Please help the Alamogordo Chimpanzees again: New automatic message

Please click on and sign:
Ask Your Congressperson to Help the Alamogordo Chimpanzees

Please click on and sign:
End Chimpanzee Experiments, Pass the Great Ape Protection Act

BACKGROUND

Please send the e-mail below that asks your U.S. representative to urge National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D., to keep almost 200 chimpanzees at the Alamogordo Primate Facility (APF) in New Mexico. Since 2001, chimpanzees have been housed at APF, where they cannot be used in experimentation. However, NIH plans to move the chimpanzees—many of them ill and elderly—to the Southwest National Primate Research Center in San Antonio, Texas, where they can be used in painful, invasive experiments.

We have provided text for you, but if you decide to write your own message, please be polite and encouraging. Here are some talking points:

1. I am troubled that the National Institutes of Health wants to move almost 200 chimpanzees from the Alamogordo Primate Facility in New Mexico.
2. Please ask NIH to cancel this planned move.
3. I do not support my tax dollars being used for cruel experiments that are not likely to improve human health outcomes.
4. These highly intelligent animals should be retired and a sanctuary created for them.

Gov. Bill Richardson Petitions USDA to Halt Transfer of New Mexico Chimpanzees

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Oppose Experiments on New Mexico Chimpanzees

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MESSAGE TEXT

I am writing to ask that you take action on an urgent situation in New Mexico that affects how our nation funds research.  The National Institutes of Health (NIH) plans to move approximately 200 chimpanzees currently housed at the Alamogordo Primate Facility (APF) in New Mexico to the Southwest National Primate Research Center in San Antonio, Texas, for future use in invasive experimentation. While at APF since 2001, the chimpanzees–many aging and infected with diseases like HIV and hepatitis–have not been part of any active research protocols. Previously, many of these animals were used for decades in research and testing by a company that was responsible for the deaths of 35 animals in an eight-year period.

Chimpanzee experimentation has declined significantly in recent years because scientists have recognized the inapplicability of chimpanzee-based research to human diseases like HIV/AIDS and using these animals is often cost-prohibitive. Permanent retirement for the APF chimpanzees, who have already had to sacrifice so much of their lives, would mean better lives for them, better scientific research, and a far better legacy for the nation.  NIH should retire these animals–including 14 chimpanzees who were moved to Southwest this summer–to a permanent sanctuary in Alamogordo. The costs of sanctuary care are significantly lower and under the Chimpanzee Health Improvement, Maintenance and Protection (CHIMP) Act of 2000 these costs are shared with a non-profit entity.

Please ask NIH Director Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D., to permanently retire the Alamogordo chimpanzees. Keeping the chimpanzees in New Mexico makes economic, scientific, and ethical sense.

Previous actions regarding the Alamogordo Chimpanzees HERE

this is just not the way
to treat an animal with
whom we share 98%
DNA!!!!

Karen Lyons Kalmenson