SAfrica-France-baboons: S.African government probing French-owned baboon breeding centre

Agence France-Presse - May 20, 2000

JOHANNESBURG, May 20 (AFP) - The South African government has launched an probe into an animal experimentation centre accused of supplying primates to the French military for nuclear tests, a report said Saturday.

The baboons at Frenchman Marc Bailly-Maitre's Centre in Africa of Primatological Experimentation (CAPE) were "emaciated beyond belief" according to the group which is planning to bring criminal charges against him, the Saturday Star reported.

The National Council of the Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty Against Animals (NSPCA) raided CAPE, situatued near the town of Hazyview in northeastern Mpumalanga province, last Friday.

NSPCA inspector Neil Fraser said he found 30 primates in various stages of starvation and had to put down seven on the spot to "prevent further inexpressible suffering."

The NSPCA wants to move the remaining monkeys to a conservation centre while the provincial department of agriculture and environmental affairs has laid a charge against CAPE for operating without a permit.

"We laid the charge with a view to closing CAPE down," a spokesman for the department, Thembi Makhuvele, told the SAPA news agency.

If the department succeeds it will be the second time CAPE has been closed down since it opened in 1984 and began exporting primates to France.

It was shut down in 1990 and the NSCPCA put down 120 starving baboons at the facility.

CAPE however took its case to cabinet and won permission to reopen as a research laboratory and export animals.

Bailly-Maitre told the Saturday Star that until three years ago he was exporting primates to France where they were used for research into HIV, cancer and sleeping sickness.

"I believe in using animals for research," he said, adding that he has for the past two years waited for a new permit to resume exports.

The anti-vivisection pressure group SAAV has however repeatedly claimed that the baboons were in fact sent to the French military to test the effects of nuclear irradiation.

The group first voiced its concerns in 1998 when then environmental affairs minister Pallo Jordan lifted a moratorium on the export of primates to allow CAPE to send 150 baboons to France and Gabon.

"The baboons are sent to CRSSA De Mestreis in Grenoble and Sanofi Research Laboratories in France," SAAV spokeswoman Michelle Pickover said this week.

SAAV (South Africans for the Abolition of Vivesection) has also claimed that CAPE had links with the notorious Roodeplaat Research Laboratory outside Pretoria where the apartheid era military conducted biological experiments.

The office of Environment Minister Valli Moosa has confirmed that it is investigating CAPE, the Saturday Star said.

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