Battle Lines Drawn Over ‘Monkey Warehouse’ in Georgia

A proposal to build an enormous monkey-breeding warehouse in Bainbridge, Georgia has prompted animal-welfare groups to launch an opposition to the plan. A company called Safer Human Medicine wants to build the country’s largest facility of this type, which would hold up to 30,000 cynomolgus, or long-tailed, macaques bred for experimentation.

The Humane Society of the US doesn’t like it: “Monkeys are social, intelligent, inquisitive animals, but when they are bred and used for experimentation their lives are filled with fear, loneliness and pain. … Instead of spending millions of taxpayer dollars on monkey breeding and experiments, we should be investing in facilities and infrastructure to support non-animal methods and strategies, which can more accurately predict how the human body will respond to drugs, treatments and substances.” 

PETA, also not a fan: “In a bid to attract a few jobs — many of them low-paying and risking exposure to zoonotic diseases — city and county officials have rolled out the red carpet for an unethical plan by some questionable characters that could spell ecological disaster and potentially spark the next pandemic,” says PETA primate scientist Lisa Jones-Engel.

For its part, Safer Human Medicine denies there would be any environmental risk to the facility and says that, on the contrary, it would be unethical not to experiment on animals. “We believe it is immoral to allow humans and animals to suffer from disease and illness,” the company writes in an open letter to the residents of Decatur County. “The use of animals in human and veterinary research is viewed by those involved as a scientifically justifiable means to an end that must be preserved to ensure that humans and animals don’t have to needlessly endure disease and suffering.”

Since humans remain incapable of navigating this tricky terrain ethically, we (once again) consulted an artificial intelligence program to inform our thinking. Perplexity.ai, when prompted, lays out extensive arguments for both sides of the issue: “determining the ethics of using cynomolgus macaques for medication intended for humans entails weighing complex intersections of scientific merits alongside philosophical principles governing acceptable conduct vis-à-vis living entities.”

Wordy equivocations aside, AI remains hopeful that more humane means for advances in medicine will eventually be developed, especially if we leave it to AI: “As technology continues to advance, particularly in artificial intelligence applications, expectations exist that alternatives to traditional animal testing paradigms will become evermore viable options.”

The artificial brain then lists examples of these alternatives, such as organ-on-a-chip technology, microfluidic chips that mimic functional units of human organs; computer modeling; genomics databases; advanced stem cell culture protocols; and more (including, of course, machine-learning algorithms, because an artificial intelligence is nothing if not self aggrandizing).

Until these marvelous advances in medicine and machines come to be, a battle is enjoined in Georgia.

Photo credit: PETA