News spread fast last on Friday night! Temperatures were dropping lock a rock in Danville Pennsylvania when WNEP’s Nikki Krize reported that an accident had occurred on Interstate 80. While normal and routine for this stretch of highway, a certain side note created an national story: Monkeys were in the loose in Montour County!
The original story from WNEP was spead on over 10,000 other social media feeds within hours. Krize wrote, A trailer carrying 100 monkeys collided with a dump truck this afternoon just off I-80 near Danville. According to state police four of those monkeys got loose. The PA Game Commission is looking for the monkeys. Troopers say the monkeys weigh about three pounds and they were on their way to a lab.
A few hours later, police released an image of at least one of the monkeys clinging on for life in a tree in the near sub-zero January air.
The night-long odyssey took on a life of its own. It’s not hard to see why: How often do you hear a story of monkeys randomly swinging through a town, unless it’s a Hollywood creation.
Some on social media immediately got worried: They saw the movie OUTBREAK and must have expected Dustin Hoffman to arrive in a hazmat suit. Others felt sorrow for innocent animals freezing in the cold Northeastern Pennsylvania woods near Geisinger..
And that is the other part of the story: Why were there 100 monkeys on Interstate 80, anyway?
12 MONKEYS 4 MONKEYS MAKE THE NEWS
Comments all over the socials begged the question: Why was a truck carrying 100 monkeys breezing through the state on Interstate 80?
Experimentation, it would seem!
The Danville story was picked up by other sources, and even made headlines on the Drudge Report, the Associated Press, and the New York TIMES.
Jamie Labar was working at the front desk at a Super 8 hotel in Montour County, Pa., on Friday when she heard that there had been a crash on the highway nearby. “I thought it was just another car accident because there’s always accidents there,” she said.
Search results show that even the UK GUARDIAN informed its readers across the pond that the town of Danville was being struck by the monkey outbreak..
The AP picked the story up and ran it nationally Saturday morning:
A truck carrying about 100 monkeys was involved in a crash Friday in Pennsylvania, state police said as authorities searched for at least three of the monkeys that appeared to have escaped the vehicle. The truck carrying the animals crashed with a dump truck in the afternoon in Montour County, Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Andrea Pelachick told the Daily Item. The truck had been on its way to a lab, Pelachick said. Authorities have asked residents who might see the monkeys to call state police at 570-524-2662. It was unclear if any people or animals were injured in the crash.
State troopers urged people not to look for or capture what were identified as cynomolgus monkeys following the crash..
That type of monkey is often used in scientific research (such as Covid vaccine tests) and can cost up to $10,000 each!They were on their way to a lab in Florida when the crash happened.
Small town cynomolgus rampage
We do have this information from an AP alert: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the agency was providing “technical assistance” to state police. The shipment of monkeys was en route to a CDC-approved quarantine facility after arriving Friday morning at New York’s Kennedy Airport from Mauritius, the agency said.
The mystery still remains on the location where the monkeys were going when they went loose in Danville. What is known is that cynomolgus monkeys are often used in medical studies.
Back in 2020 as vaccine studies stated in earnest, stories were being reported that there was actually a SHORTAGE of the monkey used to study them! The ATLANTIC wrote on August 31, 2020:
In the past seven months, more than 100 COVID-19 vaccines, therapies, and drugs have been pushed into development. But for any of these treatments to make it to humans, they usually have to face another animal first: a monkey. And here, scientists in the United States say they are facing a bottleneck. There just aren’t enough monkeys to go around.
Eventually news organizations ran stories in 2021 thanking monkeys for the COVID shot.
After Friday night’s crash, we have yet to find out how many of these monkeys (which cost $10,000 per monkey by the way) were injured or even killed.
We do know at least one potential injury of a human: Witness Michelle Fallon told the Press Enterprise newspaper in Bloomsburg she spoke with the pickup driver and a passenger after the crash. The driver appeared to be disoriented, and the passenger thought he might have injured his legs, she said.
Fallan went on to say, she and another motorist who stopped to help were standing near the scene when the other driver said he thought he saw a cat run across the road, Fallon said. Fallon peeked into a crate and saw a small monkey looking back at her, she told the newspaper.
BLAME IT ON THE CAT
Cynomolgus monkeys are frequently used in biomedical research because researchers believe these monkeys are said to be the ideal models due to the 90-93% genetic similarity to and recent evolutionary divergence from humans. So it is not surprising to hear they were being shipped to a lab.
While few details on the actual scientific location has been released to the general public, at least the destination state has been. The notation that the monkeys were heading to Florida is interesting.
Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF), a Northern California-based nonprofit organization, has sued to block the development of a new breeding facility that would allegedly house up to 3,200 macaque monkeys. That facility would be in addition to the county’s three existing facilities, where local authorities have recently arrested multiple protesters for trespassing.
An Ohio-based activist group has also filed a complaint with the US Department of Agriculture after staff at one lab, Primate Products, found three macaque monkeys dead from electrocution. The complaint urges the USDA to revoke the facility’s license to sell monkeys for research.
The British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) has also gotten involved, arguing that macaques caught in the wild on the African island of Mauritius are used to produce offspring that are then sent to Florida, and Primate Products.
There is no information showcasing that the monkeys in Danville were destined for such a location.
Nor is there information that they were headed for testing for medicinal purposes. .
The Animal Legal Defense Fund has a page dedicated to agencies that are involved with administering rules and regulations on what can and cannot be tested on animals.
And finally, this VICE news video should be watched with caution and a warning: It is graphic at times but equally showcases the types of experiemention that is performed on monkeys.
And finally, perhaps treat this as a lesson when you are passing by a truck on any given lonesome highway.. what’s in the vehicle? What is that tarp covering? What mysteries exist within the automobile going 80 miles per hour at midnight in small town USA?
