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Historic Lifesaving Petition Filed with FDA

To the Editor:

 My mother-in-law was pleased to see me described as “clean and well-groomed” in Michael Conn’s book, excerpted in “The War on Animal Research” (The Scientist, 4/1/08), and agrees with Conn that I’m someone a mother might like her daughter to marry. So far so good, but if the author wishes his book to be categorized as nonfiction, he should correct inaccuracies regarding my two years of employment in the primate laboratory at OHSU.

 I worked in the same lab as a primate technician and was often the direct target of his diatribe. For two years, 1998-2000, I doggedly tried—and failed— to change a system of assembly line-style research where experimental mistakes, animal abuse and violations of law were endemic. Fortunately for the 4,000+ macaques still captive in this federally funded Oregon lab, I secretly captured their plight on camera, although Conn prefers to cry “extremist” rather than to address the facts honestly.

Video doesn’t lie, and neither does the world’s most renowned primatologist, Dr. Jane Goodall, who had this to say after viewing the film:

“I have heard that there are people at the Primate Center who have suggested that the images on your video had been faked. Well, the images that I saw - a baby monkey rolling up into a ball and sucking his penis, an infant monkey with [the disease] shigella crawling about in his own filth, an adult rhesus who was so crazy that he had bitten his arms, bitten off almost all the flesh, an individual capuchin who had been used in drug research sitting with staring eyes, clearly in the last stages of depression, a monkey strapped down and submitted to a horribly painful electro ejaculation process with electrodes strapped on his penis, just to get a semen sample - these things could not have been faked. There's no way they could have been faked. No, these monkeys were being tortured.”

Severe emotional damage is caused when you take any socially complex baby primate away from their mother when they are far too young, and keep them alone in a tiny cage for years on end. The psychological trauma these monkeys endure manifests into bizarre, abnormal behaviors including depression, aggression, circling, pacing, and in the worst cases, psychosis, including severe self-destructive mutilation. I witnessed monkeys so mentally damaged they routinely bit themselves up and down their limbs. In desperation, the staff tried to duct tape bandages on them to keep them from attacking themselves, but the behavior persisted.

Conn maintains that diligent inspections were conducted by USDA and other internal oversight committees. Compare Conn’s claim with the fact that the USDA inspector at the time, Dr. Isis Johnson Brown, was by my side at a press conference, having quit in frustration after her supervisors at the USDA failed to support her efforts to enforce the minimal requirements of the Animal Welfare Act. Every news agency in Portland was on hand, and the following is part of what she had to say:

“While working for the United States Department of Agriculture as the inspector in Oregon for the Federal Animal Welfare Act, I was dedicated to providing the animals the protections, minimal as they are, that are stipulated by law. This is no easy task. As Oregon’s only inspector, I was responsible for the oversight of over 120 facilities throughout the state. I barely had time to visit each facility as required, which for some facilities was no more than once every three years. If that wasn’t enough, I soon found out that my own supervisors were working against me at every turn.

The research institutions I visited, including the Oregon Primate Center, were not happy to see me coming once they realized that I was going to hold them to the law. This reaction I expected. What was surprising to me was my own supervisors were disappointed and unsupportive of my efforts to simply enforce the bare minimum standards in the Code of Federal Regulations. The USDA has a good ol’ boy relationship with the research industry and the laws are nothing more than smoke and mirrors. More than once, I was instructed by a supervisor to make a personal list of violations of the law, cut that list in half, and then cut that list in half again before writing up my inspection reports. My willingness to uphold the law during my site visits at the Primate Center led to me being “retrained” several times by higher-ups in the USDA.

Understand that the laws I was attempting to enforce require no more than minimum standards— food and water, shelter from the elements, a clean cage that protects from injury and “adequate” veterinary care— that’s about it. At the Primate Center, the attending veterinarian tried to march me through as fast as he could. Only when I specifically asked to see a husbandry task, like cage washing, would he grudgingly show me. I would spot check records on paper but for the most part, I had to take the attending veterinarian on his word about procedures and veterinary care.”

Simply revealing the truth was what caused the “public relations nightmare” Conn describes as being so difficult for the primate center to deal with. 

Conn disputes the veracity of the videos I took. The baby monkey in the filthy incubator, Conn claims, “was not upset or in pain, just caught in an unflattering pose.” I maintain that the baby was caught in a nightmare. She was a victim of a massive outbreak of shigella and listereosis, an epidemic that was sweeping through the outdoor colonies, rendering dozens if not hundreds of monkeys in severely painful persistent bloody diarrhea, and causing many pregnant mothers to miscarry. The monkeys who were warehoused outside had weakened immune systems from exposure to the harsh elements during an exceptionally wet and cold winter and spring. We were running out of places to put all the sick animals, and this baby was quarantined, alone, separated from her mother in an incubator with a broken glass lid. Other video footage that Conn chose to ignore a clip of another baby in a broken incubator with the words, “no heat, no light” scribed on the glass with a marker.

