Puerto Rico Plans Huge Primate Breeding Facility to Supply Researchers

I'm behind on my email and only just read this action alert from the Animal Legal Defense Fund. Another crass attempt at primate slavery for money wrapped in "we put people first" robes."

From the ALDF action alert page....

Less than one year ago, Puerto Rico enacted a landmark animal protection law, based in part on a set of model laws drafted by the Animal Legal Defense Fund. The sweeping set of reforms provided for in Act 154 (P S. 2552) place Puerto Rico among the top tier of U.S. states and jurisdictions with regards to the strength of their laws protecting animals. This new law provides specific guidelines for experimentation on live animals: specifically, scientific research on animals at universities is allowable only when it meets criteria deeming it “absolutely essential;” any other experiments are prohibited for educational purposes at the elementary, intermediate and higher education levels, and completely banned in facilities outside of university research labs. The proposed primate breeding facility would violate both the letter and the spirit of Puerto Rico’s progressive new law, which strictly limits the use of animals in experimentation.

In addition to troubling questions about its legality, such a facility would also place Puerto Rico behind the curve in the current context of scientific debate about laboratory research involving live animals. In 2007, the National Academy of Sciences published a report calling on the Environmental Protection Agency to make a fundamental shift in its toxicity testing strategies away from testing on mammals and focusing increasingly on new, more accurate—not to mention, more ethical—in vitro toxicity testing.