They are known in the biomedical trade as non-human primates, as if to emphasize both their proximity to and their distance from ourselves. This ambivalence provokes a sentimentality which can make us laugh when we see them mimicking a tea party on the vicarage lawn, or choke at the sight of them caged in screeching torment. It can also provide the wherewithal to keep us alive, help us to control our vices, and make some of us rich through a trade which, in global generalities and gruesome particulars, resembles the high days of human slave traffic.
Monkeys and apes have no special talent for music or microcircuitry, but like us they have strong and reckless tastes. Their intelligence can be a source of astonishment; their social structures often poignantly mirror our own. Human responses to the lower primates are rooted in the shock and fear of recognition; a monkey which too closely imitates the highest rank of primates is running a deadly risk.
In Bombay earlier this year, a large black rhesus watched a motorcyclist strike down its mate. It attacked the next motorcyclist to pass by, bit the ear off a policeman and injured 15 other people before it was caught and despatched.
In Florida a few years ago, a female vervet was accidentally caught spread-eagled in the cage wiring of a monkey sanctuary. With no keeper in attendance, it risked a scorching from the sun. A male partner took it on the back instead, by shielding her body with his own and suffering a good deal of dehydration during the 90 minutes of exposure before being released from his chivalrous posture.
Man is often flummoxed when confronted with examples of near-human behaviour in monkeys, even when he has encouraged and stimulated it himself. An illuminating episode concerns Nim, the star of a troop of chimpanzees which had been taught sign language.
Nim was reared during the early 1970s in a pillared mansion at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, where he wore clothes, helped with the housework (including cooking, sweeping and laundry) and addressed his human fellow-students in the manual language of the deaf. From Stanford he was sent to Oklahoma Institute of Primate Studies, where, with others of his kind, he furthered his "education". The troop and its mentor, Roger Fouts, attracted enormous media interest and not a little academic controversy.
Nim was borrowed for three years by Dr Herbert Terrace, a New York researcher who intended to provide evidence supporting the belief in Nim's high intelligence. Instead he turned first sceptical, then dismissive, calling Nim's efforts at communication no more than imitative hand-flapping performed for reward.
As a result, Fouts's programme fell into disfavour and its funding was reduced. The problems were heightened by the tendency of the chimpanzees, once small and charming, to grow large and less tractable. A visiting professor lost a finger when he tried to feed the baby of a surly veteran, and threatened a law suit. There were also attacks on students. Finally the programme came to a complete halt. Several of the animals, including Nim and his brother Ali, were sent to a medical institute in New York state, where they were made ready for the batch-testing of hepatitis B vaccine.
At this point, reports began to circulate that Nim had made signs indicating that he "wanted out". America's animal defenders rose up in rage. The medical institute tried to argue that the vaccine testing involved no cruelty, but they were unable to stem the flood of protest. Nim and Ali were returned to Oklahoma - although the rest of the shipment, lacking star quality, was retained.
Oklahoma, of course, still had no use for the brothers. Nim was sold to an animal charity and Ali to a New Mexico chimpanzee laboratory owned by a German drug company.
Many stories indicating parallels between man and monkey seep from far corners of the world, just as there are numerous examples of the working partnership between the two. In southern Thailand, for example, monkeys have traditionally shinned up coconut trees to collect the crop for their owners.
A more sophisticated work project was initiated a couple of years ago at Tufts-New England Medical Centre in America by Dr Mary Willard, who trained three female capuchins - the old organ grinder's monkey - to serve in the homes of disabled humans. One of the animals was placed with a paralyzed car-crash victim; she was reported to have responded to clicks of the young man's tongue by combing his hair, spoon-feeding him and sprucing his apartment with a miniature vacuum cleaner.
More rarely reported was that her teeth had been removed to prevent her biting, and that ultimate control derived not from the clicking tongue, but from an electric-shock pad strapped to her waist. The capuchin project still thrives, with six more animals going about their electrically stimulated business.
Among the other famous primates put into the service of man were the space chimpanzees of the 1960s. NASA's lower-primate heroes also had their teeth removed and, according to Tom Wolfe in "The Right Stuff", were trained with electric shocks and punished by beatings with rubber hoses.
The first and most celebrated of the NASA chimps was Ham, who came close to drowning when his returning capsule overshot its landing point by more than one hundred miles. He died only a few months ago, in his late 20s. Since his retirement in 1963 he had spent all but a year of his time in solitary confinement at a zoo.
