Animal Earth Human

from http://primateresearch.blogspot.com

Novel restraint system for neuroendocrine studies of socially living common marmoset monkeys Lab Anim. 2004. [Note: if this link fails (is ever disabled) please let me know.]

N. J. Schultz-Darken1, R. M. Pape1, P. L. Tannenbaum2, W. Saltzman3 & D. H. Abbott1,4
1 National Primate Research Center and 4 Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53715, 2 Johnson & Johnson, Pharmaceutical Research and Development, 1000 Rt. 202, Raritan, NJ 08869 and 3 Department of Biology, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521, USA

Summary [emphasis mine]
We describe a novel soft jacket and sling-harness restraint that permits species-typical postures for small-bodied primates, such as the common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus),during long-term (>6 h), continuous restraint. The restraint system is straightforward to use and manipulate, it is easily repaired, and the materials used are readily available. The soft jacket allows for increased versatility and longevity, and the sling-harness provides for greater movement and much longer duration of continuous restraint (up to 3 days) compared to a previously described, more conventional chair restraint for small-bodied primates. The new restraint system prevents the normal diurnal decrease in plasma cortisol levels across the daylight hours; however, it does not disrupt ovulatory cycles. Unlike the previously available techniques, therefore, this new restraint system is applicable to many neurobiological and neuroendocrine studies involving small-bodied, non-human primates and is especially suited to investigations requiring the maintenance of relationships within social groups.

…. This system permitted such complex techniques as hypothalamic push–pull perfusion with simultaneous sampling from an intravenous cannula. Our findings demonstrated that marmosets quickly adapted to 3 days of continuous restraint in this novel system,

This is an example of the reality of the primate labs.

Earlier this year, veterinarian Eric Sandgren, Director of UW-Madison’s Research Animal Resource Center, and chair of two campus animal research oversight committees asserted that push-pull perfusions were no longer being conducted on monkeys at the UW. This came in response to a query regarding one of the committees’ minutes concering ongoing highly invasive brain experiments being conducted by Ei Terasawa on conscious rhesus monkeys. Terasawa’s animal use was previously suspended for two years following the embarrassing discovery by the USDA of monkeys dying during the procedures and indecipherable (even to Terasawa) research notes. The experiments had been going on for seventeen years at the time of the government’s discovery. This is yet another clear example that the oversight system at the UW (and at the other animal labs around the country) is completely broken.

Dr. Sangren replied that no push-pull experiments on primates were occurring on campus, and that this wasn’t just a semantics game, he promised — nothing like them was occurring on campus, he said.

But the study below suggests otherwise. These monkeys were probably restrained in the device described above.

J Neuroendocrinol. 2007 May;19 (5):342-53 17425609 (P,S,E,B,D) Gonadotrophin-releasing hormone (GnRH) release in marmosets I: in vivo measurement in ovary-intact and ovariectomised females.

P L Tannenbaum, N J Schultz-Darken, W Saltzman, E Terasawa, M J Woller, D H Abbott
Wisconsin National Primate Research Center and Endocrinology-Reproductive Physiology Program, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA.

In vivo hypothalamic gonadotrophin-releasing hormone (GnRH) release was characterised for the first time in a New World primate. A nonterminal and repeatable push-pull perfusion (PPP) technique reliably measured GnRH in conscious common marmoset monkeys. Nineteen adult females (n = 8 ovary-intact in the mid-follicular phase; n = 11 ovariectomised) were fitted with long-term cranial pedestals, and a push-pull cannula was temporarily placed in unique locations within the pituitary stalk-median eminence (S-ME) 2 days prior to each PPP session. Marmosets underwent 1-3 PPPs (32 PPPs in total) lasting up to 12 h. Plasma cortisol levels were not elevated in these habituated marmosets during PPP, and PPP did not disrupt ovulatory cyclicity or subsequent fertility in ovary-intact females. GnRH displayed an organised pattern of release, with pulses occurring every 50.0 +/- 2.6 min and lasting 25.4 +/- 1.3 min. GnRH pulse frequency was consistent within individual marmosets across multiple PPPs. GnRH mean concentration, baseline concentration and pulse amplitude varied predictably with anatomical location of the cannula tip within the S-ME. GnRH release increased characteristically in response to a norepinephrine infusion and decreased abruptly during the evening transition to lights off. Ovary-intact (mid-follicular phase) and ovariectomised marmosets did not differ significantly on any parameter of GnRH release. Overall, these results indicate that PPP can be used to reliably assess in vivo GnRH release in marmosets and will be a useful tool for future studies of reproductive neuroendocrinology in this small primate.

How macabre and stressful it must be to be a member of one of the marmoset groups that include monkey(s?) beng restrained as in the image above. This is a good example of the reasons that people continue to fight to outlaw vivisection. This is a good example of just the sort of procedure that the universities won’t discuss in public. It’s experiments like these that fuel the fire in people’s bellies.

by Michael Markarian, Humane Society Legislative Fund

California’s big factory farming interests are getting desperate. You can tell because their claims smell more like manure each day. The latest is their cynical assertion that cramming animals into cages where they can’t even turn around, lie down, and stretch their limbs is good for farm workers.

Really? Since when has Big Agribusiness cared about labor? From Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle to Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, anyone who bothered to look has found the truth. Agricultural workers are among the most abused and exploited in this country.

In this coming election, for agribusiness to claim some cozy convergence of interests with farm workers in the raising of animals for food does more than defy credulity. It mocks the very people who are trapped in dead-end jobs and made to suffer, their health put at risk, just like the animals they work around—and why? For the sake of plundering an extra penny profit out of an egg. Yes, that’s the real price of this misery. And workers shouldn’t be paying it, or animals either.

