Its a huge business:

The supply chain is a horror show. Researchers don’t always know what they’re getting. And the demand is relentless.
By Jonathan Franklin

Inside Cambodia’s forests and national parks, poachers are regularly spotted sneaking through the underbrush with fresh coconut meat to lure monkeys, nets to capture them and weapons to kill any monkey deemed a threat. The poachers approach on foot as they stalk the long-tailed macaque, which is particularly valuable on the black market. A convenient time to capture macaques is at dusk, when troops of 20 to 60 congregate in what’s known as their sleeping tree. Poachers use chainsaws to fell adjacent trees, quickly isolating the monkeys, then encircle the trunk of the sleeping tree with a net half the size of a basketball court. Then the poachers start felling the sleeping tree, sending the monkeys into a frenzy.

...............
The smuggling of wild monkeys from Cambodia into the US was little known to the general public until November 2022, when the US Department of Justice unsealed an indictment. The case alleges that the poaching from Cambodian parks is just the first stage of a sophisticated criminal scheme in which macaques are collected from the wild and transported to a processing facility in Pursat, Cambodia. The Pursat facility is owned by Vanny Group, a Hong Kong company with multiple monkey farms in Cambodia under the Vanny brand
..........
In 2019, Cambodia exported 14,931 monkeys, according to the United Nations Comtrade database. Three years later, the number had shot up to 38,000, and the value of the Cambodian monkey export business had soared from an estimated $34 million to $253 million.

full story
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024 ... r-business

Article is behind a firewall. Can you copy paste?

SiemReapLOL wrote: ↑Fri Mar 08, 2024 12:04 pm Article is behind a firewall. Can you copy paste?

long read but worth it

I use to bypass paywalls an works all the time
https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome



Inside Cambodia’s forests and national parks, poachers are regularly spotted sneaking through the underbrush with fresh coconut meat to lure monkeys, nets to capture them and weapons to kill any monkey deemed a threat. The poachers approach on foot as they stalk the long-tailed macaque, which is particularly valuable on the black market. A convenient time to capture macaques is at dusk, when troops of 20 to 60 congregate in what’s known as their sleeping tree. Poachers use chainsaws to fell adjacent trees, quickly isolating the monkeys, then encircle the trunk of the sleeping tree with a net half the size of a basketball court. Then the poachers start felling the sleeping tree, sending the monkeys into a frenzy.

Dominant males are the first to descend and defend. Often they’re blasted with buckshot. The next round of defenders consists of younger males, which are also shot or maimed with a swift machete swipe. The poachers cut through the trunk, and as the branches and monkeys crash down, the survivors are captured in the net. Breeding-age females and infants are particularly valuable, so the trapping operation focuses on them. Often a mother is trapped with a baby clinging to her belly. Given the brutal realities of the monkey business, they will soon be separated.

Because of their 93% overlap in DNA with humans and their small size, long-tailed macaques are highly prized in drug development. Known in the scientific community as NHPs, or nonhuman primates, these macaques are so widely used that over the past decade approximately 300,000 have been imported into the US in a legal fashion. There’s also a thriving underground market. Poachers across Southeast Asia snatch monkeys from national parks, city parks and religious temples, where the macaques gather to be fed by tourists. So many long-tailed macaques have been illegally poached over the years that in 2022 the International Union for Conservation of Nature placed the long-tailed macaque on its Red List as an endangered species.

Long-tailed macaques at Cambodia’s Phnom Sampov Mountain. Juveniles and breeding-age females are particularly sought by poachers. Photographer: Anton L. Delgado for Bloomberg Businessweek
The smuggling of wild monkeys from Cambodia into the US was little known to the general public until November 2022, when the US Department of Justice unsealed an indictment. The case alleges that the poaching from Cambodian parks is just the first stage of a sophisticated criminal scheme in which macaques are collected from the wild and transported to a processing facility in Pursat, Cambodia. The Pursat facility is owned by Vanny Group, a Hong Kong company with multiple monkey farms in Cambodia under the Vanny brand.

According to evidence gathered during Operation Long Tail Liberation, an undercover investigation led by the Special Investigative Unit of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Vanny allegedly made payments to ranking officials at the Cambodian Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries in exchange for access to wild monkeys. The ministry officials, according to the court case, then provided transport permits for thousands of wild-caught monkeys as part of a scheme in which breeding farms mixed wild monkeys into the legal supply chain of captive-bred monkeys.