Another clip Conn describes is one with a group of juvenile rhesus macaques, “frightened …in what looks like crowded conditions and in the midst of feces covering the floor. The images were created before morning cleanup, so some of the material is likely feces, but most is Purina Monkey Chow biscuits photographed from a distance in the dim light of dawn before morning cleanup. The photographer, having entered their enclosure, had likely frightened the monkeys, causing them to huddle together and appear hemmed in.”

In this case, Conn got it partly right, but you decide whether his omission qualifies as an untruth. What he didn’t tell you is why the monkeys were so scared. One reason was that they had been recently ripped from their mothers, and these frightened youngsters were clinging to one another for comfort, as they might cling their own mothers. Unlike puppies and kittens, primates spend years being intimately close to mom. This natural behavior is not afforded monkeys in labs that also double as monkey farms; I saw that mothers were impregnated again as soon as possible, and babies were taken away too young, when they were only six months old.

I was the technician who was assigned to clean the cages that day, and I videotaped to show an ongoing violation of the Animal Welfare Act. By law, primates are not allowed to be wetted or distressed during cage cleaning. From the moment the high pressured hose is turned on, before even beginning to clean, already these poor babies reacted anxiously. There is absolutely no physical way to clean this enclosure using the method in which I was trained, and not violate this law. And the only skill a cage-washer is rewarded for in a research lab, is going fast. What is not seen in the video is the young monkeys running this way and that, trying to get away from the spraying hose and inadvertently getting soaked in the process. This kind of callous protocol and the image of all these infants, desperately clutching each other, still haunts me to this day. I always did everything I could to try to minimize stress in my actions around the monkeys; I would give calming visual cues (called lip smacking) and divert my gaze to try to keep them calm. The crude, inescapable daily procedures are what frighten them.

Also working at the OHSU Primate Center, is Dr. Eliot Spindel, who has made a career of conducting nicotine experiments on macaque mothers and their infants for decades. Despite evidence, and the common knowledge shared by every school child, that nicotine is harmful to humans and their fetuses, NIH funding continues through 2012. And in spite of the dubious value of such research, the university’s IACUC continues to rubberstamp their approval as the grants come up for renewal; it’s a real moneymaker for the university. The cost to the taxpaying public is considerable, but the cost to the animals is much, much greater. I took these notes:

"Among the most horrifying things I witnessed at the lab were the times when baby monkeys were stolen away from their mothers. (Spindel's experiments require that babies be taken away when only just weeks or months old, and killed.) This was a chaotic, ugly, heart-wrenching scene. A worker wearing thick leather 'gauntlet' gloves, would reach into the cage where the baby clung to her mother's breast, and snatch the baby by one shoulder and arm and rip her from her mother, who was also screaming and desperately fighting to keep her baby safe. Once removed, the entire room of monkeys would erupt into total pandemonium—screaming, thrashing and crashing in their cages—some even reaching out through the bars in vain to get the baby back. Once outside the room, the screams of protest continued, echoing down the halls. The mother would never see that baby again, but would be bred again and again to produce more monkeys to feed the insatiable demand for research subjects."

This is reminiscent of Harry Harlow’s notorious experiments of the 1950’s, when the ghastly effects of deliberate removal of baby monkeys and substitution of monster-mother surrogates were called “research.” When are we really going to learn?

If the public does not bridle at the fact that a hefty chunk of their tax dollars is given out to people like Spindel, then perhaps they will be outraged by the despicable abuse of animals in laboratories that still passes as acceptable protocol. I must mention that in my two years at the primate center, I never once saw Michael Conn step foot in an animal room. He is an administrator. His co-author, James Parker, is a public relations person, and is likewise primarily office bound. Unfortunately for the animals and the taxpayers who fund these experiments, they weren’t really there, as was I, to see what happens every single day.

One last note on Conn ’s remarks about Edward Walsh’s experiments at Boys Town Research Hospital in Omaha , where I lived and worked part-time as a security guard. It’s  the place where I was first called to undercover animal abuse investigations. When I heard kittens crying, I went behind the locked vivarium door to check out what was wrong. Over time I found out these kittens were part of an experiment purporting to help deaf children. Actually, Walsh was botching brain surgeries on otherwise healthy, very young kittens, sometimes only one or two days old; Walsh was cutting into a nerve bundle at the base of the kittens’ brains, going for an auditory nerve, but apparently sometimes cutting the wrong ones, leaving the kittens walking in circles, unable to climb back into the nest box to nurse while the mother cat could only look on helplessly. Many didn’t survive; those were the lucky ones. I started documenting the abuse, and that’s how I became an undercover animal abuse investigator. Although Michael Conn chooses to crow about the USDA’s rejection of the evidence at Boys Town, activists campaigned and eventually succeeded in shutting down all the cat studies. The botched, crude experiments on kittens were decried by the deaf community and local people who’d associated Boys Town with helping orphans, not torturing kittens.

I’m glad that other undercover investigators continue to bear witness, videotape, collect evidence, show what really happens behind laboratory doors, and bring these issues to light. (Think of the book we could write.) It can’t be much longer before the public, funding agencies, and ethical scientists will respond to what they see, and take a good, hard look at the use and abuse of animals in laboratories.