For research chimpanzees, a retirement home: aging chimps are getting a taxpayer-funded sanctuary. Some scientists worry it s a step toward getting apes out of labs for good.

• Author: Stolberg, Sheryl Gay
• Position: Science times

The chimpanzees at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center were acting up. Jessie, a pink-faced 20-year-old, slapped her belly and hooted wildly from behind a steel gate. Dover, a mischievous 4-year-old, spied a visitor and served up his standard greeting for strangers, a fistful of feces, pitched with remarkable accuracy.

Jessie and Dover do not really have to be at this Yerkes field station in Lawrenceville, Georgia, but they have no place else to go. Bred for biomedical research, they are now unemployed, a result of a vast surplus of laboratory chimpanzees. They pass their days in small steel-and-concrete enclosures, playing with burlap bags and shredding old telephone books for fun.

But better times may be ahead for these great apes and hundreds of their captive kin. Acting on a mandate from Congress, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced last year that it would spend $24 million to help build and operate a chimpanzee sanctuary--in essence, a taxpayer-supported retirement home for research chimps.

"It's a good moment for chimps, a very good moment," says Frans de Waal, a Yerkes primatologist and board member of Chimp Haven, the organization that will mn the sanctuary. "If we are not going to use them for biomedical studies, let's move them to a situation that is attractive to the chimps for retirement."

TOO MANY CHIMPS

Of the 1,600 laboratory chimps in the United States, more than 400 are not involved in experiments, NIH officials estimate. Chimp Haven, to open next year, will occupy 200 acres of donated land near Shreveport, Louisiana. Up to 300 chimps may eventually live there. Others may retire to a private sanctuary in Florida.

Some scientists, however, including Yerkes director Stuart Zola, fear that the federal government is setting a bad precedent by giving its stamp of approval to the retirement concept.

"I see the retirement community idea as simply another ploy by the animal-rights community to reach their eventual goal of abolishing the use of animals in research," Zola says.

TEMPORARY RETIREMENT?

Advocates for animal rights are also angry because the bill that authorized the sanctuary included a provision permitting the animals to be returned to labs in a public-health emergency.

"They cannot call a place a sanctuary if what it really is is a holding pen for when they need the chimps the next time," says Holly Hazard, executive director of the Doris Day Animal League, a lobbying group.

The chimp surplus is an...