I want to tell you a story. It’s about a prisoner—a prisoner who has endured horrors the likes of which we can scarcely imagine.
For nearly two decades, the needles and scalpels of the prisoner’s captors have been piercing and cutting his flesh while he endures pain, confusion and abject terror. He has spent years caged in solitary confinement, battling the depression born of repeated trauma and prolonged loneliness.
This prisoner’s name is Beamish, and he is a rhesus macaque—a living, breathing, sentient individual who deserves the opportunity to make his own decisions with the agency and dignity that all beings are inherently due. He should be free, living in a lush forest where he would be part of a vast and intricate network of social relationships within his extended family, where he would learn from the elders and teach the young. Instead, he’s held in isolation and stripped of his autonomy, forced to live in artificial conditions imposed on him by laboratory experimenters.
Beamish is currently imprisoned in a laboratory run by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where he’s been held since he was 2 years old. When he was 5, experimenters cut into his skull, suctioned out a portion of his brain and injected toxins into it, causing permanent brain damage. He has been taunted with fake but realistic-looking spiders and snakes—which most monkeys fear—in pointless experiments that in 30 years have not led to the development of a single treatment or cure for the human neuropsychiatric disorders that they purport to study, wasting tens of millions of taxpayer dollars.
Beamish’s medical records, along with 43 hours of video footage—obtained by PETA through a Freedom of Information Act request—are riddled with episodes of extensive hair loss over nearly three-quarters of his body, an outward indicator of extreme psychological distress. He was observed circling in his cage and rocking back and forth. Staff noted numerous times that he was lying prone or with his head in his lap, unresponsive, even to the touch. That’s what it looks like when someone is utterly defeated, both mentally and physically.
Dr. Marc Bekoff, professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, states, “Beamish’s story makes me ill. It is unconscionable—truly reprehensible—that anyone with any sort of moral compass would ever, ever partake in this sort of activity in the name of science. How do they sleep at night? What do they say when people ask them what they do in their labs? Shame on them and let’s hope that these sorts of studies are shelved forever, and that Beamish gets the care and love he clearly needs and that he can live out his life in peace and dignity.”
NIH spends roughly half of its $47 billion annual budget on exactly the kind of pointless barbarism that Beamish has endured his whole life, which makes his story the tragic archetype of every animal in every laboratory in the country. There are hundreds of thousands of animals like him similarly enduring the unimaginable at this very moment.
None of this is necessary. For decades, other researchers have safely studied the roles of specific brain regions in humans and produced reliable, relevant results. Research dollars need to be redirected into human-relevant models and cutting-edge methods that hold promise for humans—not funneled into poorly designed and obscenely cruel experiments that squander valuable NIH funding.
For every cruel act, there exists an alternative kind one. Instead of experimenting on animals, there is sound science, such as in vitro work using human cells, integrative modeling and molecular simulations or three-dimensional printed human tissues, cell-based assays and organs-on-a-chip. These offer far more promise than wasteful, painful experiments on monkeys.
It may be too late for Beamish, but others like him can still be saved.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Katherine Roe, Ph.D. is a neuroscientist and chief of science advancement and outreach at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), 501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510; www.PETA.org.
