ACTION ALERT:
Contact:
Dr. Elizabeth Goldentyer
Director, USDA, Eastern Region
(919) 855-7100
[email protected]
[email protected]
SAMPLE MESSAGE:
Please LEVY a MAXIMUM FINE Duke University for their blatant disregard of
the Animal Welfare Act (AWA) when their negligence killed multiple primates.
This behavior must NOT be tolerated and MUST be punished to the fullest
extent of the law.
Animal welfare group scolds Duke over
October lemur deaths
By Ray Gronberg,
HeraldSun.com, April 20, 2017
An animal welfare group wants federal regulators to fine Duke University
over the deaths last October of four rare aye-ayes at the Duke Lemur Center.
The group, Stop Animal Exploitation Now, said Thursday it’d filed a
complaint with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Spokeswoman Stacey
Ellison said it believes the incident, attributed to poisoning from a
natural toxin in avocados center staff fed to the lemurs, was preventable.
Animals in captivity “should only be fed things [their keepers] know won’t
hurt them and that they eat in the wild,” Ellison said.
Ellison’s group was reacting to regulatory filings by Duke and the National
Institutes of Health, whose Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare helps the
U.S. government keep tabs on the treatment of animals at federally-funded
universities.
The four aye-ayes died suddenly in late October. The incident, shocking to
Lemur Center staff and Duke officials generally, prompted an investigation
into its causes that roped in experts at Duke, Michigan State University,
N.C. State University and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
All four of the victims, and a fifth aye-aye who took sick but survived, had
similar symptoms. Necroscopies of the dead animals showed they had fluid
around their hearts, and tissue samples showed they had damage to their
heart muscles.
Lab tests at Michigan State found the avocado toxin, persin, in samples of
the stomach contents of three of the four victims.
Persin is known to harm several kinds of birds and mammals, including some
common farm animals. But until the Duke incident there was no sign in the
literature that it could similarly affect primates, the order that includes
lemurs, apes and humans.
“This was an unanticipated reaction, as avocados have been fed to captive
lemurs around the world for many years and were fed to other aye-ayes at
Duke that day who remained unaffected,” said Michael Schoenfeld, Duke vice
president for public affairs and government relations.
Schoenfeld noted that center staff have since removed the fruit from the
lemurs’ menu. He also objected to the characterization, by Ellison’s group,
that the incident was the result of “negligence.”
“The aye-ayes and other endangered lemurs in Duke’s care are here for three
purposes: conservation, education and non-invasive research,” he said.
“Duke’s commitment to preserving and protecting these animals and their
native habitats in Madagascar dates back more than 50 years at this point.
Any suggestion that Duke is willfully or even negligently harming the lemurs
in our care is deeply misguided.”
Duke reported the incident to federal regulatory in December. On Jan. 5, NIH
staffer Neera Gopee wrote back to say her agency’s Office of Laboratory
Animal Welfare “found no cause for further action” by the government.
In taking avocado off the lemurs’ menu, the university took “appropriate
measures to correct and prevent recurrence of this adverse event” said
Gopee, a veterinarian and University of Georgia-trained toxicologist.
She added that Duke’s “prompt and thorough resolution of this matter is
commendable” and consistent with the NIH’s expectation that universities
like it police their staff’s treatment of animals.
In December, Lemur Center veterinarian Cathy Williams said that while
avocado had “been introduced to Madagascar as a [non-native] food item,”
there was “really no information as to whether wild aye-ayes would eat” it.
At the Lemur Center, avocado had been part of their feed since at least
2013.
Based in Cincinnati, Ohio, Stop Animal Exploitation Now is one of several
animal-welfare groups that monitors federal filings to watch for unexpected
animal deaths or cases of mistreatment.
It has previously filed complaints against UNC-Chapel Hill, and on Thursday
said its complaint about the lemurs also addressed the deaths at Duke of a
macaque and a mouse, and a non-fatal injury to a second macaque.
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