{"id":245110,"date":"2025-10-28T07:04:12","date_gmt":"2025-10-28T07:04:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/245110\/"},"modified":"2025-10-28T07:04:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-28T07:04:12","slug":"academics-activists-opposition-call-for-end-to-monkey-imports","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/245110\/","title":{"rendered":"Academics, activists, opposition call for end to monkey imports"},"content":{"rendered":"

The vaccines for COVID-19, malaria, polio and other global diseases have saved many human lives, but the creation of those vaccines has also cost many animal ones.<\/p>\n

As threats of zoonotic disease spread is heightened, coming off the back of the COVID-19 pandemic, and experts grapple with the ethics of animal experimentation, a team of researchers, concerned citizens and opposition are banding together to demand the federal government halt the import of long-tailed macaques.<\/p>\n

Long-tailed macaques are the most heavily traded for use in primate experimentation, and most of these monkeys are imported to Canada from Cambodia. This year alone, Canada has received 2,500 monkeys.<\/p>\n

On Oct. 21, NDP MP Alexandre Boulerice introduced a petition<\/a> in the House of Commons initiated by Manitoban animal rights activist\u00a0Twyla Francois. The petition calls on the Minister of Environment and Climate Change Canada to immediately suspend all imports of monkeys from Cambodia, after the country was caught laundering wild long-tailed macaques as captive-bred.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe conservation of long-tailed macaques has gone from vulnerable to endangered, and these imports are partly responsible for the stark decrease in their population and an increased risk of extinction,\u201d Boulerice said.<\/p>\n

Ken Marciniec, an activist and concerned citizen, is questioning how Canada can continue to import these monkeys when they are endangered. <\/p>\n

\u201cI would love for the Minister of the Environment to answer that question. I assume we\u2019re party to some international treaties on this,\u201d he said. \u201cHow are we living up to our international obligations here by allowing this?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought we stopped experimenting on primates a long time ago. But I guess that\u2019s only limited to certain primates,\u201d Marciniec said. \u201cAnd I\u2019ve learned since and that even in the primate world there\u2019s a hierarchy and so these poor long-tailed macaques and other types of monkeys are still being taken in by the thousands each year to be essentially tortured in labs.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to the Animal Alliance of Canada, imports of Cambodian long-tailed macaques<\/a> to Canada increased by nearly 350 per cent over the past three years.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, south of the border, the United States stopped the import of monkeys from Cambodia when authorities found out permits had been falsified.<\/p>\n

Marciniec said that despite Canada being known as having the \u201cfriendlier\u201d government, it is the one continuing to fuel the primate trade.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat that means practically is we\u2019ve become the monkey chop shop for the US where they come live and whole here to labs, and end up getting sent, as gruesome as it sounds, as bits and pieces back to the U.S. for whatever those scientists there want to do,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Animal testing has long been used to trial vaccines and new drugs, much to the disdain of animal rights activists. But since the COVID-19 pandemic \u2014 which came from a bat in a wet market before spreading across the globe, killing over 7 million people \u2014 there has been increasing concerns about how animal testing could promote the spread of new zoonotic diseases.<\/p>\n

\u201cPrimates and bats are the two types of wild animals that are most likely to transfer yet unknown diseases to humans. And so the more we interact with them, the more risk that\u2019s present,\u201d Marciniec said. <\/p>\n

And that risk is increased even more when wild monkeys are brought into the mix.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are supposed to breed them in captivity,\u201d Marciniec said. \u201cBut because demand is so high and because capitalism is what it is and people are so poor, they are poaching them from the wild and then laundering those wild-caught ones in with the captive-bred ones.\u201d<\/p>\n

This has introduced illnesses into the group of monkeys, leading to cases where entire groups are euthanized before research even begins.<\/p>\n

But scientists say there are alternatives to primate testing. <\/p>\n

Organs-on-chips, 3D bioprinted tissues, organoids, advances in silico modelling, stem cell-derived models, multiomics, and systems biology approaches all negate the need for live animal testing.<\/p>\n

The federal government has 45 calendar days from when the petition was introduced to respond.<\/p>\n

CityNews has reached out to Health Canada, Environment and Climate Change Canada, and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The vaccines for COVID-19, malaria, polio and other global diseases have saved many human lives, but the creation…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":245111,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[49,48,66,323],"class_list":["post-245110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245110\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/245111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}