The End of Chimp Experimentation
Using research, investigations, whistleblower protection, media, congressional testimony, complaints to regulatory agencies, and lawsuits while at In Defense of Animals, Eric played a significant role in the successful campaign to end invasive experimentation on chimpanzees.
Air Force Chimps
In the late 1950s, the U.S. Air Force created the Holloman Aeromedical Laboratory on Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. Populating the lab were chimpanzees kidnapped from Africa for spaceflight research. Ham and Enos famously preceded Alan Shepherd and John Glenn into space. When no longer used for spaceflight research, the Air Force leased the chimps out for biomedical research. In the early 1970s, notorious toxicologist Fred Coulston assumed control of the chimps on Holloman, and would remain there until 1980. He would return in 1993 after forming the Coulston Foundation, to take over care of approximately 150 Air Force chimps. The controversy about Coulston’s takeover, and New Mexico State University’s dumping hundreds of chimpanzees, and millions of dollars in lifetime endowment funds, to CF, helped to launch the issue of chimps in experimentation into the media stratosphere.
Minnie, a Famous Air Force Chimp who Ended Up as an “Expired Animal Carcass”
Minne was Ham’s backup, and the only female chimp trained for the Mercury spaceflight program. She became part of the Air Force chimpanzee breeding program. In 1998, after her death, the Coulston Foundation made a big p.r. push, claiming she was buried in a place of honor at a spaceflight museum in New Mexico. In reality, CF used her remains in a highly controversial spinal disk replacement experiment that caused the negligent death of the chimp Eason in 1999.
Coulston Foundation
In Defense of Animals had filed a complaint with the USDA and issued a press release (resulting in news stories) in November 1998 regarding these concerns. Those blaming IDA for CF’s “severe loss of funding” included CEO Frederick Coulston, shortly after he had written a letter to the NIH bemoaning the “constant barrage of negative comments/charges being leveled at CF by the animal rights groups and USDA” that had:
The 1999 NIH audit found that CF was on the verge of bankruptcy. Consequently, the NIH began providing millions of dollars in illegal “supplemental awards” to avert the lab’s collapse. A few months later, a settlement between the USDA and CF regarding administrative charges prompted by In Defense of Animals resulted in CF’s agreeing to cut its chimpanzee population in half.
Three years later, CF was officially out of business, with 266 chimpanzees and 61 monkeys going to Save the Chimps as a result of the Arcus Foundation’s incredible generosity.
In its 2002 article “Good Life Awaits Primates,” the Albuquerque Journal reported that these chimpanzees and monkeys “were saved by an intense campaign by In Defense of Animals.”
Working with IDA Program Director, master strategist, and media wizard Suzanne Roy, Eric was centrally involved in the eight-year IDA campaign that put the Coulston Foundation out of business.
Testimony before Congress
Charles River Laboratories
In September 2004, New Mexico District Attorney Scot filed multiple counts of criminal animal cruelty against Charles River Laboratories for the deaths of the chimps Rex and Ashley, and the near-death of Topsy. This was the first time in history that an entire company had been charged with criminal animal cruelty. The charges were also an indictment of NIH, which had funded and enabled the abuses at the Coulston Foundation, and was legally responsible for the operations at the Alamogordo Primate Facility, which was an intramural NIH lab.
After the charges were filed, CRL—the world’s largest supplier of animals for experimentation and NIH’s hand-picked contractor—named Eric in a Brady motion, stating that the landmark criminal cruelty case filed against the company was “instigated, prepared and ghostwritten” by In Defense of Animals and its pro bono attorneys.
Eric had recruited these generous attorneys to provide legal research regarding this case, as well as the successful Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed against the National Institutes of Health for the medical records of Rex, Ashley, Topsy, and hundreds of other chimpanzees at the Alamogordo Primate Facility.
The criminal cruelty charges, and the ultimately successful FOIA lawsuit, would not have been possible without the generosity, patience, vision, and tenacity of attorney William J. Spriggs, who was responsible for the donation of over $1.5 million in pro bono legal fees to these, and other, animal advocacy efforts.
The cruelty charges also would not have been possible without Animal Protection of New Mexico, which worked tirelessly with Senator Mary Jane Garcia to amend the New Mexico cruelty statute in 2001 so that the district attorney could prosecute. APNM recently won a huge victory—with Humane World for Animals—in a lawsuit they filed against the NIH that has resulted in the remaining chimpanzee survivors at the APF going to the Chimp Haven sanctuary.
In a September 2004 email to a pro-animal research lobbying organization about the FOIA lawsuit, prominent chimpanzee experimenter and apologist William Satterfield warned that “This IDA thing is very dangerous. This will open the door for the AR's to demand the moratorium on funding any chimp research and go after records in more facilities.”
This successful “IDA thing,” filed by the pro bono law firm Spriggs & Hollingsworth, led to the groundbreaking McClatchy Newspapers Special Report “Chimps: Life in the Lab.”
A few months later, Scientific American, citing the McClatchy Special Report, called for a ban on chimpanzee experimentation; shortly after that, the Institute of Medicine made the groundbreaking determination that chimpanzees were not necessary for research. Shortly after the closure of the Coulston Foundation, and the transfer of the chimpanzees and monkeys to Save the Chimps, Jane Goodall wrote a congratulatory letter to IDA. Five years later, the producer of the PBS Nature documentary Chimpanzees: An Unnatural History, which won an Emmy for research, wrote Eric and IDA a thank-you letter.
