IIn 2019, Jonah Sacha, a researcher at Oregon Health and Science University, received a shipment of 20 monkeys from Mauritius. As part of his research on stem cell transplants as an HIV treatment, he is conducting tests on long-tailed macaques.
The captive-bred monkeys were legally imported by an approved seller and appeared healthy. However, when Sacha tested them, one appeared to have latent tuberculosis (TB).
None of the monkeys could be used because Sacha needed disease-free animals to perform accurate research. “My feeling was one of utter despair; it set this project back by over a year and a half,” he says.
The test also questioned the origin of the apes. The macaque could have contracted TB from a human while in captivity, or it could mean the monkey came from the wild – where TB is relatively common among macaque populations – and was then mis-sold as captive-bred.
“This is the heart of the matter: we don’t know,” says Sacha. “I’ve heard stories of people saying they’ve received animals they thought were research-bred, then they get them, and it’s clearly not because they found, for example, small pellets from a shotgun in the animal. It is a wild-caught animal.”
The incident sheds light on the murky world of importing monkeys for laboratory research. An international shortage of laboratory monkeys has driven up prices, fueling a booming illegal trade. The problem risks of undermining research, creating new pandemics, and fueling the wildlife trade. As the trade expands, a once-thriving species is now on the brink: in 2022, it was added to the IUCN list of threatened species. Some animal rights activists are calling for an end to the trade altogether.
Long-tailed macaques are the most traded primate species in the world, according to a newspaper published in September, and much of this is for laboratory research. The USA National Association for Biological Research says non-human primates remain a critical resource for research, with about 70,000 monkeys imported each year to study infectious diseases, the brain and the creation of new drugs. The difficulty of finding monkeys compromises important research, says Sacha. Before the pandemic, he paid between $2,000 (£1,600) and $5,000 for an animal. Now it’s about $20,000. “For a few years during lockout, it was almost impossible to get them,” he says.
He is not alone. Almost two-thirds of researchers had trouble finding monkeys in 2021, according to a report of the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which found that the supply of monkeys for research is at a crisis point. According to a article in Science, the report is the “strongest government statement yet on the precarious state of monkey research”. A similar picture comes from Europe, where a shortage of monkeys has led to some research being abandoned.
Long-tailed macaques (the monkey most used in medical research) are protected under international trade law and special permits are required to import the animals into the US.
Laboratories require pathogen-free primates that are in good condition and therefore do not want wild-caught monkeys. However, with prices so high, traders are incentivized to capture them in the wild and launder them via established breeding colonies.
For decades, China was the biggest supplier, but it banned the trade in wild animals in 2020 in light of the Covid pandemic. The demand for monkeys increased significantly in the following years, but supply did not. Cambodia has since significantly increased exports to plug the gap and tap into this increasingly lucrative market.
“The price drives the desire of producers,” says Anne-Lise Chaber, an illegal wildlife trade researcher at the University of Adelaide, in Australia. Chaber’s research, published earlier this year in the journal One Health, says individual monkeys sell for between $20,000 and $24,000. Globally, Southeast Asia is a major international supplier of macaques, but their breeding and trade is poorly regulated, which can lead to more wild aminals being caught than is sustainable.
“It is unlikely that Cambodia managed to increase their production in such a short time frame, so we need to understand how they made it happen,” says Chaber.
The country’s export numbers tripled from 10,000 monkeys in 2018 to 30,000 in 2019 and 2020. Researchers write in the paper that Cambodia “has historically been unable to produce second-generation progeny macaques, so legalizing their production capacity seems unlikely.” increase”.
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In November 2022, Cambodia was hit by a smuggling scandal: eight people have been charged with illegally importing wild-caught monkeys into the US, falsely labeled as captive-bred. The macaques were taken from national parks and other protected areas in Cambodia to breeding facilities, where they were provided with false export permits, officials claimed. More than 14,000 wild macaques have been trapped in this way, says the US Department of Justice.
In the past 30 years, the wild population of long-tailed macaques has declined by 40%, with a further 50% decline predicted over the next three generations. One reason for the decline is overexploitation for scientific purposes.
Nadja Ramseyer Krog, director of the Long-tailed Macaque Project, says there is a misconception that macaques are overpopulated because so many of them now live in cities in Southeast Asia: “It’s not a very popular animal, in some areas. They do things like run into hotels, open the fridge and grab a Coca-Cola. If you go to a popular tourist destination, you might see 100 monkeys, but the forest behind it might be empty.”
Krog hopes we can eventually stop using primates in research. “But of course we have to find alternatives,” she says. “I don’t think any scientists want to use wild-caught animals, or want to be part of the extinction of a wild animal.”
When monkeys can be taken from the wild or farmed, this increases contact between humans and wildlife, increasing the risk of pathogen transmission.
“Macaque breeders or sellers house thousands of animals in tiny crates in close proximity, creating the right conditions for the next pandemic: it’s a pathogen bomb,” says Chaber. “The irony is that this production of macaques is primarily aimed at providing animals for biomedical research to create vaccines for current outbreaks.”
Animal rights campaigners want the US government to end the “brutal trade”., saying it poses a significant threat to public health. The National Academies report says investment in non-animal “organ on a chip” technology could reduce overall demand.
It also recommended that the US expand its domestic breeding facilities – which it could then regulate. Sacha says: “We shouldn’t be dependent on external countries for these animals that are really critical to our ability to test new therapeutics and vaccines and medicines.”
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