In a statement forwarded by Vanessa Kauffman, a public affairs specialist with the Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency said that it considered the Yerkes application “on its merits in determining whether the legal requirements of the Endangered Species Act were met.” “This unauthorized loophole allows people to buy their way out of the species protections of the ESA,” Boyle said in a statement issued at the time, “and undermines our collective, global efforts to protect endangered and threatened animals from harm and abuse.”įor its part, the Fish and Wildlife Service has publicly maintained that the Endangered Species Act explicitly makes room for these sorts of transactions. Brendan Boyle, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, said that his office had compiled information suggesting that “virtually every one of the more than 1,300 permits given out in the last five years involves this pay-to-play scheme,” and he called on the Fish and Wildlife Service to halt the practice. Transactions under these arrangements have involved everything from elephants and tigers to South African penguins and rare black rhinoceroses - all of them changing hands under pay-to-play arrangements that involved donations for as little as $500. Critics call this little more than a “pay-to-play” scheme that benefits labs and zoos - and even trophy hunters and amusement parks - while providing negligible dividends for endangered species. The judge’s ire, along with that of a growing chorus of primate researchers, wildlife advocates and legal experts, was drawn by the agency’s practice of allowing the sale, import, or export of endangered animals - all nominally forbidden by the Endangered Species Act, or ESA - if the permit applicant makes a donation, sometimes a very small one, to an organization that protects the species in question.
District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson declared, “appears to thwart the dynamic of environmental protection that Congress plainly intended when it mandated that no export of endangered species be allowed.” The agency’s broad interpretation of the act, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the federal agency that issued the original permit to Yerkes for shipping the animals, and whose mandate includes enforcing the Endangered Species Act. That cleared the way for the journey to Wingham - but in issuing her decision, the judge also delivered a stinging rebuke of the U.S. signaled the end of a drawn-out battle pitting animal rights groups, legal scholars, and many scientists against both the Yerkes lab and Wingham park - a saga that reached its climax in September when a federal judge struck down the final challenge of activists who had sued to block the shipment of the chimpanzees abroad. Their usefulness in that regard ended last year, when the federal government stopped funding experiments involving the primates, and listed captive chimpanzees as an endangered species. The cargo: seven chimpanzees, aged 21 to 39, all of whom had been the subject of behavioral research for decades at Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta. The cages had been loaded off a plane that flew across the Atlantic from Atlanta and were “carrying a very precious cargo, one the park has been working on for more than three years,” according to a press release issued soon after. I n late October, an SUV hauling a trailer bearing seven cages marked “live animal” pulled into Wingham Wildlife Park, a zoo in Kent, England.
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