How did the Coulston Foundation describe Minnie? “An expired animal carcass.” This was the reality of experimentation on chimps at CF.
“driv[en] away many of our long time private and government sponsors”
“strained our financial resources”
caused a “severe loss of funding” and “financial situation” at CF for years.
The Air Force plans to give away 144 chimpanzees, most of them the offspring of the primates used in pioneering in the 1950s and 60s housed at the Alamogordo-based Coulston Foundation…“We plan to take the animals off the base,” Kleiman said, who noted that chimpanzees share 98.4 percent of human DNA and that some have been taught sign language in controlled studies. “We view them as unique individuals who should not be used in (biomedical) research.” In Defense of Animals has been a longtime critic of Frederick Coulston, the Coulston Foundation’s owner, for the organization’s use and care of chimps. In May, In Defense of Animals filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Institutes of Health over the deaths of two chimps at the Alamogordo lab. The USDA is investigating the January and March deaths of two other chimps at the Coulston Foundation, Kleiman said. The care and maintenance of the animals is expensive in part because chimps can live up to 50 years, Kleiman said.
In March 2000, Eric testified before Congress about CF’s execrable animal welfare record, its violations of both the Animal Welfare Act and the FDA’s Good Laboratory Practice regulations, and NIH’s illegal funding of the facility despite violations of these laws. His testimony also called for a Congressional investigation of NIH, and an end to chimpanzee experimentation. After he testified, Congress launched an agency-wide investigation of NIH’s oversight of billons of dollars in grants, citing the continued funding of CF despite the documented violations of animal welfare and data integrity laws.
In April 1999, officials with CF, then the world’s largest chimpanzee lab housing half of the U.S. population of captive chimps, blamed In Defense of Animals for the lab’s financial woes during a site visit and audit by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
NIH said it conducted the audit after it “became aware of serious administrative and financial concerns” in November 1998 related to layoffs, resignations and finances.
The caretaker of the nation’s largest colony of research chimpanzees has agreed to give away almost half of them in an unusual negotiation with the United States Department of Agriculture… In March 1997, Echo, a 2-year-old female chimp, died after being operated on by two inexperienced veterinarians. In early 1998, a chimp named Holly died from preventable side effects of a drug that was being tested at the foundation. Two more chimps died from the same cause in June 1998. The most recent death, during a spinal experiment, occurred in May. The Agriculture Department, partly as a result of investigations by an animal protection advocacy group, In Defense of Animals, filed charges in 1997 and then again this year….Fourteen veterinarians have left the foundation since 1994, a high turnover rate. In the last two years, most of the foundation's veterinarians have had only minimal experience with chimps, according to In Defense of Animals. Indeed, agricultural officials said worries about Mr. Coulston's finances prompted the agency to include a provision in their recent agreement allowing auditors access to his financial records. In Defense of Animals said the foundation had lost 30 percent of its revenue between July 1997 and June 1998. Mr. McKinney of the foundation declined to respond.
The Coulston Foundation, an Alamogordo biomedical research facility, got out of chimpanzee-related research last week and turned its remaining 288 chimps over to one of the lab’s harshest critics….California-based In Defense of Animals, Coulston’s most persistent critic, said its eight-year long campaign had spurred unprecedented regulatory action by the Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Department of Agriculture and had pushed the Coulston Foundation to the brink of financial ruin. The USDA, often spurred by the group’s complaints, charged the Coulston Foundation with violations of the Animal Welfare Act four times, with some charges stemming from the allegedly negligent deaths of 10 chimps.
After CRL refused to supply chimpanzee medical records to the D.A. even after a subpoena from his office, a grand jury issued a separate subpoena for the same records. In a March 2005 motion for a protective order, CRL complained to the court that the “same Washington, D.C., IDA attorneys who have been ghost-writing this prosecution” had filed a “federal lawsuit on behalf of IDA” to obtain what CRL called the same “confidential and proprietary records” that were the subject of the grand jury subpoena. IDA obtained these, and records for hundreds of other chimps, after defeating NIH in the FOIA lawsuit cited by CRL in this motion.
A group that has long criticized the facility, In Defense of Animals, claims the situation has not improved. Based on reports from whistleblowers inside the lab, the group lobbied the district attorney to bring animal-cruelty charges in the deaths of two chimps: Rex, a 16-year-old with liver and kidney failure, allegedly was left unconscious in the care of night security guards when the daytime shift of medical personnel ended. He was found dead a few hours later, apparently having suffocated on his vomit. Ashley, a 16-year-old female, was attacked by 11 other chimps and severely injured. Although prone to hemorrhage, she allegedly was also left without medical care overnight and was found dead by security guards. Critics also charge that a third chimp, Topsy, a 26-year-old female, was left without care overnight while bleeding from a wound sustained in a fight. She was found listless and pale the next morning and required emergency blood transfusions.
In a September 2004 email to various officials at NIH and primate research labs, CRL’s director of corporate communications wrote that the cruelty charges filed against the company were “driven by an animal activist singularly focused on APF.”
Chimps: Life in the Lab
The groundbreaking McClatchy Newspapers Special Report
The FOIA victory against NIH for chimpanzee medical records from Alamogordo Primate Facility led to the groundbreaking McClatchy Newspaper Special Report, “Chimps: Life in the Lab.”
This series was written by Chris Adams and published on April 25, 2011.