On a remote island off the coast of northern Liberia, more than 60 chimpanzees were slowly starving to death. For three decades, the animals were part of a research colony used by the New York Blood Center to test hepatitis B vaccines and other medical treatments.
But as the funding for the chimps’ care dwindled and was then cut short by the blood center in 2015, they were temporarily left isolated without food or water. By the time volunteers intervened with emergency aid, they had grown thin, and the skin on their faces was yellowed and patchy.
Laura Bonar, with Animal Protection of New Mexico, called it a desperate situation, saying the animals were “basically left to die.”
The Humane Society of the United States and the New York Blood Center announced last week they had reached a $6 million agreement to provide long-term care to the Liberian chimps, a number of whom could live another 40 years.
The deal was brokered in part by former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson. That the society would turn to Richardson might seem like a surprise. He is known for his diplomatic efforts on behalf of hostages, American troops and political prisoners. But lesser known is his work as an animal rights advocate. As governor of New Mexico from 2002-10, he became deeply familiar with the plight of chimpanzees used for testing.
The state has long been at the center of a debate over the humanity of medical testing on chimpanzees, and much of the fight to gain rights for the animals was fought during and soon after Richardson’s tenure as governor. He, along with other New Mexico politicians, including U.S. Rep. Ben Ray Luján and U.S. Sens. Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich, all Democrats, lobbied to end medical testing of chimpanzees and for an independent review of the practice.
“I wanted to stop the testing because I thought it was inhumane,” Richardson said in an interview.
In the last few years, the Council of Councils, a governing body for the National Institutes of Health, recommended that chimps should be transferred from laboratories to sanctuaries, and in 2015, in part through the advocacy of famed animal rights activist Jane Goodall, chimps were listed as endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act.
Despite being considered endangered in the wild, they were only listed as threatened in the U.S., creating a loophole for medical testing.
Now, the remaining fight for chimpanzee activists is funding for sanctuary placement. About 650 chimps still remain housed in labs around the country, half owned by the government.
In Southern New Mexico, at a site that was once the largest in the nation for biomedical testing of chimpanzees, 111 elderly and ill chimps are still held at the Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, awaiting permanent sanctuary.
“There are huge ethical issues,” said Bonar, with Animal Protection. “Chimps are so similar to people. They have these complex emotional needs.”
The primates, native to the forested Congo basin of Africa, are the closest mammals to humans, sharing 98 percent of chromosomal DNA. For years, their similarity to humans made them ideal test subjects.
Many of the most horrific abuses occurred in New Mexico.
One of the chimps that is still living in Alamogordo is Nicole, a 34-year-old chimp born at the facility, where she has lived her entire life. Her medical chart, obtained by Animal Protection, lists nearly 200 medical treatments conducted on the small chimp since her birth, including 21 liver biopsies. She was intentionally bled 97 times until 2008.
The first chimps were brought to the U.S. in the 1950s and shipped to Holloman. The animals, about 65 baby chimpanzees, had been violently removed from their native environments, a process that involved the slaughtering of many adult chimps.
As part of NASA’s Project Mercury, chimps were trained by the Air Force at the Holloman base to operate levers in a space capsule. In 1961, two of these chimps, Ham and Enos, were sent into space, setting the stage for John Glenn to become the first American to orbit the Earth the following year.
But when the chimps were no longer needed by the Air Force, the government leased them out to laboratories for medical testing.
Beginning in 1972, toxicologist Frederick Coulston began to cultivate and breed a mass colony of chimpanzees — about 600 — for testing in Alamogordo. They were injected with HIV and narcotics, and used to study gunshot trauma and car crashes. They also were used for experimental medical procedures that other labs refused to conduct.
Under Coulston’s care, many chimps died, included one female who was not given medical attention for two months after having a miscarriage.
Coulston’s facility was ultimately shut down by the National Institutes of Health, but the facility continued to operate under new management with a smaller number of chimps; still, Animal Welfare Act violations occurred.
“It was a horrible condition for the animals at the laboratory,” Bonar said, “Not just because of the research but also huge issues of neglect and basic standards of care for the animals.”
Then, in 2010, the NIH said it wanted to shut down the Alamogordo facility and transfer all of the primates to a research lab for invasive testing in Texas.
That’s when Richardson and others got involved. It was one of his many efforts to support animal rights. As governor, he not only fought medical testing on chimps but also worked to ban cockfighting in New Mexico, supported the Mexican wolf reintroduction program and sought to prevent wild horses from going to slaughter. More recently, through his foundation, the Richardson Center for Global Engagement, he has advocated to protect elephants from the Ivory trade in Africa.
To gain funding for the Liberian chimps, Richardson conducted negotiations between the New York Blood Center and the Humane Society. He wrote letters to the blood center’s donors to inform them that the center had ceased funding the chimps’ care.
“They felt they weren’t responsible, and I think that was a mistake on their part,” Richardson said of the blood center, ultimately persuading it to agree to the $6 million sum. Though the amount is only half of the projected costs to keep the remaining chimps in a sanctuary for the rest of their lives, Richardson said he believes the negotiation was a success.
He credits John Silver, a Santa Fe attorney, for getting him involved in the plight of the chimps in New Mexico. Silver is the executive director of the Allene and Jerome Lapides Foundation, an environmental nonprofit, and served on the board of the Jane Goodall Institute for several years.
“The thought of having these incredible animals locked up in cages, where they never touched soil and climbed a tree, to do research that could have been done without them,” Silver said, “that was unconscionable to me.”
The way the animals lived in Alamogordo for years during testing was devastating to witness, he said. He described small concrete and metal cages with little room for the animals to stand.
Silver first met Goodall after a talk she gave at the Lensic Performing Arts Center in 2007. Goodall has been acclaimed for her conservation work with chimps for decades, after living with the animals in the wild of Tanzania for the first time when she was just 26. She has advocated since then to protect them from extinction.
Richardson and Silver traveled together to Goodall’s refuge in Gambia, an experience Silver said had a lasting impact.
Jennifer Ball, with the Humane Society, said Richardson’s advocacy for chimps in New Mexico and work with the United Nations made him the obvious choice to help aid in the process.
“He really cares about chimps in the wild and chimp research, so it made sense to reach out to him for help,” she said.
Richardson said the effort to maintain environmental and animal welfare protections must continue, especially under the Trump administration.
“It is a daily fight, and we just gotta keep pressing,” he said, calling President Donald Trump’s recent actions, such as withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate accord, “disastrous environmental policies.”
Contact Rebecca Moss at 505-986-3011 or rmoss@sfnewmexican.com.