Not that the scientific community is uniformly insensitive to either the special ethical problems arising from primate use, or to the growing clamour of animal liberationists.
It is symptomatic of the increasingly heated climate that those who do go on record to challenge the liberationist logic - by emphasizing statutory obligations, pointing to the demands of the public and explaining the attempts to find alternatives - can end up receiving phone threats and attacks on their property.
One such is a British man who chooses to be identified as "an international expert in the use and provision of primates for the biomedical field" - the reticence being prompted by a recent death threat. His view of the animal "defenders" is that they are guilty of both the richest hypocrisy and dissemination of plain lies. "Most of what I read about trapping, shipping and the diseased condition in which the animals are supposed to arrive is frankly incorrect. In the laboratories they are handled by very professional people who do care. Compared to the treatment received by other animals, such as cattle, they fare very well.
"Ultimately you have to bear in mind that they are not little people. They are animals, and I believe we should make use of them so long as it is done humanely ╔ unless, of course, the argument is that we should all be vegetarians and not wear leather shoes or permit horse racing. And that argument is nonsense."
The space race gave monkeys glamour. No such visibility or acclaim attends the use to which they are put in the related field of military research, where they are also proving to be an invaluable resource. Starting in 1957, monkeys have been placed at the sites of American atomic tests, at varying distances from the explosions and heights from ground zero. Some of those which survived were sent for observation to Yerkes Regional Primate Centre, where they developed cancer.
Radiation tests continued at numerous military and civilian institutes. In Bethesda, Maryland, for example, irradiated monkeys were taught to run a treadwheel, encouraged by the inevitable electric shock. It is estimated that 2,000 primates were irradiated at this one establishment alone.
At another Brooks Air Force Base in Texas, a scandal arose in March, 1980 when the base's principal researcher resigned over what he considered to be the meaningless torture of the animals. Looking back over his 14 years at the base, Dr Donald Barnes sees what he described as "a period of conditioned ethical blindness". He continued: "I snapped out of it only because of the blatant redundancy of the radiation experiments."
The purpose of that experiment was to gauge the effect of radiation on human performance, including that of an irradiated, dying pilot. The monkeys were dosed with radiation. Then, with jolts of electricity shooting through their feet and vomit trickling down their chins, they were sent "flying" through a variety of what aeronautical engineers call pitch and roll modes, in a device known as a primate equilibrium platform. In the early days of the experiment, "death watches" were established so that the last lingering agonies of the animals could be observed. Barnes put an end to that. After 10 hours of "performance" and study, they were put to death.
The primate equilibrium platform, Barnes says, is still in use today at Brooks Air Force Base. Now it is used largely to test the effectiveness of such anti-nerve gas agents as atropine and benactzine.
Anti-nerve gas work involving primates is also taking place in Britain, although few details emerge from the Chemical Defence Establishment (CDE) at Porton Down. It is, however, on record that the CDE has a colony of at least 1,000 cynomolgus, rhesus and marmoset monkeys, that the majority are bred on the site, and that their primates have been used to test antidotes to SOMAN nerve gas. This year a scientist from the CDE's Trauma Section joined researchers from Queen's University, Belfast and the Royal Army Medical School in a study which involved the firing of "high-velocity missiles" into the heads of members of the rhesus species.
The majority of primate experiments in this country are far more mundane. Typically an animal, confined to a metal cage, is injected with a pilot drug or compound. It will be observed, then dissected. The Home Office registered 6,186 experiments involving primates in 1981, the last year for which figures are available; that was a slight increase on the previous year.
It is known, however, that the batch-testing of live polio vaccine caused the deaths of about 300 cynomolgus monkeys last year at Wellcome Laboratories in Beckenham, Kent, and of a similar number at the National Institute of Biological Standards and Control, where the experiment was repeated.
Records for 1978, the last available year, establish that 1,342 monkeys died at Huntingdon Laboratories in Cambridge. Along with ICI and the Medical Research Council, Huntingdon is probably Britain's largest primate consumer. While it has already said that it would like to consume fewer, it adds that the 1968 Medicines Act, together with the possibility of claims against their clients - the endlessly prolific drug companies - make such grim consumption necessary.
Many of these programmes operate on the assumption that the lower primates are sufficiently like us to be used as substitute models, yet sufficiently different that their ultimate fate is of no great concern. The ambiguity is also a potent lure: the identification of that elusive dividing line means that the creatures may be used even more efficiently to throw back the frontiers of knowledge, to purge us of disease and vice, to sharpen our weapons and strengthen our shields. To these ends there are junkie monkeys in Britain testing antidotes to narcotics, alcoholic monkey suffering delirium tremens, and monkeys in Lyons that have been smashed up in French automobile impact tests.
