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They arrived by the planeload, a whole bunch of recent conscripts within the pressing battle to defeat a worldwide pandemic. Regardless of the important thing position they’d been assigned within the improvement of profitable new vaccines, nonetheless, the newcomers weren’t seated in enterprise class. They’d made the journey within the cargo holds of small constitution planes, locked for as much as 50 hours into reeking picket crates, every scarcely bigger than a knapsack, splattered inside with waste and blood.
These have been long-tailed macaques. A species of nonhuman primate that weighs round 15 lbs., they’re among the many most clever animals on the planet. Not solely have some colonies pioneered the usage of instruments to interrupt open nuts and mollusks however they train the approach to their younger. In some areas the place they encounter vacationers, they’ve been recognized to steal sun shades and cell telephones to ransom in change for meals.
The animals hailed from Cambodia, the place, in accordance with a federal indictment, many had been plucked from the wild, transported in steel cages to a breeding facility, and given false paperwork figuring out them as bred in captivity—what an official with the US Fish and Wildlife Service calls “monkey laundering.” Some bore the identification tags of their captive cousins, monkeys bred for analysis functions however deemed too sickly and easily killed. All have been destined for analysis amenities throughout the U.S. the place the creatures could be pumped with chemical substances or fitted with medical gadgets, noticed, euthanized, and dissected. Now, those self same animals are on the coronary heart of a felony trial at the moment unfolding in Florida’s Southern District.
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