People Against Chimpanzee Experiments

A Tragic History

The history of chimpanzee experimentation is a catalogue of misguided attempts to find vaccines and treatments for human ailments e.g. HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, malaria, head injuries and neurodegenerative diseases.

Take AIDS as an example: researchers in the 1980s were given almost carte blanche with regard to chimpanzee use behind the locked doors of the laboratory. Yet, now, the consensus in scientific opinion is that chimpanzees are unsuitable models for the study of HIV/AIDS in humans. The chimp immune system has evolved differently from ours and, if injected with live HIV virus, the chimp, although harbouring the virus in its bloodstream, will remain unaffected and show no signs of AIDS-related symptoms. Many chimpanzees actually destroy the virus themselves.

In the wild...

Chimpanzees live in forests with their families, in large groups. They lead lives of social, intellectual and cultural complexity, passing on lore and customs, generation to generation.

Their special intelligence, comparable to that of a human child, was developed during evolution, in adaptation to a forest environment. Chimps are our closest living kin, sharing nearly 99% of our genes and live for up to 60 years. Within the Great Ape family, we humans are more closely related to chimps than chimps are to gorillas or orang-utans.

Chimps in the BPRC in the early 1990s (c)Janie Reynolds

In the lab...

Often chimpanzees are caged in solitary confinement for years on end in a barren environment offering no stimulation, unable to touch another chimpanzee. They spend their wasted days, in frustration and boredom, banging on the bars of their cells, masturbating, rocking, self-mutilating, spitting at staff and smearing their cages with faeces.

It is common for baby chimps to be taken away from their mothers soon after birth and both mother and baby spend years pining for one another. How can we even begin to imagine their suffering and loneliness? Chimpanzees, abused in labs, can never be released into the wild, as they could not fend for themselves. Many also have been infected with human diseases.

It is the role of PACE to get lab chimps out of labs and into sanctuaries around the world.