Malaysia activists slam animal testing facility plan

Yahoo News 19 Jul 09;

KUALA LUMPUR (AFP) – Environmental groups have blasted a Malaysian firm's plan to establish an animal testing facility using imported monkeys, in collaboration with a French pharmaceutical research company.

The activists said the project was cruel and unacceptable, and that animal testing should not take place in Malaysia.

Officials familiar with the plan said the Johor State Investment Centre (JSIC) wrote a letter on May 8 to Malaysia's wildlife and national parks department, requesting permission to import macaques for the testing lab.

"They (JSIC) said they wanted to import macaques to do animal testing. But animal testing in a controversial issue," Saharuddin Anan, director of the department's legislation and enforcement division, told AFP recently.

"So we invited four local environmental groups to a meeting with the proponent of the project on June 12," he said.

Saharuddin said the proposal involved specially bred pathogen-free macaques to be imported from neighbouring countries.

The wildlife department collected responses from animal and environmental groups and "we are studying their (JSIC) application to import the macaques," he said.

A top JSIC official in Johor, a southern Malaysian state, declined to comment in a telephone call when asked to confirm the controversial plans. JSIC is owned by the state government, and promotes investment into Johor.

Conservation group Friends of the Earth said it was "totally opposed to the use of non-human primates or any other animals for research, experiments or vivisection."

The group's Malaysian president Mohamad Idris said they were informed at the briefing with JSIC and the wildlife department that the partners in the project would be an unnamed French pharmaceutical research company.

"In laboratory research, monkeys are subjected routinely to pain... We are morally opposed to any animal research as no animals should be experimented with when alternatives to animal testing are available," he said in a statement.

Idris said the lab was expected to source the long-tailed macaques from Indonesia, Vietnam or China which trade in captive-bred monkeys.

British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV), a London-based animal protection group, condemned the project.

"The use of non-human primates in research is being questioned internationally," Sarah Kite, its director of special projects, said in a statement.

"We urge Malaysia to put an end to these negotiations and to not allow itself to be part of an industry that inflicts such great suffering on our primate cousins," she added.