A monkey breeding farm operated by Vanny Group in Pursat province, Cambodia. Video: Anton L. Delgado
In 2019, Cambodia exported 14,931 monkeys, according to the United Nations Comtrade database. Three years later, the number had shot up to 38,000, and the value of the Cambodian monkey export business had soared from an estimated $34 million to $253 million.

One of the ploys was monkey identity theft. Thousands of monkeys were ripped from the forests, separated from their troops, divorced from their complex social structures and stripped of any chance of ever again living in the wild. They were brought to breeding centers, where they were held in reserve. When captive-bred monkeys at those centers were found to have diseases or other conditions making them ineligible for export, they were euthanized. From each dead monkey the individual identification tag was removed and attached to a wild-caught monkey. Instantly, the wild monkey assumed the identity, including the date of birth and vaccination history, of the captive-bred.

A monkey with an identity tag. When a captive-bred monkey dies, its tag, and its history, can be illegally transferred to a wild-caught monkey. Source: Cruelty Free International
The wild monkeys, with their fake identity papers, were then transported to Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, for a flight to the US. The indictment alleges that this was done “to make up for the lack of supply of suitable monkeys at their purported breeding operation.” The animals were crated up, 120 monkeys to a pallet, and packed into the cargo hold of commercial jets. The shipments typically were an odyssey with multiple layovers. Frequent weather and refueling delays led to trips of as long as 56 hours, putting the animals under extreme stress. Some gnawed away their own fingers.

This supply chain converted monkeys into international commodities sold to end users in the US for as much as $54,000 apiece in late 2023. Who can afford that kind of investment? Big Pharma, which uses monkeys by the thousands to develop vaccines and drugs and to conduct Alzheimer’s disease research. Vaccines are particularly monkey-intensive. In the 1940s and ’50s, researchers developing the polio vaccine sacrificed at least 1 million monkeys and possibly as many as 5 million. The monkey business is big business, and when priming the pipeline for potential billion-dollar drugs, pharmaceutical companies can afford the million dollars or more now required for every batch of 40 monkeys.

According to the indictment and supporting documentation filed in the US Federal Court for the Southern District of Florida, seven shipments mixing wild-caught and captive-bred monkeys from Cambodia were illegally imported into the US from December 2017 to September 2022. At least 1,000 and as many as 3,000 wild-caught macaques were smuggled into the country. A shipment that arrived on Nov. 11, 2020, at Dulles International Airport in Washington, for example, held 396 monkeys, all of which carried paperwork purporting to show they were captive-bred. The Fish and Wildlife Service investigation concluded that at least 323 of the monkeys were wild-caught.

From each dead captive-bred monkey the individual identification tag was removed and attached to a wild-caught monkey

Every shipment of monkeys arriving in the US is monitored by a plethora of regulatory agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Fish and Wildlife Service. But the job is plagued by logistical limitations, says Craig Tabor, who worked for 28 years as a special agent for Fish and Wildlife until his retirement in 2022. Immediately after the monkeys are unloaded from the airplane, they are moved to a secure US Customs and Border Protection facility—usually a warehouse space abuzz with careening forklifts and workers packing and unpacking crates. Airport warehouses are always busy, and that creates intense pressures to keep goods flowing. It’s hard to inspect the monkeys when each is packed into a wooden crate the size of a backpack. The crate has a small cloth-covered window for a bit of—but not much—fresh air.

“You look in those windows with a flashlight, and you might see a couple of eyeballs peering back at you,” Tabor says. “Wildlife inspectors are lucky if they can even determine how many monkeys are in each cage. Their ability to actually perform a 100% inspection is next to impossible.”

An adult long-tailed macaque is about the size of a human 3-year-old. Photographer: Anton L. Delgado for Bloomberg Businessweek
These inspections can be hazardous. Wild monkeys are known to carry rabies, leprosy, listeria, salmonella, tetanus and a strain of tuberculosis that can remain dormant for a decade before breaking out. Wildlife inspectors wear masks and gloves and are clothed in full-body anti-contamination suits. “We arrive looking like we are responding to an Ebola outbreak,” Tabor says. “We walk in wearing our moon suits, and everybody’s wondering, ‘What the hell is going on?’ ” An Ebola outbreak in 1989 at Hazelton Research in Reston, Virginia, was traced to the import of long-tailed macaques from the Philippines and became the basis for Richard Preston’s book The Hot Zone and the similarly themed film Outbreak.

