UW-Owned Zoo Monkeys Headed To Tulane Primate Center

UW–Madison Primate Center officials announced Friday that the Tulane Regional Primate Research Center in Covington, La., will be providing a new home for 100 UW-owned rhesus monkeys at the Henry Vilas Zoo.

The monkeys will be transferred to an outdoor breeding colony at Tulane, which sits on a 500-acre compound about 30 miles north of New Orleans, according to Joseph Kemnitz, interim director of the Primate Center.

“This is a good solution for the monkeys, for both primate centers and for the zoo, although I know many of us in Madison will miss these animals,” Kemnitz said.

The Tulane center has agreed to pay the shipping costs for transporting the colony. Some of the older monkeys may stay behind, joining the Wisconsin center’s main colony for noninvasive studies on aging.

Virginia Hinshaw, dean of the Graduate School, said the Tulane center will honor the local agreement made in 1989 between the UW–Madison center and the Vilas Zoo. That agreement states that animals in the colony would not be used in invasive research.

“At this point, a major objective of our efforts is to insure the continued support and well-being of these monkeys.” Hinshaw said. “The current resolution offers the best way of doing that.”

The Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center has maintained a monkey house at the zoo since the early 1960s. The National Institutes of Health, which funds the center, decided last October that the center can no longer spend federal base-grant money on the zoo monkeys because the colony is not being used in scientific research.

Center officials are still studying options for about 50 UW-owned stump-tailed monkeys housed at the zoo. This threatened species is native to Thailand, and center officials are negotiating with several organizations in Thailand to possibly send the animals to their ancestral home.

Kemnitz said the transfer of the animals to Tulane is expected in the next six weeks.