It is in America, however, that research descends to the level of the genuinely grotesque. At Cleveland's Metropolitan Hospital in the early 1970s, 18 doctors spent six days transplanting the head of one monkey on to the body of another in order to improve our understanding of diseases of the nervous system. At the US National Institute for Neurological Diseases, chimpanzees are being hit on the head until they die in order to reproduce and determine the extent of cerebral damage in professional boxers. Scientists at the Wisconsin Regional Primate Centre have injected pregnant female monkeys with hormones which produced hermaphrodite offspring.
Wisconsin also sponsored a range of elaborate maternal-deprivation experiments, some of which involved infants enduring six weeks of solitary confinement in vertical metal chambers. A scaled-down version of this programme also ran in Britan throughout the early 1970s at the Medical Research Council's unit at Madlingley, Cambridge. Infant monkeys were separated from their mothers for 13 days, stress signs were identified and when the reunions took place it was solemnly noted that those infants which had been separated the longest showed a tendency to cling most passionately to their rediscovered mothers.
Non-human primates have been changing hands for 5,000 years or more. Accounts dating back to ancient Egypt show them as pets, zoo specimens, agriculture labourers, circus exhibits, objects of religious veneration and, increasingly in our own time, laboratory tools.
The roots of the modern biomedical relationship extend to the late nineteenth century, when a number of Russians sought cures for tuberculosis and the plague. It was in Sukhumi, by the Black Sea, that the world's first major primate centre opened in 1927, and yet by then Dr Serge Voronoff had already performed his startling rejuvenation routines that involved transplanting slivers of chimpanzee testicle (known in polite circles as "sex glands") into the scrotums of aging humans.
More sombre breakthroughs came with the beating of yellow fever in Panama, the discovery of the Rh factor in blood - thus combating the blue baby syndrome - and the West's holy war against poliomyelytis, which cost in the region of 1.5 million monkey lives - and is still costing.
When the polio programme began in the 1950s, neither North American nor Europe had anything approaching sufficient rhesus stock. It was to India they turned, and at the height of the battle three planeloads were arriving every week at London Airport, each plane packed with 1,600 monkeys.
For the majority, death came long before the laboratories required them to give up their kidneys. They were lost through absurdly reckless trapping, holding and transit operations. In January 1955, 394 animals died in an unventilated van at London Airport while en route to New York. Hundreds more at a time perished from disease and starvation in the holds of ships. But it was not until the early 1970s, when rabies swept through Europe, that rigorous controls were finally introduced.
India had since been joined in the marketplace by several Asian and African countries. By then, as well as polio vaccine, there was a proliferation of monkey projects involving a host of Old World species including vervets and macaques. The US now had its seven regional primate centres, while Britain enjoyed a more modest programme, principally orchestrated through the Medical Research Council.
Inevitably, the almost lustful importation from the wild had to slow down. Official reports were issued in Britain and the US warning of an impending shortage and calling for increased domestic breeding, self reliance and less waste.
Little heed was paid, however, until the Indian authorities turned off the tap in 1978. Apart from their concern at a relative scarcity of a once inexhaustible bounty, they had been revolted by the American radiation and neutron bomb tests: these had not been in the contract.
Bangladesh looked a likely substitute for supplies until she abruptly cancelled an exclusive 10-year contract with an Oregon firm called MoL Enterprises, also citing radiation experiments performed on early shipments. MoL retorted with a $15m law suit, and a larger one against a competitor it claimed had bribed Bangladeshi officials to get the deal abandoned.
Meanwhile another US competitor, Charles River, plunged into the rhesus breeding business with two privately-owned monkey islands off Key West in Florida. Each free-range Charles River rhesus - just like the company's production-belt, caesarian delivered rodents - came guaranteed clean with a multi-digit code stamped on its chest.
Charles River offered more hope when it announced that the irreplaceable rhesus wasn't quite as irreplaceable as had been supposed; that the relatively plentiful, widely dispersed cynomolgus macaque would serve as well in many key laboratory routines, including the testing of polio vaccine.
This brought such potential macaque suppliers as Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia more prominently into play. African baboons were also becoming a standard laboratory tool, particularly in Britain. But the truly burgeoning trade began developing in South American (New World) primates such as the marmoset and the squirrel monkey.
