Baraza

Category: Uncategorized | Date: Jul 07 2008 | By: admin

I used to work for the Kenya Wildlife Service where my job was to manage trade in wildlife – I had to examine and approve export permits. At that time Kenya had a proud record of not exporting any animals – until I found out that we were! Thousands of monkeys were being exported for medical research in UK.

I still get a warm feeling when I recall how we found out - someone hacked our website and instead of a photo of our Director there was a monkey behind bars!  And an appeal to everyone to boycott Kenya until this trade was stopped. I wasn’t popular for stopping the trade, some people were getting rich off this trade. One guy was left with hundreds of monkeys to care for and eventually release back to the wild.

The guy behind the trade had a permit from many years before – he had persuaded the authorities back then, that primates were needed for research to produce vaccines for diseases like polio (which he suffered from). Kenyan policy makers didn’t see a problem, after all primates like baboons and vervets can be pests - this guy was promising to relieve the problem! So exporting them was perceived as a great solution. I would take none of that.

For a while the trade stopped, but we knew that it would just migrate to a neighbouring country. Today my stomach turns. It has been reported in the Sunday Times that trade that hundreds monkeys are being exported from Tanzania to Iran scientific experiments.

Apparently Britain has now banned experiments on primates. It’s laughably predictive what would happen, the experiments are simply being conducted in countries that don’t have these rules and Kenyan monkeys are moving through countries that don’t mind exporting them.

The Times Online sums it up “All will undergo invasive and maybe painful experiments leading ultimately to their death”.

Apparently One up to 4,000 vervet monekys are sold by one Tanzanian dealer, Nazir Manji, who runs African Primates, an animal-supplying company based in Dar es Salaam. He gets $120 for each.

One dealer Rubibira told an undercover reporter posing as a buyer “that the Cites office in Tanzania would sign permits regardless of what fate awaited the monkeys. “They don’t care about that,” he said. “If it’s for scientific, if it’s for the zoo, if the plane is accepted for transport they don’t care about that . . . The purpose is not a problem.” “

Apparently the Razi Vaccine and Serum Research Institute in Iran bought 215 vervet monkeys this year and are behaving very secretive about their purpose. They state that they are used for producing for vaccines but the exporter does not believe this. The Times suspects that they could be being used in research on germ warfare agents. No surprise, the Razi Vaccine and Serum Research Institute, which has its headquarters in Karaj, near Tehran, has been accused in the past by an Iranian opposition group of conducting biological weapons testing.

According to US intelligence, the pharmaceutical industry in Iran has long been used as a cover for developing a germ warfare capability.

Animal welfare groups called for an immediate inquiry into the revelations. Will Travers, head of the Born Free Foundation, said the captured monkeys would endure “terror and suffering” followed by “possibly painful” experiments and then death.

He said: “Following this Sunday Times exposé, Born Free is calling on the Cites authorities based in Switzerland and the Tanzanian government to immediately investigate exactly what is going on.”

Michelle Thew, chief executive for the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, said: “The BUAV is appalled by the findings of The Sunday Times. The BUAV renews its call to governments such as Tanzania to protect its indigenous populations of primates and put an end to this unacceptable suffering.”

Vervet monkeys, like most other primates, are classed in the Cites appendix II, which stipulates that all the species listed “although not necessarily now threatened with extinction may become so unless trade in specimens of such species is subject to strict regulation”. In practice this means that dealers are legally able to sell thousands every year.

However, the use of all wild-caught monkeys in experiments has effectively been banned in Britain since 1997 and the pharmaceutical giant Glaxo-Smith-Kline, which produces a quarter of the world’s vaccines, has also stopped using them.

The European Commission is reviewing a directive on the use of animal experiments in Europe which may lead to an EU-wide ban on wild monkeys being used.

The monkeys are caught, or “harvested”, by men who first herd them into a tree at dusk.

The catchers then lay a 200m net below the tree and, at daybreak, scare the monkeys out of the branches and into the trap.

Then they are transported 250 miles overland from the main trapping grounds in Arusha near the Kenyan border to Dar es Salaam.

On arrival at Manji’s holding farm, where he can accommodate up to 1,000 monkeys at one time, they are transferred into tiny metal cages where they often remain for several weeks. They are then flown in wooden rates on Air Zimbabwe planes to countries such as Iran.

It is unclear exactly which type of vaccine the Razi scientists are claiming to be using the vervets for, but the World Health Organisation guidelines on the production of polio vaccine state that vervet monkeys used for testing it should weigh a minimum of 1.5kg.

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