Surgeons’ college fined for cruelty to monkey

Press, 6 March 1985, Page 24

Surgeons’ college fined for cruelty to monkey

NZPA-PA London The Royal College of Surgeons has been found guilty in a test case of causing unnecessary suffering to a laboratory monkey. Four other similar summonses were dismissed by magistrates at Bromley, Kent. The private prosecution was brought under the Protection of Animals Act 1911, after a raid on the college’s research centre near Orpington, Kent, by about 80 animal rights activists. The college was fined

£ 250 (?600) over a summons relating to a 10-year-old female macaque monkey said to have been found in a state of severe dehydration. There was no order for costs. The other summonses, in which the college was cleared, involved four of the Asian monkeys allegedly found with an arm trapped in the mesh of their cages. Buckston Browne Research Establishment at Downe was raided last August and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection decided to

prosecute. Mr John Mackenzie, for the union, told the Court that during the raid two of the monkeys were found dead in their metre-square aluminium cages. A records chart by the cage of another animal said that she was “severely dehydrated”. Other monkeys, marked for dental or diet research experiments, were found with broken arms after trapping their limbs in meshing while reaching for a water tray.