The U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works this morning gave its approval to S. 810, the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act, marking a major step forward for the legislation to end invasive experiments on chimpanzees and to retire federally-owned chimps to sanctuaries. Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Water and Wildlife Subcommittee Chairman Ben Cardin, D-Md., both spoke eloquently in favor of the bill, which then passed the committee by voice vote. The legislation can now move to the full Senate for consideration.
There are approximately 950 chimpanzees—about half of them owned by the federal government—currently languishing in five U.S. laboratories. Most of them are not being used in active experiments, because chimps have not proven to be a useful research model, but they are still confined in cages at taxpayer expense, and some of them have been there for decades. It’s inhumane to keep these highly intelligent and social creatures in small cages and use them in invasive experiments, and it’s fiscally reckless to continue to throw taxpayer dollars at this issue with all the concern about reining in our nation’s spiraling federal deficit.
Last year a report by the National Academies’ Institute of Medicine concluded that the use of chimps in experiments is largely unnecessary because there are a variety of alternatives available and that the future trajectory is that their use will continue to decline. An amendment to S. 810 approved today by the committee addresses the concerns raised by some critics in the research community who claim that even though chimps are not useful now, they might be needed in the future due to some unforeseen emergency. The modified bill establishes a transparent process for the approval of invasive research on great apes in the event that a new, emerging, or reemerging disease, requires their use, and the criteria used to evaluate proposed research protocols to meet this need are based on the recommendations of the IOM report.
Congress years ago set up a national sanctuary system for retired chimps, and there is a network of private chimpanzee sanctuaries as well. It’s much less costly to care for chimps at sanctuaries where they are housed in groups and in more natural settings, than to warehouse them in individual laboratory cages, and passing this legislation would save U.S. taxpayers an estimated $25 million each year—or a quarter billion dollars over the next decade. Because chimps can live 50 or 60 years, every chimp born into research is a financial commitment for future generations, and it’s time to get off this fiscal treadmill.
We are grateful to Chairwoman Boxer and Chairman Cardin for moving this important bill through committee, and to the bipartisan sponsors of the legislation—Sens. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in the Senate, and Reps. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., Steve Israel, D-N.Y., Dave Reichert, R-Wash., Jim Langevin, D-R.I., and Ed Towns, D-N.Y., in the House—for their leadership. Congress should pass the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act before the session ends. It’s inevitable that we’ll end the use of chimpanzees in invasive experiments, but let’s get on with it and delay that humane and fiscally prudent policy no longer.