Long-tailed macaques are agile and clever. Fully grown, they’re about the size of a 3-year-old human and weigh 30 pounds. They’re known for figuring out how to open a lock and escape a cage. With 2-inch-long canines, they can inflict deep puncture bites. Almost all adult wild macaques—estimates range to 90%—host a strain of a herpes B virus that has killed at least 23 lab employees and 5 monkey workers. In her book The Monkey Wars, journalist Deborah Blum describes how the virus, known as monkey B, is mild in monkeys but severe when contracted by humans, in whom it destroys spinal and brain tissue. In 1997 a lab worker at a primate research center was infected when a drop of monkey urine got in her eye. She died soon after. Monkey B is classified by the Department of Justice as a “potential tactical agent of terrorism.”

While many domestic breeding centers have successfully created colonies free of monkey B, the mixing of wild-caught monkeys from overseas has reignited fears of an outbreak. The 2007 book Human Herpesviruses warns that latent strains of the virus can erupt when macaques are faced with stress, “particularly that associated with the capture and shipment of animals from the wild to captivity.”

Despite the clear and present dangers of jail time, disease and injury anywhere along this brutal black market supply chain, monkey smuggling has boomed over the past four years. Blame it all on the Covid-19 outbreak. When Covid spread from China in late 2019 and early 2020, a worldwide lab race ensued. Which scientific team from which nation would develop the first effective vaccine? Promising vaccine prototypes were concocted and experimental compounds injected into the veins of macaque lab monkeys.

As the outbreak created a surging demand for lab monkeys, the Chinese government, which supplied an estimated 70% of the worldwide market, announced an immediate ban on monkey exports. No definitive reason for the ban was given, leading to speculation. Was China keeping the animals for its own vaccine testing? Had lab monkeys become a geopolitical strategic resource like computer chips or rare-earth minerals? Were monkeys becoming a symbolic bargaining chip in the trade war brewing between the US and China?

Whatever the reasons, the ban immediately created a crisis for a long list of US-based clients. In the first half of 2020, macaque prices in the US jumped fivefold, to $15,000 per monkey, says Greg Westergaard, president and chief executive officer of Alpha Genesis Inc. in South Carolina, one of the largest monkey breeders in the US, with an estimated 12,000 monkeys at its facilities. Westergaard, who’s been in the business since the early 1980s, says he’d never seen such a shortage.

In mid-2020 the Chinese government, while maintaining its export ban, began rebuilding internal stocks with monkey imports, thus unleashing a ferocious battle between China and the US to locate new populations to feed the demand in both countries. Across Southeast Asia, the price paid to a poacher for a wild monkey jumped from roughly $75 in late 2019 to $175.

Vanny, the Hong Kong-based monkey breeder and reseller, approached US clients and offered long-tailed macaques—this time from Cambodia. “I contacted them [Vanny] when the pandemic hit, because I knew they were going to be a source,” Westergaard says. “But they said to get monkeys I had to go through their exclusive distributor, who was based down in Florida. I was, like, that doesn’t sound right to me.”

A monkey in the canopy. Photographer: Anton L. Delgado for Bloomberg Businessweek
The distributor in question was Worldwide Primates Inc. of Miami. The company’s founder, Matthew Block, was infamous for a conviction in the early 1990s related to the smuggling of six baby orangutans packed in crates labeled “birds” and destined for Moscow. Three died, apparently from dehydration. A veterinarian performing a postmortem suggested that the animals had been drugged. Block was sentenced to 13 months in federal prison.

Block gained further notoriety in 2018 when he was convicted of trying to frame animal-rights activists by mailing white powder with a threatening note in an envelope addressed to his mother. (The FBI found his DNA where he’d licked the envelope to seal it.) He was fined $14,000 and placed on five years’ probation.

Westergaard’s reluctance to buy Cambodian monkeys from Worldwide Primates centered on the convoluted supply chain. “Why do we have to go through an exclusive distributor just to buy some monkeys?” he asked himself. “So I skipped it. I didn’t do it. I didn’t import any from Cambodia.” He had dodged a bullet. US law enforcement agencies were already deep into Operation Long Tail Liberation.

A decade before the Covid pandemic, Ed Newcomer, a Fish and Wildlife Service special agent, was sent to work in Bangkok. Within weeks of his arrival, in 2010, he began to hear accounts of monkey smuggling. “Everybody suspected they were laundering wild-caught monkeys through these Cambodian farms,” he says.

