After a mounting campaign, Israeli airline EL AL has once again joined the list of other popular carriers and refused to transport monkeys for medical research.
A supreme-court ruling and public pressure this week forced Israeli airline, EL AL, to stop monkey transportation.
In a brief letter, translated below, to Jonathan Shpigel, a lawyer with the Israeli animal-advocacy group
Let the Animals Live, Ran Rahav, spokesman for the Israeli flight carrier El Al wrote:
Dear Johnathan,
EL AL will not fly monkeys for reasons of experimentation. Full stop.
Best Wishes
As reported in
Haaretz,
nature.com and
Care2, the recent High Court of Justice ruling allows the sale of 40 monkeys bred in captivity for experiments in the United States, but bans the export of 50 monkeys born in the wild.
Bjørn Christian Tørrissen
Green monkeys were used to test the effectiveness of antibiotic Levaquin against the plague.
image:113313:0::0
Although animal rights groups, Let the Animals Live and the
Israeli Society for the Abolition of Vivisection had petitioned the Israeli Supreme court with a request to ban the sale of 90 monkeys from the Mazor monkey-breeding farm in Israel to
SNBL laboratories (Shin Nippon Biomedical Laboratories) in Texas, US, the petitioners were informed that their petition of more than 5,400 signatures, dealt only with monkeys born in the wild, not those born in captivity. However, it was noted that all monkey shipments for the purposes of experiments abroad would be addressed by the court in the future.
Although,
EL AL has agreed to ban monkey transportation in the past, they have continued with shipments.
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