The German Animal Welfare Federation and the Bremen Animal Welfare Federation are appalled that the neurobiologist Prof. Andreas Kreiter is allowed to continue his seriously damaging brain experiments on macaques at the University of Bremen. Although the Senate recently rejected this after a comprehensive review, the Bremen Administrative Court has now issued an interim order allowing Kreiter to continue experimenting on the monkeys for the time being - beyond the actual end of the current permit on November 30. Kreiter had filed an urgent appeal against the Senate's decision. It remains to be seen when the Administrative Court will rule on this. The fate of the experimental monkeys is therefore uncertain. The only thing that is clear is that they will continue to suffer for an unknown period of time.
"It is appalling that the torturous brain experiments on the monkeys are allowed to continue unhindered," commented Brigitte Wohner-Mäurer, Chairwoman of the Bremen Animal Welfare Federation. "We very much hope that the Administrative Court will follow the assessment of the various experts who have classified the experiments as ethically unacceptable and will finally reject the current application." Thomas Schröder, President of the German Animal Welfare Federation, adds: "Cruel things are being done to animals here for one man's desire for recognition. The experiments are neither ethically justifiable, nor have they provided any far-reaching findings in 25 years. This makes it all the more urgent to finally come up with a clear nationwide concept for phasing out animal experiments and putting an immediate end to severely stressful experiments and experiments on non-human primates - our closest relatives!"
THOUSANDS OF MONKEYS SUFFER IN EXPERIMENTS
Every year, around 2,000 monkeys suffer and die in primate experiments in Germany alone. In experiments of sometimes very dubious scientific value, electrodes are implanted in the animals' brains - as in the brain experiments in Bremen. The animals are fixed in primate chairs by their heads using a special holder and forced to perform tasks for hours on end by depriving them of fluids. In other experiments, monkeys are infected with serious diseases, poisoned with chemical substances or used for the production and quality control of vaccines and are usually killed at the end of the experiment.
EXPERIMENTS AGAINST THE WILL OF THE POPULATION
Primate experiments are highly controversial among the general public. Just recently, public criticism was voiced of Augsburg Zoo, which had given two baboons to the German Primate Center in Göttingen for breeding further laboratory animals. The monkey experiments in Bremen, which have been running since 1998, have also been accompanied by numerous protests and campaigns over the past decades, which have been organized and supported by the Bremen Animal Welfare Federation and the German Animal Welfare Federation, among others. Thousands of residents have repeatedly made it clear that the experiments are not welcome in their city. The Bremen health authorities had repeatedly rejected the requested experiments, while the Senate repeatedly spoke out in favor of an end to the experiments during the decades-long legal dispute: The severe stress placed on the laboratory animals was not justified by the desired gain in knowledge and was therefore not ethically justifiable.
