Since becoming a regular listener of the Ricky Gervais show with Ricky, Steve Merchant and Karl Pilkington, I've been forced to think about, and even investigate, some of the ridiculous subjects they bring up, purely to see how much of it it "utter shit" and how much is based in reality. I love Karl's Monkey News, cos its mostly garbage, but today when I looked up Chimpanzees, the subject matter of most Monkey News (despite the fact that they are Apes, not monkeys), I found a story that astonished me.
Did you know that in the US today there are over 1300 Chimpanzees in Laboratories being experimented on? Furthermore many of these were born in the 1950s and are either among the first to be captured in Africa and taken to the US for experimentation, or they are the children or grandchildren of the first.
Wenka is 52 years old and was born in the first facility (in Florida) of its kind, built to conduct experiments on Chimps. She has been used for decades in research including drug and alcohol, cognition, and other experiments. Her Grandmother was Wendy who was in the first wave of Chimps taken to the US from Africa.
It was news to me that Chimps lived this long for starters, and to top it off, I cannot believe that anyone would subject the little buggars to experimentation for decades without retiring them.
There is a group Release and Restitution for Chimps in the US fighting to release the older ones, and further, to stop the experimentation completely.
I just thought it was worth mentioning.
No comments:
Post a Comment