The National Institutes of Health says it plans to retire all government research chimpanzees to sanctuaries, reversing its stance of many years. The NIH had said a set of chimps needed to be kept for future medical experimentation.
The nearly 300 chimps will be retired over the next two years, or possibly longer, according to Cathy Spraetz, director of Chimp Haven in Louisiana, the nation’s only federally-approved chimp sanctuary.
The NIH’s decision follows a CNN investigation in February that found the agency had fallen woefully behind in retiring chimpanzees. Only six of 310 research chimps promised retirement in June 2013 had been allowed to leave government research facilities, and the agency had no timetable for when it would retire the rest of the animals.
Many of the chimps had been intentionally infected with diseases such as hepatitis or HIV — or both — for the sake of medical science, and dozens had died waiting to be retired to Chimp Haven, which has acres of forest where the chimps can roam.
In emails to CNN last year, NIH spokeswoman Amanda Fine had said the delay in retiring chimps was due, in part, to the selection of 50 animals that would be kept out of retirement in case they were needed for “critical research” in the future. Selecting those chimps, Fine said, could “require a period of several years.”
On Wednesday, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the NIH, said in a statement he had reassessed that need. “We reached a point where … the need for research has essentially shrunk to zero,” Collins said in an interview with Nature.
Spraetz said it is unclear who will pay to expand Chimp Haven to accommodate the hundreds of new chimps. She said her organization is launching a capital campaign in early 2016, but the government might also pay for part of it. The first set of chimps could arrive by the end of the year, she said.