The Ex-Lab Chimps in San Antonio Deserve a Break

Opal is one of 20 chimps owned by the National Institutes of Health that were transferred to Southwest from the Alamogordo Primate Facility in New Mexico, where hundreds of chimps had been retired from biomedical research. And now, in the wake of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to declare captive chimpanzees endangered, animal welfare groups are calling for Opal and 19 other federally owned chimps at Southwest to be permanently retired.