Silver Spring Monkeys - Fight For Custody

Fight For Custody

After the monkeys were returned to Taub's custody, they were transferred to an NIH facility. They were later removed to the Tulane Regional Primate Research Center in Covington, Louisiana, still under the care and control of the NIH. Two primate sanctuaries, Moorpark College in California and Primarily Primates in Texas, offered them a permanent home, but the NIH refused to release them.

They were moved by the NIH to the Delta Primate Center in June 1986, where animal rights activists, who had been able to visit and groom the animals at the previous center, were told they could no longer see them. In 1987, the custodians of 14 of the remaining monkeys recommended that eight of them be euthanized, because they were judged to be beyond hope of resocialization. A lawsuit filed by PETA and others sought to block euthanasia and transfer the animals to a facility under their control. The New England Anti-Vivisection Society and PETA ran ads in The New York Times on December 26, 1989, The Washington Post on December 27, and in The Washington Times on January 3, 1990, asking President Bush to save the monkeys, and concerned citizens to petition the White House. After the court denied custody to PETA, two of the monkeys, Titus and Allen, were kept for the National Institutes of Health at a Tulane University primate center, where they were later euthanized.