Per Capita Primate Experimentation

A friend recently noticed that Germany and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have about the same number of monkeys in their labs.

There are about 82 million people in Germany and about a quarter of a million people in Madison. Roughly, there are 2,500 primates in German labs and 2,000 at UW-Madison.

So, on a per capita basis, Germans use about .00003 monkeys per person while UW-Madison uses about .008 monkeys per person, or, put another way, UW-Madison uses about 267 times as many monkeys per person as does Germany. Maybe the Madison vivisectors just care more about people than German vivisectors do.

Interestingly, all of Europe uses about 10,000 monkeys a year. Madison is home to one of the gigantic Covance labs. The Covance lab in Madison has about 7,000 monkeys, which means that, altogether, Madison alone uses almost as many monkeys as all of Europe combined.

On a per capita basis, this means that Europe, with its approximately 830 million people uses about .00001 monkeys per person while Madison uses about .036 monkeys per person, or, put another way, Madison consumes about 3,600 times more monkeys per person than does Europe.