The smuggling of monkeys caught in the wild is believed to have been going on for years due to the colossal demand for laboratory monkeys in the U.S. and the limited supply at breeding facilities at home and abroad.
and the limited supply at breeding facilities at home and abroad. The arrival of the pandemic and the race to find a Covid vaccine squeezed the market even further, experts say, setting off a mad scramble for the animals that fueled a spike in monkey poaching and contributed to the endangerment of the species most commonly used in drug studies — the long-tailed macaque.
"It’s inconceivable to me how high it went," said Greg Westergaard, the founder and CEO of Alpha Genesis, a South Carolina-based company that breeds and sources monkeys for pharmaceutical companies and government researchers.Cambodia is home to a number of macaque breeding farms, but they receive little scrutiny and the paperwork that accompanies monkeys imported to the U.S.
Image: A macaque in Cambodia. Earlier this year, long-tailed macaques and pig-tailed macaques were listed as endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The trade has already had a significant impact on the populations of long-tailed macaques in the wild, which play a critical role in forest ecosystems by dispersing seeds. In July, the International Union for Conservation of Nature changed their status from “vulnerable” to “endangered,” citing their use in medical testing as a driving force.
Image: Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel conducted research on long-tailed macaques in Bangladesh in 2014 and 2015. "To avoid detection by the authorities, the animals were reportedly brought into the farms during the night, hidden under packs of ice in vehicles which had been adapted to hold cages," the document says.
Craig Tabor, a former Fish and Wildlife Service agent who retired last year, said he looked into monkey laundering allegations more than a decade ago, but the investigation was ultimately dropped due in part to concerns about whether wildlife officials overseas could be trusted. Two unidentified companies in the U.S. -- one in Florida and one in Alice, Texas -- imported hundreds of the wild-caught monkeys, according to the indictment, which referred to the companies as unindicted co-conspirators.
The reports would provide prosecutors with a"true picture of the various facilities, which it believes are in fact laundering and illegally marketing in the world market captured animals — animals taken illegally from the wild under the treaties and under U.S. law and sent to the U.S. with false documentation," Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Watts-Fitzgerald said at Tucker’s sentencing in October 2021, according to a transcript of the hearing.
The U.S. government operates seven primate centers that house about 21,000 macaques, baboons and other species. But the primates are still arriving in droves in cargo planes that land in major cities, where they are met by Fish and Wildlife Service inspectors in protective suits who look over paperwork but tend to perform only cursory inspections of the animals themselves, according to former agents.
A motorist, Michele Fallon, unexpectedly came face to face with one of the caged monkeys after she stopped to check on the drivers in the crash. She wound up with pink eye-like symptoms that cleared up after a few days .
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