The Monkey Wars
The Monkey Wars Books
Product Description
The controversy over the use of primates in research admits of no simple answers. We have all benefited from the medical discoveries of primate research–vaccines for polio, rubella, and hepatitis B are just a few. But we have also learned more in recent years about how intelligent apes and monkeys really are: they can converse in to us with sign language, they can even play video games (and are as obsessed with the games as any human teenager). And activists have also uncovered widespread and unnecessarily callous treatment of animals by researchers (in 1982, a Silver Spring lab was charged with 17 counts of animal cruelty). It is a complex come forth, made more trying by the combative stance of both researchers and animal activists.
In The Monkey Wars, Deborah Blum gives a human face to this often caustic debate–and an all-but-human face to the subjects of the struggle, the chimpanzees and monkeys themselves. Blum criss-crosses America to show us first hand the issues and personalities caught up. She offers a wide-ranging, informative look at animal rights activists, now numbering some twelve million, from the moderate Animal Welfare Institute to the highly radical Animal Liberation Front (a group destructive enough to be placed on the FBI’s terrorist list). And she interviews a wide variety of researchers, many forced to conduct their work protected by barbed wire and alarm systems, men and women for whom death threats and despise mail are common. She takes us to Roger Fouts’s research focal top in Ellensburg, Washington, where we meet five chimpanzees trained in human sign language, and we stay LEMSIP, a research facility in New York State that has no barbed wire, no alarms–and no protesters chanting outside–because its director, Jan Moor-Jankowski, listens to activists with respect and treats his animals humanely. And by the side of the way, Blum offers us insights into the many side-issues caught up: the intense battle to win over school kids fought by both sides, and the danger of transplanting animal organs into humans.
“As it stands now,” Blum concludes, “the research community and its activist critics are like two different nations, nations locked in a long, bitter, seemingly intractable political standoff….But if you listen hard, there really are people on both sides willing to accept and work within the complex middle. When they can be freely heard, then we will have progressed to another place, beyond this time of hostilities.” In The Monkey Wars, Deborah Blum gives these people their voice.
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