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January 12, 2024
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Amanda Hays 202-483-7382
Decatur County, Ga. – A PETA scientist will sign up for native citizens on the Bainbridge Town Council assembly on Tuesday, urging council individuals to opposite direction and prevent a plan to construct the most important monkey warehouse within the U.S., able to maintaining 30,000 monkeys—two times the human inhabitants of town—in addition to risking the unfold of infectious sicknesses and the opportunity of ecological crisis.
Town and county officers have already agreed to greater than $58 million in handouts—together with a 20-year tax abatement scheme and 200 acres of public land price $2 million—in a bid to safe building of the ability that, if constructed, will be the biggest monkey-holding facility within the Western Hemisphere.
“In a bid to draw a couple of jobs—a lot of them low-paying and risking publicity to zoonotic sicknesses—town and county officers have rolled out the crimson carpet for an unethical plan via some questionable characters that might spell ecological crisis and probably spark the following pandemic,” says PETA primate scientist Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel, who will attend the assembly. “PETA urges Bainbridge officers to withdraw their toughen and close down this undertaking sooner than a shovel hits the filth.”
An endangered long-tailed macaque monkey. Credit score: PETA
More secure Human Medication, the corporate in the hunt for to construct the colossal facility, was once simplest lately established via former executives from different large gamers within the monkey-supply trade: Envigo, Covance, and Charles River Laboratories, which is lately underneath civil and felony investigation via the U.S. Division of Justice for imaginable violations of the Endangered Species and Lacey acts.
The proposed facility goals land not up to half of 1 mile from the Flint River, which gives farmers with water for crop irrigation and in the end flows into the Gulf of Mexico. It could dwarf the following biggest equivalent facility within the U.S., which is owned via Envigo and positioned in Alice, Texas, and cages 6,000 to 11,000 monkeys, developing about 22,000 gallons of wastewater full of feces, urine, and different physically fluids from the animals on a daily basis.
At complete capability, the proposed facility in Bainbridge would produce greater than 440,000 gallons of wastewater an afternoon—sufficient feces, urine, saliva, and different fluids to just about fill an Olympic-size swimming pool on a daily basis. This poses a big possibility of environmental injury to within reach land.
PETA lately exposed a plague of tuberculosis in imported monkeys at a Michigan laboratory after the animals had cleared quarantine. Imported monkeys had been arriving within the U.S. with a dangerous micro organism that may be shed into the soil and water, executive paperwork display. Mosquitoes and different bugs prevalent within the space surrounding the proposed facility may feed at the monkeys, spreading pathogens to people.
Any other proposed monkey facility, which items equivalent ecological penalties, is deliberate in Brazoria County, Texas. Native activists have joined with PETA to forestall the undertaking.
PETA—whose motto reads, partly, that “animals don’t seem to be ours to abuse whatsoever”—issues out that Each Animal Is Any person and provides unfastened Empathy Kits for individuals who want a lesson in kindness. For more info on PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please consult with PETA.org or observe the crowd on X (previously Twitter), Fb, or Instagram.