Dear Editor:

A company called “Safer Human Medicine” is proposing to build a monkey breeding warehouse in the small town of Bainbridge, Georgia. At full capacity, the proposed facility, at a significant cost to taxpayers, would be the largest in the U.S., holding up to 30,000 long-tailed macaques bred for experiments.

Local residents and national advocates are speaking out in opposition to the compound. Unlike non-animal methods, which are based on human biology, experiments on monkeys have been shown to be very unreliable when attempting to predict what will happen in humans, given the important biological differences between humans and monkeys. More than 90% of drugs tested on animals ultimately fail in human trials.

Some of the corporate executives behind the proposed facility, who advanced these plans behind closed doors to the dismay of the citizens of Bainbridge, are no strangers to controversy. The CEO of Safer Human Medicine is the former chief operating officer of Envigo, which owned a facility in Virginia where thousands of beagles were bred and sold for experiments. Dozens of shocking Animal Welfare Act violations at the facility led to a U.S. Department of Justice investigation and lawsuit and in 2022, the Humane Society of the United States took on the massive task of removing nearly 4,000 beagles to help place them with shelters and rescues so they could find homes. The facility was ultimately closed.

Both the CEO and the COO of Safer Human Medicine also have ties to companies undergoing a government investigation involving endangered long-tailed macaques, the same species of monkeys that the proposed facility in Bainbridge plans to breed. Inotiv (Envigo’s parent company) and Charles River Laboratories are currently under scrutiny for their roles in allegedly obtaining long-tailed macaques from national parks and protected wild habitats in Cambodia to use in their testing facilities and to sell to other laboratories.

Inotiv also owns the animal testing facility in Indiana where the Humane Society of the United States conducted an undercover investigation released in 2022, documenting the suffering of dogs, monkeys, pigs and rats used in drug tests; nearly all were killed as part of the experiments. During the investigation, two monkeys died while immobilized in restraint chairs.

The Humane Society of the United States is urging local officials in Georgia to oppose this facility.

If citizens live elsewhere in the U.S., they can tell Congress to oppose an expansion of the monkey experimentation industry that would use $30 million additional taxpayer dollars in its final fiscal year 2024 appropriations bill to fund even more monkey laboratories and breeding facilities.

Thank you,

Emily Snow Ehrhorn