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 alternatives such biosimulations, computational models, diagnostic imaging and organ-on-a-chip technology — artificial systems that function in the same way as human tissue or organs. Over the past two decades, multiple institutions have called into…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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