Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce legislation to end the use of Great Apes in invasive research and urge my Senate colleagues to support the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act.

The Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act would prohibit invasive research on all Great Apes, including gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees--who are the primary Great Apes used in research today. The bill would also require the immediate retirement of 500 federally-owned chimpanzees to great ape sanctuaries.

Today about 1,000 chimpanzees--half of them federally owned--languish at great taxpayer expense in eight research laboratories across the Nation.

These chimpanzees are being held or used for invasive biomedical research, research that may cause death, bodily injury, pain, distress, fear, and trauma. Invasive research practices include techniques such as injecting a chimpanzee with a drug that would be detrimental to its health, infecting a chimp with a disease, cutting a chimp or removing body parts, and isolation or social deprivation.

The vast majority of these animals--between 80 and 90 percent--aren't actually being used in research, but instead are warehoused, simply wasting away in these facilities. For example, approximately half of the government-owned chimpanzees are being held in a facility in New Mexico where no research is being conducted.

Some chimpanzees have been in labs for more than 50 years, confined in steel cages for most of their lives and enduring sometimes painful and distressing experimental procedures.

The fact that the vast majority of federally-owned chimpanzees are not being used in active research, but instead are warehoused in labs at the taxpayer expense, underlines the futility of their continued confinement.

For a single chimpanzee, lifetime care in a research facility can cost over $1 million, compared with $340,000 for superior care in a sanctuary. Ending invasive research will mean a savings of more than $25 million per year for the American people.

Chimpanzees are poor research models for human illness, and they have been of limited use in the study of human disease. Despite how similar they are to us, significant differences in their immunology and disease progression make them ineffective models for human diseases like HIV, cancer, and heart disease research.

For example, research published in the Journal of Medical Primatology in 2009, on hepatitis C indicates that use of chimpanzees has produced poor results. And the National Center for Research Resources under the National Institutes of Health has prohibited breeding of government-owned chimpanzees for research. In effect, NIH has already decided that the chimpanzee is not an essential animal model for human medical research.

Significant genetic and physiological differences between great apes and humans also make chimpanzees a poor research model for human diseases. We have spent millions of dollars over several decades on chimpanzee-based HIV and Hepatitis C research with no resulting vaccines for those diseases. Chimpanzees largely failed as a model for HIV because the virus does not cause illness in chimpanzees as it does to humans.

These are very social, highly intelligent animals--with the ability, for example, to learn American Sign Language. Their intelligence and ability to experience emotions so similar to humans underscores how chimpanzees suffer intensely under laboratory conditions.

Their psychological suffering in laboratories produces human-like symptoms of stress, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder after decades of living in isolation in small cages.

Given their social nature and capacity for suffering and boredom due to lack of stimulation, the 500 privately-owned chimpanzees and 500 federally-owned chimpanzees being held in research laboratories would be better off in sanctuaries. And by doing so we would save more than $25 million taxpayer dollars each year. This is because the cost of caring for a chimpanzee in a sanctuary is a fraction of the cost of their housing and maintenance in a laboratory. And many in the scientific community believe this money could be allocated to more effective research.

In my home State of Washington, I am proud that we have Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest. Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest provides sustainable sanctuary for seven chimpanzees retired in 2008 from decades in research facilities.

The United States is currently behind the rest of the world in outlawing this sad practice.

Australia, Austria, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom have all banned or severely limited experiments on great apes. And several other countries and the European Union are considering similar bans as well.

We are the only country--besides Gabon in West Africa--that is still holding or using chimpanzees for invasive research. It's past time for the United States to catch up with the rest of the world by ending this antiquated use of this endangered species.

We are lagging behind in action, but the desire to end invasive research on Great Apes has been present for more than a decade. In 1997, the National Research Council concluded that there should be a moratorium on further chimpanzee breeding. And the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has already announced an end to funding for the breeding of federally-owned chimpanzees for research, but this should be codified.

Government needs to take action to make invasive research on chimpanzees illegal.

That is why today I am introducing the bipartisan Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act, along with my colleagues Senators SUSAN COLLINS, BERNIE SANDERS and JOE LIEBERMAN.
The Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act is a commonsense policy reform to protect our closest living relatives in the animal kingdom from physical and psychological harm, and help reduce government spending and our federal deficit.

Specifically, this bill will phase out the use of chimpanzees in invasive research over a three-year period, require permanent retirement to suitable sanctuaries for the 500 federally-owned chimpanzees currently being warehoused in research laboratories, and codifies the current administrative moratorium on government-funded breeding of chimpanzees.

We have been delaying this action for too long. It is time to get this done and end this type of harmful research and end this wasteful government spending.

END

Source