Experimentation on Live Animals vs Animal Computer Modelling

"There have been very serious welfare concerns raised about the living conditions of these monkeys in Cambodia and nearby countries, as well as concerns about misleading information being provided from sellers over there. And I think for Canada to be complicit in that is potentially quite concerning."

"Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam are pretty notorious for monkey breeding and taking monkeys from the wild, putting them in facilities and breeding."

"My biggest concern about animal research in Canada, and specifically this situation, is that it's completely non-transparent, and not overseen by public authorities."

"What people deserve is the ability to know about the experiments that are being done, and judge for themselves if they think that that's acceptable or not. But with this system that is as opaque as it is right now, the average member of the public mostly has no idea about any animal tests that are going on in Canada."

Camille Labchuk, executive director, Animal Justice

"This is a serious concern in terms of maintaining a healthy wildlife population in Cambodia for macaques."

"This has great implications in terms of the population numbers and the health of the population and the countries that they're getting them from."

"These animals might have been imported to be used in the COVID-19 vaccine development or there might be another company who [sic] is doing drug trials and requires primates as part of those trials."

Liz White, head, Animal Alliance of Canada

Macaque monkeys used for research, at a breeding centre in Thailand. Photo by Mladen Antonov/AFP via Getty Images/File

According to a 2008 investigation by the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, up to 80 percent of macaques trapped in the Cambodian wild die due to trauma or poor treatment, even before they reach a laboratory. In the United States, CBS issued a report in 2010 noting that 30 monkeys had been cooked alive in a Nevada research laboratory, having been erroneously placed through an automatic cage washer.

The government of Canada in 2020 approved importation of 1,056 macaque monkeys of a type called macaca fasicularis. They were imported from Cambodia for "scientific and research" use by private interests. According to documents associated with the recently released story, this is the first time such imports have been permitted after being allowed since 2016. 

It was also revealed that part of the total and possibly all of them were brought to Quebec for use by Charles River Laboratories, a major American importer of non-human primates to be used for breeding and scientific experimentation. The company has a number of laboratories across the province. Canada's government approved the import of about 2,500 non-human primates yearly from the United States, to be used for research testing within the past five years.

It was only in 2020 that an additional number of primates were imported from Cambodia. Animal protection organizations have frequently alleged mistreatment of the animals within Cambodia. The sudden increase in the number of macaque imports to Canada signal to both White and Labchuk that the animals are being used to test potential COVID-19 vaccines and treatments in Canada, based on multiple media reports and documents emanating from pharmaceutical companies indicating vaccines were tested on macaques.

Members of the public who quail at the very thought of subjecting helpless animals to experimentation in laboratories dedicated to the discovery of new medical protocols and therapies have often salved their feelings in the belief that animal computer modelling is advancing to the point where there will be a complete elimination of the use of living, feeling animals for research purposes. A practise that causes immediate revulsion in any animal-empathetic mind.

 

The theory is that science has come a long way since Banting and Best at their utilitarian laboratory at University of Toronto used dogs in their search for a cure for diabetes.

Insulin turned out not to be a cure, but a lifeline for people with diabetes to be able to treat their condition where their pancreas' islets of Langerhans no longer produces insulin, through injecting insulin to enable the body's uptake of sugars, moving it to body tissues for the blood glucose to be converted to energy. Simply put, without injectable insulin, people with Type 1 diabetes would die a painful death; before the advent of the Banting and Best discovery, the diagnosis of insulin-dependent-diabetes was a death sentence. 

 

Similarly, the vaccines produced for the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 is not a cure, but a therapy, and COVID, like diabetes is managed, not cured. The entirely separate issue of animal cruelty with respect to the handling of these living, feeling monkeys and other research-bound animals that science uses in research and experiments is one that is concerning and requires attention. Countries like Cambodia should be made aware that ill-treatment of animals will lose their custom.

"The importation of macaques occur on a regular basis and is not an unusual event."

"Due to reasons of privacy and confidentiality, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is not authorized to share personal or confidential information with third parties about importers."

Canadian Food Inspection Agency

 

"Charles River Laboratories is deeply committed to animal welfare and exceeding international standards for the care of research models under our stewardship."

Sam Jorgensen, spokesperson, Charles River Laboratories 

"The advancement of computer technology in the information revolution has been so amazing that we have become convinced that there is nothing an advanced computer can’t do. That is why it is so easy for animal rights organizations to convince the public that we can eliminate animal research and replace it with computer models. Even organizations that supposedly defend animal research have helped this misconception by promoting the idea that eventually it will be Replaced (one of the three Rs) by computer models, in vitro research or clinical trials. That is simply not true. As I have shown here, as scientific productivity increases, so does the use of animals. It has not decreased, we are just using fewer animals of some species (dogs, cats, rabbits, primates) by using more animals of other species, like mice and zebrafish. And, as Figure 4 shows, research using computer models is relatively small and is not growing fast enough to ever catch up with animal research."

"In conclusion, computer models are not replacing and likely will never replace animal research. Computers can do amazing things, but they cannot guess information that they do not have. There are limits to what is possible, and this is one of them."

Juan Carlos Marvizon, Ph.D., David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, VA Greater Los Angeles ... Speaking of Research, January 7, 2020

"Monkeys are used in animal research only if a particular phenomenon cannot be studied on any other species of animal, such as mice, fish or fruit flies. In the course of evolution, similar structures and functional principles have developed in the brains of monkeys and humans. Such structures and principles are not present in other mammal groups. Neuroscientists can therefore only research complex cognitive functions relating to perception, attention, memory formation and awareness on monkeys."

"Because they are biologically so similar to humans, the potential for applying research results to humans is very high. They are therefore used primarily for the final drug safety tests on new medicines before they are used on humans. Moreover, scientists use monkeys to study important fundamental questions on how a healthy organism functions or how to cure fatal illnesses (e.g. Ebola) or severely debilitating disorders (e.g. Alzheimer’s). Monkeys therefore play an important role as laboratory animals in infection research and in the neurosciences."

Max-Planck-Gesellschaft