Creating and Celebrating Primate Obesity and Diabetes

by Stephanie Ernst

category: Animal Testing and Vivisection

Published October 05, 2009 @ 07:14AM PT

One of the most frustrating aspects of animal research is hearing about research that will do nothing more than tell us what we already know or that involves absurd amounts of both cruelty and money in an effort to cure something with drugs that we already know how to prevent and cure with lifestyle changes.

Such is the case with the notorious Charles River Laboratories' latest "product offering" for animal researchers -- monkeys made intentionally overweight and diabetic:

Charles River Labs plans to sell its fattened-up monkeys to pharmaceutical companies, academic research centers and biotechnology firms that will examine “the metabolic changes associated with the onset and development of diabetes” and other obesity-related diseases, the company has said.

To prepare the monkeys, Charles River Labs fed them a high-fat diet for 18 months.

In that time period, many of the monkeys developed glucose intolerance and a foundation for what scientists say will become type 2, or adult-onset, diabetes.

Last week, Charles River Labs began marketing the fattened-up monkeys for the first time.

This is big business. An animal lab down in San Antonio, Texas, is quite pleased with its success making baboons obese and diabetic by feeding them a diet equivalent to fast-food value meals (because, after all, we didn't already know that this sort of diet is disastrous for our health, right?):

After more than 50 years of studying the ways a fatty diet contributes to heart disease in San Antonio baboons, it might seem there wouldn't be much left to learn. Then Anthony Comuzzie started feeding them soda pop.

Comuzzie, a nationally prominent obesity researcher and geneticist at Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research, recently induced metabolic syndrome — risk factors associated with the human epidemic of diabetes and heart disease — by making the baboons' high-fat diet tastier and adding a sweet drink flavored with high-fructose corn syrup. The baboons tended to guzzle several liters of the stuff with their meals.

“Without giving away the name so we don't get sued, we modeled the diet after a fast-food value meal,” Comuzzie said Thursday at a 10th birthday celebration for the Southwest National Primate Research Center, which maintains the foundation's massive colony of baboons, monkeys and chimps.

And that "birthday celebration" is the actual focus of this local news article and what first caught my attention. The concept of celebrating that your primate lab has been open for 10 years, that your cruel experiments have been, and are still, going strong and are showing no signs of stopping, is jaw-dropping for me. What happened to animal research being something researchers supposedly wish they didn't have to do, a somber endeavor that researchers supposedly do reluctantly rather than happily? (And in actuality, the lab has been experimenting on animals for more than 50 years, but this is the lab's 10-year anniversary of becoming one of the regional primate research centers established by the federal government.)

The president of the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research complains to the journalist that currently, not as many in the public support animal research as in past years and implies that this is only because we silly lay people don't understand how necessary it is. He goes on to explain, "Our primates are essential partners in medical progress, as are mice, rats, guinea pigs and opossums. Without them we would be stripped of the very tools we need to open new paths of discovery and to challenge old dogma."

"Partners"? "Old dogma"? The animals are not partners. Partners engage in something willfully. The animals imprisoned in these labs are just that -- prisoners. And what "old dogma" really needs to be challenged here? Is Mr. Trevett suggesting that compassion is an "old dogma"? The outdated dogma that needs dismantling is the one Trevett and other animal researchers and animal research defenders hold to. The idea that our fellow animals are mere tools for our horrible experiments and the idea that animal research is the most effective and efficient type of research both are outdated and are what's standing in the way of "new paths of discovery."

Learn more about the unnecessary nature of animal research and about alternatives from the American Anti-Vivisection Society (take note of the links under the "Animal Research" tab and above the title for further info beyond background info) and Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM). See also "The Cycle of Violence"; the quotation featured there is quite relevant to these news stories.

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Photo courtesy the Empty Cages Gallery and Animals Voice