14 DAY TRIAL // On June 26, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US announced that it planned to retire most the research chimpanzees presently housed and experimented on in laboratories across the country.
The organization says that, out of 360 federally owned chimpanzees, about 310 will be sent to animal sanctuaries.
It also promises that, although researchers will be allowed to continue experimenting on the remaining 50 chimps, they will not be given permission to breed them.
This means that, at some point in the not so distant future, the practice of experimenting on chimpanzees will die out.
“Americans have benefited greatly from the chimpanzees’ service to biomedical research, but new scientific methods and technologies have rendered their use in research largely unnecessary. Their likeness to humans has made them uniquely valuable for certain types of research, but also demands greater justification for their use.
“After extensive consideration with the expert guidance of many, I am confident that greatly reducing their use in biomedical research is scientifically sound and the right thing to do,” Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. explains in a statement.
The NIH reassures that the 50 chimpanzees that will not be retired will get to live in conditions not very different from the ones they would enjoy in their natural environment.
Furthermore, they will only be used in experiments that do not threaten to harm them in any way.
Animal rights activists were quick to express their joy at the NIH's announcement. “Some days make you especially proud to be an animal rights advocate. Today is one of them,” green-oriented group PETA wrote in a blogpost.
The organization explains that the United States has been experimenting on chimpanzees for well over 90 years now, and that it is the last country in the industrialized world to continue carrying out such gruesome activities.
“But we are changing that,” PETA adds.
The animal rights activists are confident that, now that the NIH has taken the decision to retire most of the country's research chimpanzees, it will not take long before other lab animals are set free as well.