Animal Underworld by Alan Green

Animal Underworld by Alan Green

Author:Alan Green
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2011-04-13T16:00:00+00:00


For all its indiscretions, however, White Oak is by no means the worst in its disregard of the spirit of the nation’s endangered species laws. That distinction goes to the Tulane Regional Primate Research Center in Covington, Louisiana, for its handling of a troupe of mangabeys, monkeys native to Ghana, Togo, and other nations in western and central Africa.

Tulane, which is affiliated with the university of the same name, is the largest of the nation’s seven regional primate centers supported by the National Institutes of Health. Its specialties are the study of AIDS, hepatitis, malaria, and other infectious diseases.

In the early 1980s, when the institution was still known as the Delta Center, Robert J. Gormus, a staff biologist, developed a particular interest in leprosy and for a time collaborated on his research with the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center, at Atlanta’s Emory University. The appeal of Yerkes for Gormus was the research community’s only breeding colony of mangabeys, which were deemed physiologically well suited to the leprosy inquiries.

In the late 1980s, Gormus was promised federal grants to continue his work at Tulane, provided he could put together his own collection of mangabeys. But there was a problem, as journalist Deborah Blum, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, chronicled in her 1994 book, The Monkey Wars. When Tulane asked the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service about the legality of importing sooty mangabeys, which Gormus sought for his research, the agency ruled, in keeping with widely held scientific and zoological opinion, that the sooty was a subspecies of the endangered white-collared mangabey. As a result, it decreed that the sooty mangabeys could not be imported for Gormus’s research purposes.

Adroit lobbying and the exploiting of connections at the National Institutes of Health, Blum writes, earned Gormus a special permit to import the mangabeys, although the agreement carried such requirements as the establishment of a mangabey breeding colony at Tulane. After assenting to the conditions, Gormus set out to round up his one hundred fifty mangabeys, a process that took him on harrowing treks to Africa. Blum vividly portrays Gormus’s search for the monkeys, which brought him into contact with con men, wildlife smugglers, and African tribesmen who trapped mangabeys by placing nets on the ground and then burning down the trees in which the primates nested. After four trips to Africa, and having spent a small fortune of federal dollars, Gormus managed to round up only forty-nine of the one hundred fifty mangabeys he sought, some plucked from restaurant kitchens before their pending date with the stew pot. He bought another thirty-five mangabeys from Yerkes, reports Blum, along with fifty rhesus macaques from China, and began this new phase of his research.

But Gormus soon faced a problem: In the summer of 1993, the National Institutes of Health withdrew its funding for the leprosy project. Peter Gerone, the director of the Tulane primate center, agreed to support the mangabey colony from general funds for at least a year. Gormus was determined to continue the study, which he believed had shown early promise, and appealed to the government.



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