The race to develop new COVID vaccines has enriched monkey poachers. Orient Biomedical Center and it’s competitors are being accused by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service of an international monkey smuggling ring which is trapping endangered primates and shipping them to United States bio medical researchers and pharmaceutical companies.
Last month the Justice Department charged eight people, including two Cambodian wildlife officials who conspired to poach monkeys from the wild and supply them to researchers in the United States with false papers saying they had been bread in captivity.
There is a massive demand for monkeys at research facilities in America so this poaching has been going on for years. The recent cases are just the tip of the iceberg. The race for a COVID vaccine exponentially accelerated the demand much like a COVID wave. The U.S. leads the world in its demand for endangered Macaque monkeys for research.
China was the lead supplier of monkeys before the start of the pandemic but they banned the export of monkeys after the spread of the deadly virus. Because of the pandemic demand, a single long tailed monkey could fetch up to $40,000 whereas it cost $3,000 just a couple of years earlier.
Conservationists bcgan to notice an increase in reports of monkeys being pulled of of the wild in Cambodia and South East Asia. In 2019 Cambodia supplied 8,571 monkeys and by 2021 that number had more than doubled to 18,870 monkeys.
In July 2022 the population of Macaque monkeys went from being vulnerable to endangered, because they are being hunted to extinction of the sake of research. Most monkeys die in research facilities. There is money in monkeys, so the dark trade will continue.