Monkey Business

One of the great things about living in Mauritius is that we get the chance to meet the most amazing diversity of people, different backgrounds, different lives, different ways of making a living.

Last night, I met a man who runs a breeding business. He breeds Java Macaque monkeys for sale to foreign (US and European) medical experimenters. I share a shudder with most of you.

They have 22 000 monkeys (parents, breeding males, babies and juveniles) in a number of breeding stations in Mauritius. They have 350 staff and seven full time vets. They monkeys command a top price (around $2 000 per animal) as they are pristine. Other animal breeding countries, such as China, have huge operations, but their product is inferior due to the conditions they are reared in as well as the genetic impurity of the animals - the monkeys should be as similar to each other as possible, to allow for repeatability of results of experiments.

Why is Mauritius so good for breeding monkeys? Because it is an island, and the monkeys have been genetically insulated for over 300 years. They have tested the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of the monkeys and traced them back to two original mothers introduced to the island from Sumatra by the Dutch in the 1600 or 1700's. Scientists use mtDNA to trace human origins to better understand our evolution.

Animal experimenters, I was told, not only like genetically similar monkeys, they also like to have 'clean' monkeys. That means they should be free of defects in the form of bites or other physical anomalies, disease and interestingly, stress. In fact, they have found that a stressed monkey does not survive well, nor produce the same results as an unstressed monkey.

Monkeys are social animals, and the breeders have found that if the monkeys are kept together through the rearing process, and then transported together and even undergo experiments together, this greatly helps reduce their stress.

I realised then that perhaps we humans underestimate the damage we do to ourselves with stress. But I think I would rather be a stressed human than an unstressed test monkey.