On the day of the breakout, the rhesus macaques, all adolescent females, weighing about seven pounds apiece , slipped out a door left unlocked . The authorities say the monkeys are not dangerous. Still, people in the area have been told to steer clear.
The monkeys left the facility, Alpha Genesis, on Nov. 6. As of this writing, 39 of them have been captured. The rest remain at large. Their story, as portrayed in the media, is a true-life “Planet of the Apes” tale.
In a TV news program about 43 monkeys that fled a research facility in South Carolina, a camera pans along concertina wire. The sky is silver-gray, giving the place an ominous feel. It looks like a scene from a prison-break movie.
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A rhesus macaque monkey in Cayo Santiago, known as Monkey Island, off the eastern coast of Puerto Rico. Brennan Linsley/Associated Press
The primates housed at Alpha Genesis are used for biomedical studies.
Another rhesus macaque that was used for medical research and has the brain surgery scars to prove it, Rusty, now lives in Noah’s Ark, a sanctuary for mistreated animals in Locust Grove, Ga. I visited him on a hot summer day in 2023, as other monkeys whooped and hooted, a whirl of jungle sounds.
Rusty has dark-brown fur with reddish tufts. On the day I visited, he was prowling around a fenced-in area with a hammock and a tree stump. When he saw me, he grabbed onto the wires of the fence. His fingers were thick and strong, and he gave me a hard stare. He bared his teeth. He climbed higher on the fence and looked down at me. His face showed pure malevolence.
I’d gone to see Rusty because I’d been working on a story about monkey smuggling. A Cambodian official, Masphal Kry, was charged in November 2022 with assisting in a poaching scheme. Macaques are protected by international trade law. In order for them to be sold in the United States, they require permits that show they were raised in captivity for research — rather than captured in the wild.
Kry was arrested at JFK International Airport in New York. Prosecutors said he had been helping to sell wild monkeys from Southeast Asia, passing them off as ones raised in captivity. A reporter covering Asia, I had attended his pretrial hearing in Miami in 2023. He was acquitted in March and returned home to Cambodia.
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“I hope a monkey will take the stand,” I’d told my dad, a retired businessman, on the phone before the hearing in Miami. “And put his hand on the Bible.”
“More likely his foot,” my dad said.
My dad, John McKelvey, knows about monkeys. He used to be president of a Kansas City company, Midwest Research Institute, where they kept primates in laboratories. As a child, I would visit my dad at work and could hear the animals rustling in their cages. I loved animals, but I understood the reasons for the research done in the labs.
The study of primates helps scientists learn about the aging process and the brain. Research done on rhesus macaques was crucial for the development of the COVID vaccine. Every year, about 70,000 rhesus macaques are used in medical investigations in the United States, according to Science.
I traveled to Locust Grove in the summer of 2023 because I’d heard so much in the courtroom about the macaques and wanted to see one in real life. I also spoke with scientists about them. One of the scientists, Charles Murry, a University of Washington professor who does heart research, told me what it was like to walk into an operating theater with a monkey surgically draped. He spoke about how important it was to “honor” the animal.
“Nobody does this lightly,” he said. But in the end, he said, he needed the monkeys for research because their hearts are so similar to ours.
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I guess that’s why it was hard to see Rusty with his face twisted in rage and now to hear about the monkeys in South Carolina trying to escape. It makes me wonder about artificial intelligence and whether it will someday replace the monkeys in medical research. In the future, scientists might be able to use machine learning models, employing large datasets instead of monkeys, to see which drug compounds work and which ones are toxic. Scientists may also someday be able to use AI to gather large datasets of human cells, enough to help them determine whether a drug compound works. Then they would not need to use monkeys for their research. When you’ve seen the monkeys up close, it’s hard to shake the feeling that they’re so much like us, they shouldn’t be subjected to these procedures.
A former research monkey at Noah’s Ark animal sanctuary in Locust, Ga., strikes an eerily human pose for the author. Tara McElvey
A friend of mine, a Polish scientist, once told me about his work with monkeys. He said that he’d gone to his lab one night to pick up something he’d left behind. He turned on the lights and looked around the room in stunned silence. The monkeys were crouching in their cages with their arms sticking out of the bars. Holding hands, they had formed a circle.
After that, he said, he gave up studying monkeys and focused instead on another subject: snail brains.
Tara McKelvey is a journalist with Radio Free Asia in Washington.
Why I rooted for the escaped research monkeys
