![]() It took several years for PETA to pick up on Bucky’s trail, but we found him at Steve Martin’s Working Wildlife, an animal dealer and exhibitor in California who trains exotic animals for commercials and movies. After the USDA sanctions, Buckshire sold many of the chimpanzees held in its basement. Two of those violations resulted from keeping chimpanzees in cages that did not meet the 5-foot-by-5-foot minimum size (imagine living in an area that size for decades!) and Bucky’s obviously sorry mental state. Department of Agriculture (USDA) sanctions against Buckshire for violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act. That’s when PETA’s investigator videotaped Bucky rocking ceaselessly from loneliness and the trauma of losing his mother. Bucky was returned to Buckshire’s basement laboratory cages when he was 2 years old. LEMSIP tore Bucky from his mother and gave him to Buckshire, and from there, at 7 months of age, he was given to a tawdry traveling photo business run by a Florida couple. LEMSIP had an ugly habit of giving babies to Buckshire in exchange for using other Buckshire chimpanzees for breeding and testing. Bucky was born in 1992 at the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates (LEMSIP) at New York University. Evidence indicates that Walter’s name before coming to AWR was Bucky, and at the time of PETA’s 1994 investigation into animal supplier Buckshire in Perkasie, Pennsylvania, he was just 2 years old. Walter is an 11-year-old chimpanzee who has been at AWR since he was 9 years old. The chimpanzees, including one who Azzopardi claims appeared in a remake of Planet of the Apes, spent their days staring at the walls, lying on a garbage-strewn metal resting platform, or screaming and fighting with one another because of the unnatural and stressful conditions. Over time, she found out that this was the usual state of affairs at AWR. Our investigator was appalled when, on her very first visit to AWR, she saw piles of rotten food and feces swarming with flies and maggots in the chimps’ depressing cell. The indoor chimpanzee cage at AWR was an underground cement pit that resembled a dungeon.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |