As reported this spring in the AWI Quarterly, a company called Safer Human Medicine (SHM) is seeking to build a massive facility in Bainbridge, Georgia, to breed tens of thousands of long-tailed macaques that it would sell for research purposes. The company name would certainly suggest a noble effort to fulfill an imperative social need. Behind the public relations, however, is a business model associated with enormous profits and a company led by industry insiders with unsavory animal welfare histories—including a CEO who served as COO of Envigo during the time when conditions at that company’s Virginia dog-breeding operation were so atrocious that the facility was eventually shuttered. Subsequently, Envigo was convicted of conspiring to violate the Animal Welfare Act and paid the largest-ever fine in a case involving this law. (See AWI Quarterly, fall 2024.)
The planned Georgia facility is currently mired in multiple legal disputes. In February, the Decatur County Development Authority voted to revoke a bond resolution it had approved to help finance the project, prompting SHM to sue the Development Authority for breaching its agreement. That case, however, is currently on hold pending the outcome of a legal challenge to the validity of the bond resolution filed that same month by local citizens, who claim it was approved in violation of Georgia’s Open Meeting Act. In August, local citizens filed a second lawsuit to halt the project on the grounds that the resulting noise, smells, and negative economic impacts in the residential area would constitute a public nuisance.
Public protest over the proposed Bainbridge facility only intensified after news broke in early November that 43 monkeys had escaped from a primate research facility in South Carolina, prompting police to advise nearby homeowners to lock doors and windows until the monkeys were recaptured. Four monkeys remained on the loose as of late November, according to media reports.