NIH’s Last 50 Chimpanzees Are Retiring

The US National Institutes of Health quietly ended the federal government’s long and controversial history of using chimpanzees for biomedical research.

In 2013, after a prolonged effort by the Physicians Committee and other groups, NIH announced that it would retire from experimentation more than 85 percent of the chimpanzees it owned, leaving 50 individuals as a reserve colony for possible future use.

With all this in mind, Collins made the decision to send the NIH’s remaining research chimpanzees to Chimp Haven, the 200-acre federal sanctuary in Louisiana. Even that application was later withdrawn. “We reached a point where in that five years the need for research has essentially shrunk to zero”, Collins added.

Collins said that the NIH had received only one request for chimpanzee research since reducing its population in 2013, and that request was later rescinded.

Fish and Wildlife Service director Dan Ashe said a 1990 decision by the agency to classify wild chimps as endangered, while listing captive chimps as threatened (a designation that carries fewer protections) was flawed.

However, other non-human primates will continue to be used for research. His decision came a little more than two years after NIH chose to release more than 300 chimps at research facilities across the country and resettle them in more humane conditions.

The NIH had been slowly – and quietly – reducing the size of its chimp research program since 2013. But the NIH won’t follow a recommendation that each chimp be given 1,000 square feet of living space. Collins says: “We did not feel that there was adequate scientific evidence at present” to support that requirement. Collins says that the NIH is still discussing how to house its retired chimps, especially since the animals’ eventual deaths will make sanctuary space unnecessary. The move is years in the making, and we applaud NIH director Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D., for making this scientifically sound and ethically correct decision.

Animal-rights activists are thrilled by Collins’s move to retire the NIH chimp colony.

The group has been pushing the NIH to end primate research.

One possibility is expanding Chimp Haven, Collins said; another is having other locations declared sanctuaries, though that would require congressional action.

But Peter Walsh, an ecologist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, is disappointed. “We still have work to do”, he says. “Now, the first time that NIH has ever been asked to give anything back to wild chimps, they cut and run”.