The majority of laboratory-reared animals live one or a handful to a metal cage and are addressed under hot lights by scrubbed-up, white-coated operatives: this, at least, is the general picture in Britain, where the Home Office watches over matters of hygiene.
At the "resource" end, the picture is less sophisticated. Shirley McGreal, US chairman of the International Primate Protection League, says that monkeys "are not caught by professionals in white smocks. They are trapped by locals who sell them to middle-men like so many cans of beans.
"The highest mortality happens at holding stations. These local people have no regard for the monkeys. To them, they are just local pests. They are not fed well, they will squeeze six or seven into a 3ft cage, they will lift and drop the cage as if they were moving carts of stone."
Top of the US and United Kingdom import league at present is the cynomolgus macaque. This is an intelligent, social animal that has carved a niche for itself across the whole of the Asian lowlands, including Borneo and the coastal islands. In Bali it is regarded as sacred.
Cynomolgus live mostly in mangrove swamps where they swim and fish for crustaceans. Theirs is a male-dominated, completely polygamous society that bands together in troops of up to 50.
Britain's major cynomolgus operator is Keith Hobbs, whose company is called Intersimian. Hobbs is a veteran monkey handler who was commissioned by the Medical Research Council in the early 1970s to take stock of Britain's primate prospects; it was he who called for more breeding and an upgrading of standards.
Since the beginning of the year his company has been shipping cynomolgus back to Britain, principally to Shamrock Farms of Sussex. Shamrock is, in fact, Britain's largest importer from the wild, and practically the sole supplier of Old World species to British laboratories.
Before their sale to the biomedical community, each of Shamrock's monkeys is "conditioned" at the company's farm premises outside the West Sussex village of Small Dole. Here the animals are given a five-figure chest tattoo and housed in small metal cages within prefabricated cabins.
They will have arrived from the wild in a state of stress and sickness incurred by rapid switches through alien environments. For the flight itself, perhaps half a dozen strangers would have been crated together. Fighting is not unusual in such circumstances, and since there is nowhere to retreat fatalities occur. It is also typical to find them, when the crate is opened, huddled in each other's arms.
A former Shamrock worker reported coming across such scenes and also finding dead babies in the containers. The mothers, he believes, were too vexed to cope with birth on the move. Shamrock's founder and chairman, Edwin Lonsdale, admits to losing two or three animals from every batch of 50 within the first few days. But a regimen of vitamins and injections, he says, rebuilds the great majority and within about six weeks they are ready for shipment to the customer.
A large number go for polio vaccine and drug testing, a smaller percentage to the Chemical Defence. Establishment at Porton Down, which now also breeds its own monkeys. Shamrock has also supplied a French testing house, which received a degree of publicity after killing 31 baboons in simulated car smashes.
It was this last routine, together with an on-site "freezing experiment", that raised the ire of many animal liberationists. For two years in the late 1970s - according to Shamrock's own journal - 25 cynomolgus were kept in "a kennel and run with minimal heating in the living area". The 18 that survived were then divided into two experimental groups of nine.
The first batch all perished when night temperatures fell below freezing. Five from the second batch also died during a 14-hour period. The remaining four were saved by an infra-red heater and were left out for the rest of the winter. Despite the losses, the experiment had pointed to "large savings" in heating bills.
Earlier this year the Animal Liberation Front broke into Shamrock, spraying paint and blood and destroying medical equipment. Last month several thousand protesters marched to the Small Dole premises. Now coils of barbed wire have gone up around the perimeter and sentries make night patrols.
Edwin Lonsdale seems baffled by the liberationist storm that now whips around his enterprise. In the old days it was simple business, a straightforward matter of humans taking natural precedence over monkeys. He entered the trade after the war when, with two friends, he went to India. Originally it was to collect zoo stock. Then he ran into that bottomless, gilt-edged polio vaccine business.
Mr Lonsdale says he has felt "sad" about the fate of his monkeys. "Have done for 25 years", he says. "And that's the truth!" But when he reflects on the "millions of lives saved" due to primate-assisted medical developments, he expresses no qualms whatsoever. "I'd sooner all the monkeys in Africa than my family. And my friends' families."
All the monkeys in Africa and Asia and South America are indeed threatened by the vanity of the advancing human populations. The highest primate - the human - requires the monkey's habitat, both timber and land. And if the monkey continues to haunt its old territory, it will be killed as a pest or, better yet, trapped and sold to eager western traders.
