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ACTION ALERT
Letters Needed to Save
the Lives of Hundreds of Baboons!
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Please take a moment to send a brief letter which could
prevent the suffering and death of thousands of baboons.
Each year hundreds of baboons have been
trapped in the wild in Kenya and Tanzania and sent to
biomedical "research" facilities to be used
in experimentation, including xenotransplantation (cross-species
organ transplants.) Read
more about xenotransplantation...
Data provided by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife
Service shows that from 1995-2000, 1146 baboons were
exported from Kenya to the United States alone... Many
other baboons have been exported to the United Kingdom
and Russia for egregious "research" protocols.
Learn more about
primate trade...
The fate awaiting these magnificent and
intelligent baboons is dreadful, as they will be relegated
to a piteous lot in captivity, confined to stark stainless
steel and cinder block prisons, and where they will
most likely be subjected to painful "procedures"
in laboratories....
If this fate were not bad enough, before
being captured and exported, the baboons have in many
circumstances been kept in deplorable conditions in
the facilities of Kenyan and Tanzanian wildlife traders.
One Kenyan wildlife trader, Mann &
Miller, exported 1016 of the total 1146 baboons to the
United States. The Mann & Miller facility was described
in part in an expose' (printed on 10 March 2000 by the
British newspaper Mail on Sunday) as follows:
The
screams [of the baboons] are what you hear first:
piercing, prolonged and almost human, the screams
of mothers and babies. Somewhere inside the
well-protected, hidden compound run by wildlife
dealer Richard Mann on the outskirts of Nairobi,
baboons abducted from their natural habitat
on the wide open veld are railing against their
capture, some battering their heads against
the bars of the tiny cages. Yet if they knew
the full terrors awaiting some of their numbers,
they would scream even louder.
They
are to be flown to Britain, then transported
in secrecy to a medical laboratory near Cambridge,
where their organs will be surgically removed
and replaced with those of pigs. Some will have
pig organs attached to the outside of their
bodies.
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WHAT YOU CAN
DO TO HELP!
The
Guardian's expose' last spring prompted the Kenya
Wildlife Service to suspend the license of Mann &
Miller, which has sufficed to stop exports (at least
temporarily) from that country.
Only
permanent export bans in Kenya and Tanzania will truly
make a difference.
Please write letters to the Tanzania Embassy in the
U.S. and to the Tanzania Wildlife Division asking for
an immediate and permanent ban on the capture and export
of baboons for research.
Embassy of the Republic of Tanzania
2139 R Street NW
Washington, DC 20008
202-939-6125 (phone)
202-797-7408 (fax)
Tanzania Ministry
of Natural Resources and Tourism (MNRT)
Attn: Director of Wildlife
POB 40832
Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania
Also write the
Kenyan government urging it to place a permanent ban
on the export of baboons.
Embassy of the Republic of Kenya
2249 R Street NW
Washington, DC 20008
202-387-6101 (phone)
202-462-3829 (fax)
Kenya Wildlife
Service
PO Box 40241
Nairobi, Kenya
Fax: (254-2) 505866
E-mail: kws@kws.org
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