It’s a familiar story of suffering, not just in California but nationwide, and we know it well.

The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union is campaigning on behalf of 5,500 Smithfield workers in Tar Heel, N.C., who reportedly face poverty wages, brutal conditions, and crippling injuries at the world’s largest hog slaughter plant. Human Rights Watch cited the company for violating international human rights standards by creating an environment of intimidation, racial tension, and sometimes violence for workers who want a voice on the job.

A recent editorial in The New York Times described reports of “dirty, dangerous conditions” at a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, as “told by workers, union organizers, immigrant advocates and government investigators.” According to the Times, “A woman with a deformed hand tells a reporter of cutting meat for 12 hours a day, six days a week, for wages that labor experts call the lowest in the industry.”

No wonder Foster Farms funneled a quarter million dollars into the campaign against Prop 2. This company was the site of a worker being crushed to death in a grisly silo accident in 2006. A federal court had to force the owners to accept a union at its Livingston, Calif., poultry plant, after the court found it violated labor laws and unfairly punished and demoted union organizers.

And the egg industry has one of the most sordid histories. An employee was fatally electrocuted at Hillandale Farms of Fla., a subsidiary of Cal-Maine Foods, and the company was assessed fines and penalties of hundreds of thousands of dollars. A federal court ordered Kofkoff Egg Farm in Conn., a subsidiary of Moark—the top contributor to the campaign against Prop 2—to pay 34 employees $80,000 in back wages after an investigation found the company violating labor standards.

Here’s the truth about labor and farm animals. By crowding animals into tiny cages or stacking them in epic rows on top of each other, agribusiness doesn’t need the kind of skilled and semi-skilled hands who know a thing or two about husbandry. There’s no career ladder for workers on one of these operations. They’re the very bottom of the heap, just like the suffering animals. Prop 2 would phase out these confinement systems that have helped to transform factory farms into automated chambers of horror.

A single factory farm owned by Gemperle Enterprises in Turlock, Calif., confines one million chickens. The owners brag that only four people have keys to the facility, and fewer than a half dozen people are even allowed inside. A half dozen people for a million birds.

The paltry few jobs that remain expose workers to infectious diseases and concentrated chemicals. Factory farms generate toxic dust and gas plumes that cause respiratory irritation among workers. These are matters of everyday common sense, even to urban dwellers. But as usual, the health of farm workers is of little consideration to the political laggards of agribusiness—or to those who do their bidding.

In truth, industrial-sized farms cut corners every step of the way and drive traditional family farmers out of business. Yes, the big-city PR hirelings for the anti-Prop 2 campaign would like voters to imagine those serene, gentle farm vistas where happy animals are cared for by wise stewards. Sorry. It ain’t so, and Californians by the millions know it.

Prop 2 won’t bring back those days, but it’s one modest step toward instilling some basic responsibility into the business of raising of animals.

The legendary farm labor organizer Cesar Chavez said, “We need, in a special way, to work twice as hard to help people understand that the animals are fellow creatures, that we must protect them and love them as we love ourselves.” He taught us that “kindness and compassion toward all living things is a mark of a civilized society…Only when we have become nonviolent toward all life will we have learned to live well ourselves.”

That’s the voice of the real labor movement. That’s the voice of Prop 2. That’s the voice of Californians who want safe food, humanely raised by workers who care.

Factory farmers are unable to defend the cruelty they inflict for hardly any real gain. They cannot engage in honest discussion of Prop 2. So, they dodge and feint and ladle out the manure in hopes that Californians can be fooled. Sorry. Won’t happen. Voting YES! on Prop 2 is right for animals. It’s right for the men and women who work with them on the farm. It’s right for all Californians.

By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Saturday, 2 August 2008

The Independent

REUTERS

Chimpanzees subjected to medical experiments suffer similar psychiatric symptoms to those shown by tortured humans, according to a study to be released next week.

An assessment of the behaviour of 116 chimpanzees who have been involved in animal research found that 95 per cent display at least one of the distinctive patterns of behaviour that people show when suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

The chimps now live in a primate sanctuary in the United States but their unusual behaviour is still causing concern years after they were released from the animal-research laboratories in which they were experimented upon.

The findings, which will be made public at an international primate conference in Edinburgh on Monday, will be used to press for a Europe-wide ban on the use of great apes in medical research. Although experiments on chimps were banned in Britain in 1998, they are still legal in the rest of Europe even though the two research facilities where chimps had been kept have recently closed. However, in the US there is no such ban and about 1,200 chimps are still kept for medical research. Hope Ferdowsian, an American doctor who has treated torture patients from around the world, said that it is clear that chimps suffer many of the extreme psychological conditions shown by human torture victims.

“There are obvious differences between species but it’s obvious that these chimps are suffering chronically,” Dr Ferdowsian said.

The study involved asking the staff at the animal sanctuary in Louisiana to itemise the types of behaviour patterns shown by the chimps. The scientists then assessed the reports against criteria used to assess human patients.

Dr Ferdowsian said that as well as the signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, more than 80 per cent of the chimps had the symptoms of anxiety and at least half showed the sort of behaviour associated with depression. “The patterns of behaviour we are seeing in these chimps are not normal and not seen in the wild,” Dr Ferdowsian said.

The types of behaviour shown by the chimps included “floating limb” displays said to be an expression of disassociating their body with the real world, which is much like the disassociation behaviour seen in people with post-traumatic stress disorder. Other behaviours were avoidance of certain areas of habitat, such as indoor enclosures, anger outbursts, failure to socialise and inability to sleep.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/chimpanzees-used-for-

medical-testing-show-signs-of-torture-883257.html