He returned to the US the next year, and in the spring went undercover at a toxicology expo in Washington, DC, posing as a corporate lawyer looking to invest a client’s millions in setting up a monkey breeding farm in Cambodia. Newcomer, with his fake identity arranged and dressed in his only tailored suit (“the one I use to testify in court”), tried to enter the conference. To ensure that he was not an animal-rights activist in disguise, conference security required Newcomer to show multiple IDs and made calls to his office phone number. “I have never been identity-vetted so hard in any undercover investigation I have ever done,” he says. “That includes some deep undercover in South Central Los Angeles, where they certainly would have hurt me had they known my real ID.”

“How will I know if a monkey is wild-caught or captive-bred?”
“The bullets,” replied the monkey broker

Once inside the conference, Newcomer ingratiated himself with monkey brokers and recorded his conversations with a hidden microphone. He was amazed at the brazen admission of illegal activities. Wild monkeys are often mixed in with the captive-bred, he was told.

Playing naive, he asked one industry insider, “How will I know if a monkey is wild-caught or captive-bred?”

“The bullets,” replied the monkey broker.

“Bullets?”

“Yeah, if they come in with healed-over bullet wounds, or you find bullets in them, or if they are missing fingers, that is all indicative of a wild animal.”

“Then what do I do?” Newcomer asked.

The answer stunned him. “He was nonchalant and lackadaisical,” Newcomer says. “He told me, ‘It’s the cost of doing business.’”

Huddling with his boss, Tabor, Newcomer wondered whether he had in a single day gathered enough evidence to file charges against the monkey brokers. Tabor was encouraged but suspected it wasn’t enough. “It is extremely frustrating. As an investigator, I knew what was happening,” Tabor says. “I just needed to be able to come up with the evidence to prove it.”

Over the ensuing years, agents from Fish and Wildlife initiated multiple undercover operations to investigate monkey smuggling from Cambodia, and on Nov. 16, 2022, they made their first high-profile arrest. Cambodia’s deputy director of wildlife and diversity, Masphal Kry, was on a flight headed to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora conference in Panama. He was arrested during a stopover at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Kry was hit with federal criminal charges including violation of the Endangered Species Act and the Lacey Act, the oldest wildlife protection law in the US. The Justice Department indictment included an arrest warrant for six executives from Vanny, who were alleged to have made payments of at least $2.5 million to “black market collectors.” Later court documents allege the money was used to acquire thousands of wild-caught monkeys. All six executives remain at large. Vanny, which wasn’t charged as a company, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Intense efforts by the Cambodian government to allow Kry to live in the Cambodian Embassy in Washington during the criminal proceedings were fruitless: He’s under house arrest with GPS monitoring, awaiting a trial scheduled for March. His defense team includes at least six attorneys from the self-described “elite global law firm” Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, including Stacey Mitchell, the former head of the Environmental Crime Section at the Justice Department. Kry’s lawyers have decried the case as “a full-on assault on a foreign ministry” and called it an “affront to Cambodian sovereignty.”

In February 2023, in the aftermath of the indictments, several US monkey importers, including the publicly traded companies Inotiv Inc. and Charles River Laboratories Inc., announced that they’d been served with subpoenas and were temporarily suspending imports from Cambodia. As details of the investigation became public, their stocks sank, with Charles River falling 12.4% in a day and Inotiv plummeting 65% in a week. (Charles Rivers’ stock has recovered; Inotiv’s is still substantially down.) Inotiv didn’t respond to requests for comment. In a statement, Charles River said it “is cooperating with the DOJ investigation related to NHP shipments it received from Cambodia and believes that any concerns about its conduct will be found to be without merit.” Charles River also acknowledged that Fish and Wildlife had refused to clear some shipments of Cambodian macaques received from March 2022 to February 2023 and said that it “continues to care for the Cambodia-sourced nonhuman primates from these shipments, while they are held in the United States.”

Two days after the subpoena to Charles River, former company executive David Johst was named on paperwork filed to start a $300 million breeding facility in Bainbridge, Georgia, meant to house 30,000 monkeys. Johst, a three-decade veteran of Charles River, saw an opportunity to provide a steady supply of monkeys to US government researchers and private-sector biotech firms. He and his partners named their startup Safer Human Medicine and lobbied Decatur County officials to donate 200 acres of land and exempt the facility from property tax payments for 10 years. “We are excited about bringing good paying jobs,” Johst, the company president, wrote in a letter to locals, stressing that “the welfare of our animals will always come first” and that these were little monkeys and “not gorillas.” He tried to sweeten the pot by suggesting that the monkeys would be a boon for local farmers. “We will supplement their diet with fresh local produce,” Johst wrote.

