Thursday, March 28

Baboons in Murcia: xenotransplants and other atrocities


Baboons (or baboons) are native to central Africa and some regions of the Arabian peninsula. They are extremely intelligent animals and are among the largest non-hominid primates; depending on the species, they reach a height between 50 and 120 cm, and a weight between 14 and 40 kg.

These animals live in large social groups of 30 to 300 members and form complex relationships with each other. Adapted to living in grasslands, savannahs, forests, and deserts, they travel more than 10 km daily to go to specific places to feed, drink, or socialize. Along with humans, they are among the few primates that live primarily on land, having left the heights of trees and cliffs for only occasional refuge.

On October 12, while another exaltation of violence and abuse was taking place, a baboon was seen on the streets of Murcia crossing a highway and climbing on several roofs. Finally, he was anesthetized and returned to the jail from which he had managed to escape, at the Veterinary Farm of the University of Murcia. There, they survive today between 50 and 70 baboons crowded into two outdoor cages of 55 m2 eachthe same cages in which they were born and in which they will spend every minute of their lives until they are “used” in some experiment.

The origin of this “colony” dates back to the late 1990s, when the company Imutran (formerly Animal Resources Limited and now part of Novartis) began a pig-to-baboon xenotransplantation project with the aim of making pig-to-baboon transplants. human. This project was carried out at the infamous Huntingdon Life Sciences in the UK, and at the Juan Canalejo Hospital, in A Coruñaand in the Hospital Virgen de la Arrixaca, in Murcia. During these years, dozens of baboons were caught in the wild in Kenya and exported, as merchandise, to be used in these insane and immoral experiments.



In the year 2000, in the United Kingdom, the diaries of despair, 1,274 pages of information and documents that exposed the horrible conditions in which the animals were in the Huntingdon Life Sciences facilities, demonstrated the incompetence and negligence in the experiments and, in addition, made it clear that, given the lack of results and encouraged by Imutran /Novartis, the (misnamed) scientists, falsified and concealed data and results to try to sell advances that clearly did not exist.

Some of the “negligence” revealed are:

  • Death of a baboon after transplanting a pig kidney that was frozen
  • Illegal reuse of animals
  • “Poor” reporting of the pathologies of the animals used
  • Use of sick animals that could not be used
  • Baboon death from bouts of vomiting and diarrhea
  • Baboons with symptoms such as violent spasms, bloody discharge, grinding of teeth and uncontrollable eye movements
  • Dying baboons, lying motionless and huddled in their cages
  • Baboon dies from stroke after suffering two days of spasms and paralysis
  • Swelling and yellowish discharge from the heart of a transgenic pig transplanted into the neck of a baboon
  • Not recording the weight of the organs that were going to be transplanted
  • Use of veterinary products without label or dosage
  • Four baboons die electrocuted when lightning strikes in the cages in which they waited to be exported from Kenya
  • Three baboons killed on arrival at the Paris airport, where they were making a stopover, due to the small size of their cages
  • “Suspicions” of the importation of animals with herpes b, which can cause brain damage and even death in humans

Despite everything that happened in the United Kingdom with HLS and Imutran/Novartis and the irrefutable evidence on the falsification of data, the uselessness and irresponsibility of these atrocious experiments and the extreme torture to which the animals were being subjected, in Spain the financing this project and, in collaboration with Imutran, several xenotransplants were carried out in Murcia and A Coruña. His greatest success was agonizing survival of a baboon with a pig’s liver for eight days.

After 20 years of “investigations”, the head of General Surgery at the Virgen de la Arrixaca hospital, Pablo Ramírez, admits that they had to stop the project because they did not obtain better survival. Even so, to this day they continue to insist on the project of transplanting pig organs into humans, but now more focused on giving blind blows by genetically modifying pigs.

Xenotransplants with pigs as forced donors are a good summary of the profound stupidity and the business behind animal experimentation. The reason for using pigs is that they are fast-growing animals, “easy to access” and whose daily murder goes unnoticed thanks to the meat industry. In his own words:

“[Los cerdos] They are easily accessible animals. and with a short growth period, it is also a food animal of which more than 3,000,000 are slaughtered daily around the world for food, which reduces the social controversy about its use in experimentation”.

This is obviously not science; it is an indescribable aberration.

All these are the consequences of the erroneous basic approach existing in animal experimentation: there is no objective, valid and realistic study of what is aspired to be achieved in these experiments (always ignoring the impossibility of any ethics in this context). Such is the case, such questions trivial Since pigs and humans have very different life expectancies, they do not prevent them from continuing to waste money and massacre lives for this nonsense. In the words of Guillermo Ramis Vidal, principal investigator of the project at the University of Murcia:

“Finally, if xenotransplantation becomes a clinical reality, it will be necessary to see the evolution of porcine organs in humans as survival of years is achieved, since the normal life of a pig is around 15 years, compared to the average age of 70-80 years of the human being”.

In 2016, planned the placement of cameras in the cages to study the behavior and cognition of the baboons. A clearly absurd study, because in no case can anything valid be learned from caged animals that cannot develop or interact freely with each other and with nature. From such a study, the only thing that could be confirmed is how negatively captivity affects these highly intelligent animals.

In recent years, the baboons of this colony have also been used to study Parkinson’s disease. In one of the experiments, 17 baboons are killed and brain removed after two years of study. Their conclusion is that the differences between species should be further investigated. because, unsurprisingly, the results in baboons bear no relation to those in humans. However, they continue to do more experiments on baboons and other animals.

As in this case with the baboons, sudden changes in the “use” of animals are frequent in the field of animal experimentation and seem to obey only an attempt to find or invent a justification to continue profiting at all costs from abuse. , the unimaginable suffering and slaughter of animals.



Either because of the more than presumable irregularities in the importation of the baboons that originally formed the “colony”; for the very serious irresponsibility shown by the escape of the baboon on October 12; for the horrible conditions in which they survive and the even worse fate to which they have been condemned; for compliance with current legislation and for ceasing to promote and perpetuate the use of non-human primates for experimentation; or by science and ethics, this “colony” and its cruelty cannot continue to exist. For this reason, together with other organizations, we have asked the University of Murcia to transfer the baboons to a sanctuary where they can be rehabilitated and live the rest of their days with dignity and without a scheduled death.

Other references:




www.eldiario.es