Animal Writings

According to the International Primate Protection League (IPPL), in 2007 China sold over 15 thousand monkeys to the U.S. This is disturbing for many reasons, one being that primates are not native to China. The IPPL reports that "...it is widely believed that China is siphoning off its neighbors' wild monkeys and re-exporting them for profit." So we have crimes against nature, violation of national sovereignty, and cruelty to animals all intertwined. And the U.S. bankrolling it. (The U.S. buys the vast majority of its primates from China.)

The IPPL further reports that "Chinese entrepreneurs, possibly financed by their government, are known to have established 'monkey farms' in China and its neighboring countries" and that native-born monkeys may be falsely sold as "captive born" as a way to skirt around the official policy of not impacting wild primate populations (numerically, anyway).

IPPL explains that at these facilities, "[t]he animals are usually kept in tiny, crowded, unsanitary, barren cages. There, they could become prime targets for sparking any sort of epidemic, or even for disseminating some sort of emerging disease that could be exported around the world before the authorities were aware of its existence." Thus, under the guise of improving human health, we're putting human health at risk by creating breeding grounds and means of expansion for new pathogens.

Just in case anyone thought that the monkeys would be treated with loving care by their Chinese captors, according to IPPL, "We can only guess at the mortality of monkeys who have been targeted for export, but one suspects that the survival rates are staggeringly low. Conditions of housing, cpature, and transport are widely reported to be inhumane." What a shock. If the monkeys are "lucky" enough to survive their harsh and joyless ordeal in China and in transit, they can look forward to years of torture, abuse, and deprivation in vivisection labs, as discussed in the last post.

Labels: China, primates, trade, vivisection