The report implied that monkeys are a strategic national resource and that the US faced something akin to a strategic monkey gap

This farm-to-pharma pitch did little to stem the community backlash once the background of the Safer Human Medicine executive team became public. Jim Harkness, the CEO, had been chief operating officer of the animal broker Envigo when it was involved in a series of notorious animal welfare violations. In October 2022, the Envigo dog testing facility in Cumberland County, Virginia, was shuttered after widespread abuse was documented. Puppies had died by the hundreds. Dogs had been euthanized with injections to the heart, without the use of a proper anesthetic. Many of the animals that survived had rotting teeth. The authorities removed 3,776 beagles from the facility and placed them in adoption homes.

A protest sign in the yard of a home near a proposed monkey breeding facility in Georgia. Photographer: Alicia Devine/USA Today Network
“For years, these individuals have been in leadership positions at companies that have repeatedly been charged with violating even the most basic federal animal welfare regulations,” says Lisa Jones-Engel, a primatologist and an adviser for animal welfare group PETA, who spoke at several of the contentious public hearings about the proposed facility in Georgia. The fate of the project is still pending. Safer Human Medicine did not respond to requests for comment.

Controversy has also plagued a proposed monkey breeding facility planned for Brazoria County, a rural area near Houston. The facility was started by Kandhurt LLC, a holding company set up by Charles River Laboratories. Kandhurt purchased 538 acres of land in the county, and months later told community leaders it was planning to house as many as 43,000 monkeys. When the news leaked, neighbors weren’t pleased, even when the company rapidly downgraded the plans to 8,600 monkeys. County commissioners unanimously voted against the plan, citing risks of floods to the area and opposition by locals.

A 2023 study by the National Academy of Sciences warned that if the US monkey shortage continues, “biomedical research, like the microchip industry, will continue to relocate overseas, thus ceding scientific leadership to China.” The 268-page report highlighted the China Brain Project, a $746 million “targeted investment” by the government that will require massive numbers of research monkeys. “Failure to reduce reliance on foreign sources for these critical research resources exposes US biomedical research programs to preventable supply chain vulnerabilities and impedes the nation’s ability to prepare for future public health threats,” the report says. It implied that monkeys are a strategic national resource and that the US faced something akin to a strategic monkey gap.

Proposals for alternative methods to replace live monkeys in scientific research are plentiful. The use of artificial intelligence to collate and analyze thousands of past clinical results has the potential to reduce the number of monkeys needed by providing clear patterns and lowering the number of repeat experiments. Lab results are also being harvested from what are known as “organs on a chip” or “organoids,” in which cells from different human organs are placed on a single slide and then studied as a substitute for using live monkeys. The FDA Modernization Act 2.0 of 2022 both authorizes and incentivizes less dependence on live animal testing.

“All I can tell you is that if I had a thousand more monkeys here to sell, they would be sold in an hour”

But old habits die slowly. Researchers and pharmaceutical companies are loath to ditch their reliance on nonhuman primates. Despite extensive investigation into substitutes for monkeys, the National Academy of Sciences report was adamant that “there are no alternative approaches that can replace nonhuman primate (NHP) models to answer research questions.” The academy recommended that “to ensure that NHP resources are available to respond to public health threats, the United States needs to prioritize expansion of domestic NHP breeding programs.”

Almost all scientists and investigators who work with long-tailed macaques in the US are feeling the squeeze. Some researchers are looking at importing marmosets, smaller monkeys native to Brazil that have multiple offspring and reach sexual maturity more quickly. Because pharmaceutical and biotech companies have millions to invest, they’re currently obtaining most of the available monkeys. “If you are trying to get monkeys for basic research, you are not getting any,” Westergaard says.

From his office in Yemassee, South Carolina, Westergaard can gaze across the expansive grounds of his company, Alpha Genesis, and keep an eye on the roughly 7,000 monkeys he owns, feeds and cares for at the site. Westergaard began his career studying ways to enrich the life of captive monkeys, and 40 years later he still spends hours calculating the ideal monkey biscuit; his latest recipe includes extra protein for the lactating mother monkeys and extra fiber for the geriatric monkeys. A staff of three works out of a crowded shed building toys for the monkeys in what looks like a repair shop for a day-care center. Westergaard jokes that his job is akin to “being the mayor of a small town.”

