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ACTION ALERT
Letters Needed to Save the Lives of Hundreds of Baboons!
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Please take a moment to send a brief letter which could prevent the suffering and death of thousands of baboons.
Each year hundreds of baboons have been trapped in the wild in Kenya and Tanzania and sent to biomedical "research" facilities to be used in experimentation, including xenotransplantation (cross-species organ transplants.) Read more about xenotransplantation...
Data provided by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service shows that from 1995-2000, 1146 baboons were exported from Kenya to the United States alone... Many other baboons have been exported to the United Kingdom and Russia for egregious "research" protocols. Learn more about primate trade...
The fate awaiting these magnificent and intelligent baboons is dreadful, as they will be relegated to a piteous lot in captivity, confined to stark stainless steel and cinder block prisons, and where they will most likely be subjected to painful "procedures" in laboratories....
If this fate were not bad enough, before being captured and exported, the baboons have in many circumstances been kept in deplorable conditions in the facilities of Kenyan and Tanzanian wildlife traders.
One Kenyan wildlife trader, Mann & Miller, exported 1016 of the total 1146 baboons to the United States. The Mann & Miller facility was described in part in an expose' (printed on 10 March 2000 by the British newspaper Mail on Sunday) as follows:
The screams [of the baboons] are what you hear first: piercing, prolonged and almost human, the screams of mothers and babies. Somewhere inside the well-protected, hidden compound run by wildlife dealer Richard Mann on the outskirts of Nairobi, baboons abducted from their natural habitat on the wide open veld are railing against their capture, some battering their heads against the bars of the tiny cages. Yet if they knew the full terrors awaiting some of their numbers, they would scream even louder.
They are to be flown to Britain, then transported in secrecy to a medical laboratory near Cambridge, where their organs will be surgically removed and replaced with those of pigs. Some will have pig organs attached to the outside of their bodies.
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WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP!
The Guardian's expose' last spring prompted the Kenya Wildlife Service to suspend the license of Mann & Miller, which has sufficed to stop exports (at least temporarily) from that country.
Only permanent export bans in Kenya and Tanzania will truly make a difference.
Please write letters to the Tanzania Embassy in the U.S. and to the Tanzania Wildlife Division asking for an immediate and permanent ban on the capture and export of baboons for research.
Embassy of the Republic of Tanzania
2139 R Street NW
(phone)
(fax)
Tanzania Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism (MNRT)
Attn: Director of Wildlife
POB 40832
Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania
Also write the Kenyan government urging it to place a permanent ban on the export of baboons.
Embassy of the Republic of Kenya
2249 R Street NW
(phone)
(fax)
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