Chimpanzees—our closest living relatives—are social, intelligent individuals who have rich mental and emotional lives, but hundreds are still kept as prisoners in U.S. laboratories, where many have been forced to endure decades of painful, invasive procedures and solitary confinement.
Recently, a government panel concluded that experiments on chimpanzees were "unnecessary" and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) promised to retire all federally owned chimpanzees to sanctuaries—but since this announcement, few have been retired and many have died while waiting. History of Chimpanzee Use in U.S. Laboratories
Sadly, in the early 1920s, experimenters in the U.S. began purchasing baby chimpanzees who had been kidnapped from the forests of Central and West Africa. To capture baby chimpanzees, hunters would kill the mother chimpanzees and any other adult chimpanzees who tried to defend the babies. Often, whole families were killed just to obtain a few babies. The mortality rate among these babies during capture and transport was high. Those who made it to U.S. laboratories suffered terribly and died young. In 1923, the notorious American psychologist Robert Yerkes—who dreamed of creating the ideal chimpanzee "servant of science"—purchased a young bonobo and a chimpanzee he hoped to study into maturity. Both died within a year. Undeterred by the carnage and suffering inherent in the chimpanzee trade, experimenters continued to fuel the practice. In the early 1950s, the U.S. Air Force secured the capture of 65 young chimpanzees from Africa for use in military flight experiments at Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The descendants of these chimpanzees were used in infectious disease experiments and high-velocity seat-belt tests.
