so high and because capitalism is what it is and people are so poor, they are poaching them from the wild and then laundering those wild-caught ones in with the captive-bred ones.”
This has introduced illnesses into the group of monkeys leading to cases where entire groups are euthanized before research even begins.
But scientists say there are alternatives to primate testing.
Organs-on-chips, 3D bioprinted tissues, organoids, advances in silico modelling, stem cell-derived models, multiomics, and systems biology approaches, all negate the need for live animal testing.
The federal government has 45 calendar days from when the petition was introduced to respond.
CityNews has reached out to Health Canada, Environment and Climate Change Canada, and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency for comment.
