Oct. 10 -- Five of the former test subject chimpanzees living in an Alamogordo facility have died in the last year, taking the colony's numbers down to 23, the National Institutes of Health says in a new report.
The chimps were previously used as biomedical test subjects at the Alamogordo Primate Facility on Holloman Air Force Base. Animal rights activists thought they had won a legal battle in March to get them moved to Chimp Haven, a wooded preserve in northern Louisiana, yet they remain in Alamogordo.
"These five chimpanzees never got the chance to live out their lives as retirees in a sanctuary and experience life outside of a laboratory due to NIH continuing to deny their release," Emily Snow Ehrhorn, a spokesperson for The Humane Society, wrote in an email this month.
Emily Ritter, a spokesperson for the National Institutes of Health, wrote in an email the chimp colony's mortality rate for fiscal year 2024 was 7.5%, "which is within the expected range" of natural attrition.
The NIH has long resisted relocating the chimps, which haven't been used for experiments in years.
Advocates appeared to notch a victory in March when the agency withdrew its appeal of a judge's ruling that keeping the chimps at the facility was a violation of the Chimpanzee Health Improvement, Maintenance and Protection Act, passed by Congress in 2000.
But the NIH later said it had no plans to relocate the colony after all because it considers all the chimps left in Alamogordo "moribund," or close to death, and exempt from the mandatory move.
NIH leaders said the judge's ruling in the case did not include a directive to transfer the chimps.
The NIH's annual chimpanzee management report, issued recently, tallies the cost of care for chimpanzees at the Alamogordo facility at just under $230 per animal per day. The agency funds Chimp Haven, meanwhile, at a little more than $76 per animal per day. The sanctuary gets about 75% of its funding from the federal government.
Ritter wrote in the email Thursday the 23 chimps still living at the Alamogordo facility "have been diagnosed with life-threatening, systemic disease that poses a constant threat and could result in abrupt death."
The Alamogordo Primate Facility "has been and will remain a chimpanzee care facility; no biomedical research has been or will be conducted at APF since NIH took over management of the facility in 2001," Ritter wrote. "NIH will continue to monitor the chimpanzee care program at APF to ensure that chimpanzee care is provided at the highest standards expected by the NIH."
Gene Grant, animals and science policy officer for Animal Protection New Mexico, told The New Mexican in an email sick and elderly chimps have been transported to Chimp Haven frequently without incident.
"It's time for NIH to stop looking for excuses and start moving chimps," he wrote.
The NIH plans to continue its current process of conducting an annual evaluation of the surviving chimps to determine whether to move them to Chimp Haven, Ritter wrote.