Published via NY Daily News on January 28, 2022
(Shutterstock via NY Daily News)
Before being catapulted in shipping crates onto highway 54 in Danville, Pa. (”All monkeys that escaped Pennsylvania truck crash accounted for,” Jan. 22), 100 monkeys spent 19 hours as cargo on a flight from Mauritius in East Africa to JFK. Any type of transport is stressful for animals and the longer the travel time, the greater the risks of exhaustion, dehydration, injury and heat/cold stress. Temperatures dipped close to zero on this day, and it’s unclear how long these monkeys were left outside on the road, exposed to the frigid elements.
Humans interfering with wild animals is how pandemics start. Three monkeys who managed to escape the crash were captured and killed after being deemed a public health risk. But why were they a health risk after they were caught? How would spending a few hours clinging to a nearby tree make them more of a public health concern? What disease threats did these monkeys pose? What will happen to the remaining 97 who weren’t killed?
Monkeys in Mauritius are stolen from the wild and bred in captivity to be shipped out globally for experimentation purposes. The stress of capture can be fatal to animals, and removing them from the wild can have catastrophic effects on ecosystems. Inside labs, animals experience a slew of psychological traumas, where they spin in cages and pull out their hair.
I hope this tragedy leads to shining a light on the larger issue: What are we doing to animals?
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