Monkey Bars

The kids & I took a tour of the Oregon Primate Research Center this afternoon. It's always been here, it occasionally makes the news, I know a couple people who work there. I even know where it is, but I had never been.

PETA made a big stink about it a while back, and couple of the monkeys got loose last year and terrorized a terrier.

They had a couple of guards manning the gate when we arrived at the back end of line of cars, all presumably here for the tour as well. I don't know if you need to know someone to get a tour, but they want your names beforehand and they check ID's at the gate.

The tour wasn't what I expecting. I expected more touring and less lecturing. What we got was an hour and a half lecture in the auditorium, a stroll down the cell blocks and then a few minutes watching the inmates in the exercise yard. If I make it sound like a prison that's because it is exactly what it felt like: a Federally funded prison for monkeys. Cages are clean and well ventilated. The animals appear to be generally healthy and well fed. But they are locked up tight and they are not getting out. I saw several of the Japanese snow monkeys in the corral ("exercise yard") sitting on the ground facing the fence with their backs to the yard. I suspect they were looking out through small holes in the corrugated iron sheets that made up the fence.

I think their fight with PETA has made them sensitive to publicity, so they spent a lot of time explaining how well the animals were cared for, the hoops the researchers must jump through in order to get approval to perform any kind of experiment on an actual animal, including whether it is necessary, whether there are any possible alternatives and whether the research merits this action.

The animals are kept wild. I suspect that is for the researchers benefit more than the monkeys. You don't want people getting emotionally attached to someone they are going to subjecting to some kind of medical-research-related-unpleasantness.

They are working more closely with zoos these days on techniques to keep the animals happier, or as they put it, less stressed. Less stress means less problems all around.

In the lobby of the main building there were some posters on the wall. One was a copy of a magazine cover with the word CYTOMEGALOVIRUS printed across the top. Good grief! What a word! These people are dealing with some really complicated stuff here. The monkeys are just one tool they use to try and figure out how diseases work and how we might be able to combat them.

They have over 4,000 monkeys here. Monkeys only, no chimpanzees or higher primates. The cages we saw held maybe a thousand. Corral held one or two hundred. There were twelve cell blocks, each with 6 interconnected cages. Figure a dozen monkeys per cage works out to about 850. Only saw the 2 cages that were facing the visitors path. No telling how many monkeys were in the four cages that we couldn't see. There could have been a hundred in there having a big monkey party, or they could have been empty.