Caring for the Elderly. (More Monkey Business)

 

by Pa Rock

Elderly Primate

There was a report out yesterday morning stating that twenty-four more of the little monkeys who escaped from a research facility in rural South Carolina had been recaptured.   The CEO of the company that breeds and owns the monkeys said later in the day that “more than half” were now back in custody.
 
I’m not sure how I feel about that.  I guess they are safer in the testing facility than they would be out in the wilds of South Carolina, at least for the time being, but who knows what ugly fate awaits them now?
 
There is one other monkey story in the news, but it involves chimpanzees.  The Alamogordo Primate Facility (APF) at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico has been housing a colony of chimps that were brought from Africa as juveniles sometime around 1970.  They were initially under the supervision of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and used for flight and space travel research, but over the years, as the colony grew to over six hundred, the facility was contracted to a company that used them for medical research.
 
No medical research (at least the “invasive” research) is reportedly being done with the chimps now, but those who were exposed to certain diseases are still being studied and tracked.  Some of the chimps who have survived thus far are quite elderly, and so too are some of the human primates who care for the chimpanzees – and many of the humans are expected to retire by next summer.  Most of the chimps have been moved to a non-research facility in Louisiana, some sort of “care” home, but twenty-three very elderly ones were thought to be too old and frail to endure the trauma of a major move.
 
Now apparently the NIH has reconsidered their earlier decision and will send the old chimpanzees to “Chimp Haven” near Shreveport, Louisiana.  
 
I’m not sure how I feel about that either.
 
(I have a very elderly friend who was incarcerated for several years in a women’s prison in California.  Old prisoners are a big drain on prison budgets, and my friend had plenty of medical maladies that are common to old people.  A few years ago California got smart and released many of their elderly prisoners, those who were too feeble to resume their lives of crime, to the care and supervision of family members.  My friend’s family were all in southern Missouri, and she was sent home to be with them.  Not long after that the relatives placed her in a nursing home, and when I occasionally visit with her over the phone, her description of life in that facility is very similar to the life she had been leading in prison – one of pain, misery, and captivity.)
 
I hope that the elderly chimps were moved for their own benefit and not to take pressure off some government bureaucrat’s financial spreadsheet.
 
We need to be showing more humanity to all creatures, great and small.