The monkeys, used in medical testing, have a legal claim to freedom, according to animal law experts Angela Fernandez and Justin Marceau.
43 monkeys, all of them young female rhesus macaques, escaped from the Alpha Genesis research laboratory in Yemassee, South Carolina, when an employee failed to properly secure the door to their enclosure.
It wasn’t the first time something like this happened at Alpha Genesis, a company that breeds and uses thousands of monkeys for biomedical testing and supplies nonhuman primate products and bio-research services to researchers worldwide. In 2018, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) fined the facility $12,600 in part for other incidents in which monkeys had escaped. “We’re not strangers to seeing monkeys randomly,” a nearby resident and member of the Yemassee town council told the New York Times.
Alpha Genesis is now working to recapture the macaques, who are each about the size of a cat; over the weekend, 25 of them were recovered. Meanwhile, the animal protection group Stop Animal Exploitation Now, which for years has filed federal complaints against the facility, has called on the USDA to prosecute Alpha Genesis as a repeat violator of its duty to keep the animals secure.
“The recovery process is slow, but the team is committed to taking as much time as necessary to safely recover all remaining animals,” a Facebook post from the Yemassee Police Department said, attributing the comment to Alpha Genesis CEO Greg Westergaard.
In one way, this is a story about what looks like a corporate failure. But there is another way to understand this situation, both legally and morally. What if these intrepid macaques, who the lab has said pose no threat to the public and carry no infectious diseases, have a legal claim to freedom?
The legal status of wild animals is more contested and malleable than ever, evident in the recent court case arguing that Happy, an elephant living at the Bronx Zoo, was a legal person entitled to freedom, the phasing out of animal use at entertainment venues like circuses, and the end of US lab experimentation on chimpanzees. While Alpha Genesis may have a strong financial incentive to recapture the escaped monkeys, longstanding legal doctrines suggest that the 18 monkeys still at large may not belong to the company as long as they remain free and outside of its custody. State officials, or perhaps even members of the public, might even be legally protected in rescuing these monkeys from a fate of cage confinement and invasive experimentation and bringing them to a sanctuary. Such an outcome would matter not just for these monkeys but also for the rights of captive animals more broadly. When a captive animal becomes free
For many people, the idea of a lost animal becoming the property of another person might seem absurd. Certainly, no one would imagine forfeiting the companionship of a beloved dog or cat because the animal got out of the yard and was found by someone else. Neither law nor morality treats the escape of a domesticated animal as tantamount to a forfeiture of all claims to the animal.
But when it comes to wild animals, the law is different.
When a captive wild animal escapes, their captor generally remains liable for any damage the escaped animal creates to persons or property, but they may lose ownership of the animal, especially if the creature integrates into an existing wild population (sometimes called “reverting to the common stock”). That might sound unlikely for rhesus macaques in the US — the species is native to South and Southeast Asia and has been exported around the world for lab testing. But it turns out that it’s perfectly possible to live as a free-roaming rhesus macaque in South Carolina, where a more than four-decade-old population of the monkeys resides on the state’s Morgan Island, also known as “Monkey Island.”
Originally relocated from Puerto Rico between 1979 and 1980, the Morgan Island macaques now serve as a kind of reservoir of lab monkeys for the US government.
