Please join us at the Henry Vilas Zoo for a Remembrance of the Vilas Zoo Monkeys

(3/8/2008)

Alliance for Animals
Primate Freedom Project

Contact: Rick Bogle; Phone: 608 222 2348; email: rick.bogle@gmail. com

Activists Remember Ten-Year Anniversary of Vilas Zoo Monkey Scandal;
Mourn for Victims

On Saturday, March 4, 1998, nearly one hundred fifty rhesus monkeys,
born at the Henry Vilas Zoo and protected by three written promises
from UW-Madison were loaded onto trucks and sent to Tulane University
where they were used and killed in infectious disease and other
experiments.

On March 8, 2008 , between 11:00 and 1:00 PM, Dane Co. residents will
gather at the previous site of the Henry Vilas Zoo monkey house [just
inside the Giraffe Gate (Gate 9) on Vilas Park Drive] to remember the
approximately 350 victims of the University of Wisconsin's broken
promises.

In 1989, 1990, and 1995, the University of Wisconsin Primate Center
had promised the zoo in writing that monkeys born at the zoo would be
exempt from harmful experimentation.

In 1997 a whistle-blower leaked documents showing that at least 201
monkeys born at the zoo since 1989 had been sold to labs around the
country and used in experiments at the UW primate center that resulted
in their suffering and deaths, while written promises that they would
be safe were in effect.

When the truth came out, NIH ordered that no federal funds could be
spent on the care of the monkeys at the zoo.

At first, then Graduate School Dean Virginia Henshaw said, "[T]here is
no quick resolution to this issue and finding an appropriate
arrangement for the colony may take several years." Then she said,
"The change in funding means that we have to work rapidly to find
options for the colony."

The Alliance for Animals contacted a sanctuary in San Antonio that
agreed to take the monkeys and to donate $15,000 for their
transportation and immediate care.

The University declared that the sanctuary, the Wildlife Orphanage,
was no more than a roadside zoo, life there would be hell, and that
the monkeys would be better off being sent to the labs at Tulane.

School children raised money to protect the monkeys, every TV station
covered the story, three county sub-committees voted unanimously to
help the monkeys, the county government overwhelmingly passed a
resolution intended to help the monkeys, the governor's wife Sue Anne
Thompson recorded a public service announcement to help the monkeys,
and no one who attended public meetings spoke against the monkeys
other than Primate Center staff and the Director of the Zoo
Commission.

Nearly one hundred fifty rhesus monkeys born at the zoo were sent to
the Tulane Regional Primate Research Center on March 4, 1997 where
they endured ninety days of solitary confinement which Tulane termed
quarantine. Their family groups were destroyed. Some were placed into
breeding situations, some died (at least one during solitary
confinement), and others were experimented on and then killed. This,
in spite of three written agreements, promises by the graduate school
dean, and limitations written into the primate center's federal grant.

No one has ever been held accountable for the two hundred one monkeys
who were secretly stolen over the nine-year period.

The university had the monkey house bulldozed to the ground.

For background and comment see:

http://primateresearch.blogspot.com/2007/11/vilas-monkeys-part-one.html
http://primateresearch.blogspot.com/2007/11/vilas-monkeys-part-two.html
http://primateresearch.blogspot.com/2007/11/vilas-monkeys-part-three.html
http://primateresearch.blogspot.com/2007/12/vilas-monkeys-part-four.html
http://primateresearch.blogspot.com/2007/12/vilas-monkeys-part-five.html

and,

http://www.primatefreedom.com/essays/vilas.shtml