Chimp treatment draws complaint

New Orleans —- The video footage shows monkeys biting themselves and slamming against the bars of small cages. Other scenes show a newborn chimpanzee being taken from its mother and an adult screaming as a lab worker aims a tranquilizer gun before the animal falls sedated from a shelf to the floor.

The Humane Society of the United States released the video scenes Wednesday, saying that’s only part of the documentation of what it claimed were 338 violations of federal law and policy at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s New Iberia Research Laboratory. It is the nation’s largest primate research lab that studies chimpanzees.

“This is a story of inhumane treatment and a story of psychological torment for these animals,” Wayne Pacelle, president and chief executive officer of the Washington-based animal rights group, said at a news conference Wednesday.

Even if the animals were otherwise well treated, he said, keeping intelligent, highly social animals in small, barren cages is enough to cause mental problems. A 21-year-old chimp at NIRC is kept out of research because of stress psychosis, he said.

Pacelle said an undercover humane society investigator secretly videotaped those and other scenes over nine months in 2008 while working as a lab assistant at the facility, where 325 chimps and 6,000 other primates are housed.

Neither university spokeswoman Julie Simon-Dronet nor Jim Barrett, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, could be reached for immediate comment.

The Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare, part of the National Institutes of Health, “evaluates all allegations or indications of noncompliance with the PHS Policy and is investigating this case,” an e-mailed statement said.

Pacelle said the humane society sent the U.S. Department of Agriculture a 108-page complaint detailing the alleged violations.

He said he expects bipartisan legislation to be introduced in Congress today that would phase out all use of chimpanzees in research and immediately halt breeding of the apes for invasive research.

Pacell released a statement from primate expert Jane Goodall stating the behaviors of the NIRC animals indicate stress and panic.

“In no lab I have visited have I seen so many chimpanzees exhibit such intense fear,” Goodall wrote. “The screaming I heard when chimpanzees were being forced to move toward the dreaded needle in their squeeze cages was, for me, absolutely horrifying.”

An undercover humane society video of a Westland/Hallmark Co. slaughterhouse in Chino, Calif., spurred the largest beef recall in U.S. history in February 2008. The video showed plant employees abusing cows.

> ON THE WEB: Humane Society: www.hsus.org