110 Chimpanzees Retired

September 2012

A group of 110 federally “owned” chimpanzees, currently locked in a laboratory, were finally given a reprieve when the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that it would be permanently retiring them from experiments. Last year, after a National Academy of Sciences committee listened to testimony from PETA and others and concluded that “most current biomedical research use of chimpanzees is not necessary,” the NIH announced that it was suspending funding for any new experiments on chimpanzees and that it would be reevaluating currently funded experiments on chimpanzees.