Great Ape Protection Act Gains New Ground in Congress

The campaign to free chimpanzees from laboratories isn't new, but the ray of hope for more than 1,000 chimps being used for research in the U.S. just got a little brighter. For the first time, the Great Ape Protection Act has been introduced in the senate.

The senate bill was introduced by Sen. Maria Cantwell (with Sen. Susan Collins and Sen. Bernie Sanders) as "common-sense policy reform to protect our closest living relatives in the animal kingdom ... and to reduce government spending and our federal deficit." For those who don't concern themselves with animal welfare or bad science, government spending is always a good ace in the hole. The Great Ape Protection Act will save taxpayers over $20 million annually — an estimated $170 million over the chimps' lifetime.

Now there are two identical bipartisan bills on the table — H.R. 1326 in the House of Representatives and S. 3694 in the Senate — and they need to move quickly. More than 200 federally-owned chimpanzees are in danger of being taken out of retirement to be subjected to invasive experiments.

The Alamogordo chimpanzees have been warehoused in New Mexico since a 2001 agreement stopped research on them at the facility. Fifteen chimps have already been shipped to Texas to be used in biomedical research; by early 2011, the National Institutes of Health plans to move the rest of them. Gov. Bill Richardson called the plan a "bad idea," saying "It will be cruel to the chimpanzees." He supports keeping the chimps at Alamogordo and converting it into a sanctuary.

That's part of the beauty of the Great Ape Protection Act — it not only ends experiments, but it releases hundreds of federally-owned chimps to sanctuaries.

As Sen. Cantwell pointed out when introducing the bill: "The fact that the vast majority of federally-owned chimpanzees are warehoused in labs at the taxpayer expense underlines the futility of their continued confinement."

Chimps are warehoused, rather than actually being used in experiments, because testing on them to get human-relevant results doesn't work. Take HIV/AIDS, for instance — millions of dollars and decades later, great ape research hasn't brought us any closer to a vaccine or a cure because HIV doesn't cause illness in chimps the way it does in humans. There are too many differences between the species. What do we have in common with our primate relatives? The capacity to suffer psychological distress, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder from a lifetime subjected to tests, isolation and confinement.

As Noelle Callahan from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine notes: "It says something that the United States is the last country in the world to permit large-scale invasive research on great apes like chimpanzees."

The Great Ape Protection Act was one of the top ten Ideas for Change, spearheaded by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and voted on by the Change.org community as a top priority for our country. There are nearly 150 co-sponsors of the bill in the House of Representatives and only a handful in the Senate. Chimpanzees in labs have never been so close to freedom.

Ask your senators to step up and stop chimpanzee experiments. We need more co-sponsors before the August break to move the Great Ape Protection Act forward this fall, before it's too late for the Alamogordo chimps and hundreds of other great apes languishing in small cages and being subjected to cruel, wasteful experiments.

Photo credit: pelican