This 28-year-old chimpanzee, freed from enclosures, saw the sky for the first time
The current13:11The fate of primates used in medical research
It took a moment for Vanilla the chimpanzee to step out of her enclosure, but when she did, she stared at the clear sky, her eyes wide and her jaw gaping open.
It was the 28-year-old chimpanzee’s first free view of the open sky. Previously, she had seen it only through openings with metal bars.
Her reaction transcended all language barriers and a video of it went viral on social media.
“It’s such a beautiful moment and I think people all over the world are recognizing that,” said Dan Mathews, director of rescue organization Save the Chimps.
WATCH: The moment Vanilla first saw the sky
Born in New York University’s infamous LEMSIP lab, Vanilla the chimpanzee has lived in cages and enclosures for 28 years of her life. At least, until she recently stepped into the sun at the Save the Chimps Reserve and stared out into the open sky in amazement for the first time.
Vanilla had spent most of her life in enclosures. She was born in New York University’s Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates (LEMSIP), a former biomedical research lab. According to Mathews, she lived in a cage measuring 5 feet by 5 feet by 6 feet, suspended above the ground.
In 1995, she and 29 other chimpanzees were sent to the Wildlife Waystation animal shelter in Sylmar, California.
Mathews said the sanctuary – which closed in 2019 – was a step up from a lab environment, but it was still overcrowded and “she lived in there for many, many years [an] garage-sized enclosure with several other chimpanzees.”
Vanilla was under the care of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. According to the Washington Postthe agency found her a permanent home at Save the Chimps in June.
“So when she came to us last year, it took several months for her to even get used to being outside and being with a group of chimpanzees on her island,” she said.
Vanilla is currently part of a group of 19 chimpanzees living on one of the reserve’s artificial islands, Airforce Island. The island is a no-contact zone of about three to five hectares.
“Vanilla is doing great,” said Mathews The current guest host Robyn Bresnahan. “She spends most of her time on platforms exploring her new world.”
Primate testing
Chimpanzees are no longer used in animal research in Canada and the United States, but hundreds of other non-human primates, such as rhesus macaques and marmosets, are.
Veterinarian for laboratory animals Dr. Andrew Winterborn says any Canadian institution that uses animals for scientific research is required to report their numbers annually to the Canadian Council on Animal Care. According to the Council In 2021, 6,818 non-human primates were used for research in Canada.
“That’s about 0.2 percent of the animals used in research,” said Winterborn, director of Animal Care Services at Queen’s University.
“It should be pointed out that not all of those 6,800 would be in the biomedical field. That could also be field studies, where those animals would be included in that number,” he told Bresnahan.
Winterborn said the vast majority of non-human primates in Canada are used to help scientists understand brain function and disease, as well as vaccine development and treatment.
He said non-human primates are still critical to vaccine development and treatment status, even if there are human trials.
“Unfortunately, there is still a requirement from a regulatory perspective that before a drug gets to the market — and vaccines, in particular — you have to demonstrate the safety and toxicity of that vaccine,” he said.
“So before it gets into the human population, there has to be a demonstration that that vaccine is going to be safe and it’s going to be [effective]And so that’s unfortunately still a central part of drug development right now.”
He admitted that sometimes science requires those animals to undergo a procedure that can be painful. But he said it’s extremely important to have qualified personnel on board and the “gold standard” of painkillers available at the time.
“So, you know, we do everything we can to maximize care and respect animal welfare when working with animals and research,” he said.
But Mathews said it’s “a mistake” to think animals must be infected with human disease for a cure to be found — pointing to HIV testing as an example.
“[Chimpanzees] were a poor research model. They didn’t develop HIV the way people do,” he said. “The disease they get… [from] SIV, immune deficiency in monkeys, developed in a completely different way.“
Chimpanzees evolved to control the pathogenicity of the virus, which typically does not progress to AIDS in the same way it does in humans.
“So it turned out that we wasted a lot of money breeding chimpanzees, we created a lot of cruelty by keeping them in captivity, and it turns out that the things we learned about HIV came from human clinical trials.”
Winterborn said he would like to see scientific research break away from animals — and suggested that artificial intelligence could play a role in that in the long run.
“I think, unfortunately, we’re still decades away from that point where we just don’t understand the biological processes, disease processes at the moment,” he said.