A worker hoses down a cage at the Alpha Genesis facility in South Carolina
The Alpha Genesis facility in South Carolina holds 7,000 monkeys. Photographer: Alan Hawes/The Post and Courier
A macaque rhesus at the Alpha Genesis facility in South Carolina
A macaque rhesus, another choice for researchers, at Alpha Genesis. Photographer: Alan Hawes/The Post and Courier
Walking outside each cage, in which groups of 20 to 50 macaques scramble up and down the chain-link fences, scale poles or swing on colorful plastic climbing structures, Westergaard tosses handfuls of Froot Loops and mini marshmallows to the animals as he describes all the reasons he doesn’t want to import monkeys from Cambodia—or anywhere. “Importing monkeys is always a problem. You have to send over all the money upfront, and the monkeys could have diseases, they could be stopped in transit,” he says. “This is a real big cash expenditure, and you are not totally sure if you will actually get the monkeys. Maybe you get the monkeys, maybe you don’t. And then what? What am I going to do? Sue Chairman Mao?”

Westergaard is convinced that only a large investment from the US government can resolve primate shortages. By early 2024, monkeys on the open market were selling for $35,000 to $50,000 apiece. “That is a lot for a monkey that was $3,000 four or five years ago,” he says. Nonetheless, sales are brisk. “All I can tell you is that if I had a thousand more monkeys here to sell, they would be sold in an hour.”

Long-tailed macaques are now considered endangered. Photographer: Anton L. Delgado for Bloomberg Businessweek
Charles River appears to be hedging its bets by developing multiple supply chain options. If a client needs monkeys, the company can draw from its own facilities in Texas or buy the monkeys on the open market and resell them. CEO James Foster told investors on a 2023 conference call that the company expected to pass the surge in monkey prices on to end users. “The good news is we have a very big infrastructure and enormous amounts of expertise with NHP around the world,” he said on the call. “And we’ll be able to slide in different providers of NHP. Let’s say in the US market, if you don’t bring them in from Cambodia. And if we do bring them in from Cambodia, then we will use multiple sources. So I don’t believe it’s going to have any impact on our margin. … We are getting healthy prices everywhere.”

Soaring prices have also spurred innovation. Rather than euthanizing monkeys for tissue samples, researchers are repeatedly anesthetizing the animals to remove portions of their liver, cells from inside the stomach or slices from an ovary. These successive procedures were described by one monkey farm worker as monkey “recycling.”

But there’s a limit to how often surgeons can operate on the same monkey; incremental resistance to each additional injection of the ketamine used for anesthesia means that eventually the monkey is no longer suitable for selective tissue withdrawals. These monkeys can then be subjected to “bio-harvesting,” which can include the removal and collection of multiple tissue samples. These samples are placed on dry ice and shipped to pharmaceutical laboratories. The monkey doesn’t survive this.

Samples from monkey organs are just part of the booming array of monkey products sold online. For $2,500, HumanCells Biosciences, a company in Milpitas, California, offers 1.5 milliliters of “fresh” macaque “whole bone marrow.” Zyagen, in San Diego, sells 10 slides of “frozen monkey skin” for $307 and 10 slides of “freshly harvested” sections from a monkey heart for $208.

The growing scrutiny of the live monkey trade has also prompted monkey brokers to consider these monkey tissue shipments. A crate of monkeys is easy to track, but a box of monkey organs or tissue samples kept on dry ice is far harder to monitor. In the first six months of 2023, tens of thousands of Cambodian-sourced monkey samples entered the US from Canada, raising the possibility that illegally sourced monkeys are being shipped first to that country, then sliced and diced so they can cross the border. “If we know that the whole monkey is likely falsely labeled, why wouldn’t the bits and pieces of the monkey be falsely labeled?” says Jones-Engel, the primatologist. “How are Fish and Wildlife going to be able to tell what is in that vial? Who is going to know?”

The monkey specimen business is murky. If a shipment contains macaque brain cells, did they come from a legal captive-bred monkey? Were the brain cells harvested from a wild Cambodian macaque smuggled into the US? Investigators piecing together the puzzle that is the lucrative monkey laundering business now face a new challenge: Where are all the pieces coming from?

Fascinating article, thank you for posting

At least the monkeys fight back with their disease spreading magic. Monkey B - stay away from that.

พิซออนเดอรูฟ ®

Alex wrote: ↑Sat Mar 09, 2024 10:25 am Let's be realistic here. If their meat tasted more to most people's liking, they'd be bred and traded in the millions, not mere thousands. Luckily for them, selling them for research is quite a niche market.

You sound like a man who would enjoy the taste of some Soylent green