The Monkey Wars

New York: Oxford Univ Press, 1994. First Printing . Hard Back. Fine/Very Good. 6 1/2" X 9 3/4. Tight, clean pages. Dust jacket is slightly creased at edges.Everone has benefited from the medical discoveries of primate research--vaccines for polio, rubella, and hepatitis B are just a few. But we have also learned more in recent years about how intelligent apes and monkeys really are: they can speak to us with sign language, they can even play video games and are as obsessed with the games as any human teenager. And activists have also uncovered cases of unnecessarily callous treatment of animals by researchers. It is a complex issue, made more difficult by the often combative stance of both researchers and animal activists. In this book the author gives a human face to this debate--an all-but-human face to the subjects of the struggle, the chimpanzees and monkeys themselves. She offers a wide-ranging, informative look at animal activists, now numbering some twelve million, from the moderate Animal Welfare Institute to the highly radical Animal Liberation Front, a group destructive enough to be placed on the FBI's terrorist list. And she interviews of researchers, many forced to conduct their work protected by barbed wire and alarm systems, men and women for whom death threats and hate mail are common. She takes us to a research center in Ellensburg, Washington where we meet five chimpanzees trained in human sign language - Olulis, Tatu, Mojha, Dar, and Washore - and watch as they talk to each other, to themselves, and to stuffed animals. Blum introduces us to Alex Pacheco, a founder of People for Ethical Treatment of Animals, and to his bitter enemy, Peter Gerone, head of the federal primate center who wants people to think about the trade-off at its most fundamental level - human life versus animal life. And we visit LEMSIP, a research facility in New york State that has no protesters chanting outside because the director, Jan Moor Jankowski listens to activists with respect. Along the way, Blum offers us insights into the many side-issues involved: scientists who lose funding because they support animal rights; the intense battle, fought by both sides, to win over school kids; the danger of transplanting animal organs into humans (it could possibly unleash a deadly, highly infectious disease), and the concerns over the dwindling monkey populations. Blum concludes that the research community and its critics are like two different nations. But if you listen hard there are people on both sides willing to accept and work within the middle. This book gives those people their voice. Deborah Blum won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for the series of articles that inspired this book.