From their home a half-mile away, Tony and Lindsey Cafarella can sometimes hear the morning monkey chatter coming from the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. It’s a reminder that they’re neighbors with hundreds of rhesus macaques, chimpanzees and other species of monkeys.
But after a 2-year-old research monkey was reported missing from the facility on June 15, an increasingly vocal group of local residents and animal-rights activists have called for the facility to be shuttered and forced to relocate.
“That place hasn’t been an issue before,” Tony Cafarella said. “But now I don’t know who to trust.”
The Cafarellas received the same ominous letter that has circulated throughout the neighborhoods along Collins Hill Road in Lawrenceville. “Yerkes kept the recent [monkey] escape from the public for a week,” it read. “Yerkes is not a good neighbor. Yerkes is not a truthful neighbor.”
Yerkes officials maintain that they’ve done nothing wrong and have been honest and cooperative with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, local investigators and their anxious suburban neighbors.
“When [the USDA] came, they felt like we were doing what we needed to be doing,” Yerkes spokeswoman Lisa Newbern said, referring to a recent visit by the federal agency. “We’re doing the best that we can.”
Operated by Emory University, Yerkes is one of eight federally funded national primate research centers. Its scientific contributions include new understandings of monkey and chimp behavior and development of an experimental AIDS vaccine now in its second human clinical trial.
Yerkes keeps a total of about 3,400 primates at a 25-acre campus in Atlanta and the 117-acre field station in Lawrenceville. The field station, which opened in 1966, is home to 1,899 rhesus macaques and 2,220 animals overall.
For most residents in the surrounding neighborhoods, Yerkes often goes unnoticed. The facility’s driveway off Taylor Lane quickly disappears down a tree-canopied path.
“Nobody really realizes it’s there,” said Jane Diebert, who’s lived in the nearby Edgewater subdivision for 14 years.
Over the past three years, the Cafarellas gave little thought to what happens on the other side of the towering tree line that separates the research center from their Westchester Commons neighborhood.
That changed when someone placed a flier on their front door — titled “Why wait for a tragedy?” — warning them that Yerkes placed “you and your family at risk for a week before advising your neighborhood. [The monkey] is still loose in the community.”
“I want to know how a monkey can escape from a place like that,” Tony Cafarella said. “And why they’d take a week to notify the public? We’ve got kids all over this neighborhood.”
Yerkes officials said they didn’t immediately disclose the monkey’s absence because they believed they would find it on their property. That’s a belief some still hold, though a recent Georgia Department of Natural Resources report indicated at least one veterinarian at the research center believes the primate may already be dead.
Newbern declined to comment on the report because Yerkes had yet to review it. She said a new search for the five-pound macaque, known only as Ep13, that involves cataloging each monkey by an identifying chest tattoo, could take at least another 10 days.
That’s of little solace to Randy Muller, who filed a complaint about Yerkes, signed by 18 other residents, with Lawrenceville and Gwinnett authorities. Muller said the field station no longer belongs in a residential area.
Muller has envisioned a number of animal escapee problems that could spill into the neighborhoods near Yerkes: a frightened monkey could bite a child or kill a pet; a macaque could infect someone with the potentially fatal Herpes B virus; a tornado could rip through the facility and expose residents to toxins and diseases used for research at the facility. He’s thought of other worst-case scenarios.
“If this was a reverse situation, there’s no doubt in my mind that they wouldn’t locate here,” said Muller, who also has the backing of animal-rights groups PETA and the Primate Freedom Project.
The facility had virtually no neighbors until developers seized upon the valuable surrounding properties in the 1980s, said Gwinnett historian Elliott Brack. Before then, he said, hardly anyone gave much thought to the field station.
“There probably weren’t a 1,000 people within three miles of that place,” said Brack, who moved into the nearby Pineridge subdivision in the mid-’70s. “It was just farmland and timberland.”
Margie Lohmar, who lives in Edgewater, has been on tour of Yerkes with her family and said concerns about the facility are generally unfounded. But Lohmar has heard it all before, having grown up in Orange Park, Fla., the original site of Yerkes primate research center.
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