Protester Gets Forum at Conference on Animals

Four days after about 100 demonstrators marched on the San Diego Zoo to protest the sale of animals to research laboratories, the zoo’s research director gave the most outspoken protester a shot at an international conference on primate conservation.

Javier Burgos, leader of a Pasadena-based animal rights group, spoke Thursday for about 20 minutes before the conference participants at the Vacation Village Hotel in San Diego. He asked members of the audience at the conference, titled “Primates: The Road to Self-Sustaining Populations,” to sign a petition and side with him in condemning the cooperation of zookeepers and research scientists.

“We already know the researchers are our enemies,” said Burgos, who leads SUPPRESS (Students United Protesting Painful Research Experiments on Sentient Subjects). “We want to know of the zoo people, who is on our side and who is not? We know there are many people who are selling animals out the back door. If you knew what these people were doing to the animals . . . some of you would not want to be in the same room with them.”

Given the chance to ask questions, some conference members stood up to dispute Burgos’ claims, but most were content to call out, “We don’t agree with you” when Burgos asked for a show of hands from those who supported his cause. Many were shaking their heads in disbelief as Burgos spoke.

“I was shocked,” said Joseph Lindholm, a student at UC Berkeley. “I suppose it (letting Burgos speak) had to be done. This brought it out into the open.” Lindholm stepped to a microphone to tell Burgos that research laboratories have been responsible for saving several endangered primate species from extinction.

Kurt Benirschke, the San Diego Zoo’s research director and head of the conference, said he was “bending over backward to give (Burgos) space on the program” because “it’s an open meeting. It’s a free society.” Benirschke had asked Burgos to speak at a smaller conference workshop, but Burgos demanded that he be allowed to address the entire conference, Benirschke said.

“I think it’s very disruptive to what is planned as a wholesome, forward-looking discussion,” Benirschke said, adding that the five-day conference was intended to defuse any antagonism among zoo officials, field researchers and laboratory researchers. “These factions have never spoken together to come to grips with the overriding problems of the most endangered species.”

Ruth Keesling, a trustee of the Denver-based Morris Animal Foundation, which co-sponsored the event with the zoo, said Burgos and other protesters were missing the point of the conference.

“They’re against everything because, from an emotional standpoint, that’s what gets them attention,” she said. “There are people here (in the conference) that object to other people being here, and that’s what this conference is all about. . . . It makes them face each other across the table and come up with a viable program to save the animals.”

About a dozen protesters from PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) began to demonstrate in the long hotel driveway Thursday morning, carrying posters of monkeys being abused in experiments. Three were arrested by hotel security guards and charged with trespassing, and the group was escorted off the hotel grounds.

The protesters, like Burgos, accused several conference participants of conducting abusive experiments on animals. They also objected to zoos offering their surplus animals to research labs and said zoos don’t check to make sure the lab experiments are not harmful.

Officials of both the Los Angeles and San Diego Zoos have said that neither zoo has sold a primate to a lab because no lab has accepted the zoos’ conditions that the animals be used only for breeding or display purposes.

Roger Short, an Australian conservationist who spoke Wednesday at the conference on the need for ethics in animal research, said he didn’t mind the protest.

“I think it’s necessary to have people constantly questioning--we need to be reminded of our responsibility,” he said. “(But) to imagine that there’s a Mafia trying to get another gorilla out of Rwanda so they can vivisect it, is just baying at the moon.”