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The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) is considering repealing a rule that exempts captive members of 11 threatened primate species from protection under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA). If the agency approves a repeal, the captive animals would be designated as threatened, like their wild counterparts, and researchers would need to apply for permits for experiments. To be approved, studies would have to be aimed at species survival and recovery.
[...] Writing to PETA on 1 March, FWS promised to "consider your petition request promptly," and assess whether ESA protection is warranted for each species. There is precedent indicating that the agency might agree with PETA. In 2015, it designated captive chimpanzees as endangered, like their wild counterparts. In doing so, it wrote that its reading of the ESA indicated that "Congress did not intend for captive specimens of wildlife to be subject to separate legal status on the basis of their captive state."
PETA's Goodman says a listing change would allow animal rights activists to better track—and challenge—research involving captive Japanese macaques. When a researcher applies for a permit to conduct an experiment on a species listed under ESA, the application is published in the Federal Register and open to public comment. That means, says Goodman, "We have the opportunity to stop experiments before they happen. And we have more information as to what the animals are actually being used for, how invasive the experiments are."
The Japanese macaques, also known as snow monkeys, have been housed at the Oregon center, part of Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU), since 1965. The troop has provided animal models for multiple sclerosis and for an inherited form of age-related macular degeneration, a leading cause of human blindness. Ongoing work studies the effects on offspring when pregnant dams are fed a high-fat diet. Several years ago, some males were castrated and received hormone replacement to study the effect of androgens on neurons thought to motivate aggressive behavior. Females with their ovaries removed have been used to study the effects of hormone replacement therapy on stress and anxiety, with potential applications to mood and stress in menopausal women.
[...] FWS designated the wild Japanese macaque as threatened in 1976, because the Japanese forests needed for its survival had been heavily logged.
Note: PETA = People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Wikipedia page)
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by Hartree on Friday March 10 2017, @04:38PM
I suspect this is something of a ruse. It's pretty unusual to use endangered species for research. Chimps may be a case of it, but mostly they are being phased out anyway.
However, some subspecies have been designated endangered. The Red Wolf or the Channel Island foxes for example. There's some merit to that, given the specific situation.
However, there are many specialized strains that are use in research that, though the main species is very common, those strains are very rare in the wild. Example, fruit flies (Drosophila) with the gene Apterous (no wings) are very rare in the wild, though you can get them in the thousands in captivity as it's used as a genetic marker for genetics studies. It would be pretty easy to tie up research by lawsuits claiming that Apterous is an endangered subspecies of fruit flies, regardless that it's a deleterious mutation and any in the wild tend to die out.
Repeat this with Xenopus (clawed frog), Danio rerio (zebra fish), mice and rats which are all common research animals and you can tie up a lot of work with nothing but a few lawyers. And it'll be a wonderful fund raising point for Peta's direct mail donation solicitation.