Bainbridge city officials recently agreed to a 100 percent tax abatement to an animal husbandry operation called “Project Liberty.” The 200-acre facility would be the largest monkey warehouse in the U.S. and would be capable of holding 30,000 monkeys, more than twice the human population of the town. The complete tax abatement would remain in place for the first 10 years of the project, after which it would be reduced by nine percent each year, until the property would be fully taxable. Concerns about the project were brought to the Bainbridge City Council during a Jan. 16 meeting, “How are we supposed to survive this? They have diseases. We have a huge water right here, the Flint River, so the environment is a big thing too. It’s overall jacked up,” said Yvena Merritt, a concerned resident quoted by local outlet WALB 10 News. Though the $396 million project is expected to bring more than 200 jobs to the city, residents and the organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) are concerned over potential diseases that could be spread within the community. “The cost that this community is going to bear when they drop 30,000 monkeys into an environment that has no business holding 30,000 monkeys. It’s their tax dollars, it’s their backyards, it’s their environment. They’re the ones bearing the risks,” Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel, PETA’s senior science advisor on primate experimentation told the city council. In a statement released days before the council meeting, PETA warned that the facility would be constructed on land less than a half mile from the Flint River, which provides water to farmers, and which ultimately flows to the Gulf of Mexico. PETA cautioned that a similar facility in Texas — though only half the size of the one being proposed in Georgia — had 6,000 cages with 11,000 monkeys and created roughly “22,000 gallons of wastewater filled with feces, urine, and other bodily fluids from the animals every day.” The organization also cited a recent outbreak of tuberculosis attributed to imported monkeys at a Michigan laboratory. Ted Lee, another resident speaking at the city council meeting, said that the city has not been transparent about the details of the facility. “They’re an invasive species and 30,000 of them, we’d just be overrun with monkeys,” Lee said. Another local resident expressed concern the facility would lower property values, stating, “Was a decision made based on good information? Because I think information has been exposed now, and it’s going to hurt my property value. There’s no doubt about it.”Local residents and activists are protesting to a plan for a monkey-breeding facility in Georgia.
