Data discrepancies suggest Laos monkey smuggling persists, despite trade ban

Isabel Esterman - Mongabay - 05:26
BANGKOK — A new report published on Feb. 18 detailed widespread discrepancies in data provided from Southeast Asia’s long-tailed macaque breeding farms, highlighting how monkey trafficking is able to slip through the regulatory cracks put in place by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). Although the report was published […]
  • A new report highlights widespread monkey laundering in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, where wild-caught long-tailed macaques are illegally funneled into breeding farms before being exported for biomedical research as captive-bred animals.
  • Despite growing concerns over the ethics and effectiveness of animal testing, the biomedical industry continues to rely on macaques, fueling a multibillion-dollar trade, with some shipments worth millions of dollars.
  • Thailand has emerged as a hotspot for poaching, with poachers capturing monkeys in urban areas before smuggling them across the Mekong River into Laos and Cambodia, often using concealed transport methods.
  • Laos has significantly increased its estimate of wild macaques to justify legalizing their capture, raising concerns of official complicity in laundering monkeys for the biomedical industry, despite international skepticism over the accuracy of the data.
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BANGKOK — A new report published on Feb. 18 detailed widespread discrepancies in data provided from Southeast Asia’s long-tailed macaque breeding farms, highlighting how monkey trafficking is able to slip through the regulatory cracks put in place by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

Although the report was published anonymously by Sandy River Research, the data it draws from are referenced and largely available to the public across disparate sources. Mongabay has not been able to independently verify the identity of the authors, and Sandy River Research’s website states it will not be commenting further on the report.

The report’s findings paint a bleak picture for endangered long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis) that appear to be poached from the wild across the Mekong region before being laundered into breeding farms across Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. From here, the monkeys are kept in often grim conditions before being exported to biomedical research laboratories, primarily in Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan and South Korea.

These laboratories purchase macaques at scale, often for tens of thousands of dollars per head, while poachers across Southeast Asia scrape together a living plucking the monkeys from the wild. All of this, the biomedical research industry says, is necessary to develop life-saving drugs, despite existing and in-development alterna...
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