HSUS Efforts to Ban Chimp Research Could Doom Primates

Last month, Humane Society of the United States’ $4 Million Man Wayne Pacelle wrote a blog post proclaiming, “At Long Last, Testing on Chimps to End in the United States – and the World.” Wayne went on to praise the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for granting an HSUS legal petition to protect captive chimpanzees under the Endangered Species Act. However, HSUS’s effort could end up dooming chimpanzees and other primates to extinction.

“Disease has become a third drive of the unfolding African ape apocalypse,” Peter D. Walsh, a primate ecology lecturer at Cambridge University, wrote in The New York Times. “Most notably, the Ebola virus has in recent decades killed perhaps one third of the world’s gorilla population and an untold number of chimpanzees.”

Now thanks to animal liberation extremist groups such as HSUS, “Efforts to develop and deploy vaccines against Ebola and other infectious diseases ravaging these animals could grind to a halt,” according to Walsh. It will also likely complicate the development of a vaccine for humans against the Ebola virus, which killed more than 9,300 people in Western Africa last year.

It’s already known that subjecting human beings to a painful death isn’t an issue for some in the animal liberation movement. Ingrid Newkirk, president of HSUS’s philosophical counterpart PETA, infamously said, “Even if animal research resulted in a cure for AIDS, we’d be against it.” Apparently, Wayne feels the same way about Ebola.