Airline says it will stop monkey shipments after Penn. crash

The airline that carried monkeys part of the way to a US research laboratory before they were involved in a highway crash in Pennsylvania says it will stop the shipments. Kenya Airways will not renew its contract with the shipper when it expires this month, airline CEO Allan Kilavuka said. Kilavuka did not identify the shipper who paid the airline to fly the animals from Mauritius, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, to New York. The move by the African airline is the latest skirmish in a long-running battle between animal-rights groups and researchers — with airlines caught in the middle — over the use of animals in medical experiments. On Jan. 21, a truck towing a trailer with 100 monkeys collided with a dump truck on a Pennsylvania highway. Several of the monkeys escaped. Authorities said later that three were shot and killed and they accounted for the rest. The US CDC, which assisted local authorities after the crash and escape of some of the monkeys, said Tuesday that the monkeys are at an approved quarantine facility. A CDC spokeswoman declined to give the location of the facility or say what the lab intended to do with the monkeys. Cynomolgus monkeys are often used in medical research because their DNA resembles that of humans, and they have been in high demand since the beginning of the pandemic for testing vaccines. Monkeys were in short supply even before the pandemic. A 2018 report by the National Institutes of Health said half of researchers had trouble finding enough animals, which led to talk of talk of creating a “strategic monkey reserve.”<br/>