<B>By Deepa BHOOKHUN</B>

Did you know that monkeys, like other primates, have shown impressive intellectual abilities, such as counting and understanding relationships between numbers?

Did you know that they possess a sense of fairness? Did you know that they have shown remarkable social intelligence? Have you noticed how cute they are?

You probably didn?t know but you?ve probably noticed. But then you didn?t give it any other thought. Why should you?

But did you know that ?humane? animal experiments include among other things, surgically implanting metal pipes into the skulls of monkeys to induce stress?

All in the name of experiments that would help human beings? But, above all, do you care?

Biosphere Trading Limited is a company awaiting government green light to go ahead with a project that will make a lot of money, which I guess is good for them.

The project brings foreign investment, so I guess that?s good for the country. The only problem - and it?s a big one at that - is that the company will be engaged in the business of capturing primates, breeding them and eventually selling those poor, poor animals to a company in the US for medical experiments. To help research on diseases such as Alzheimer, Parkinson, Aids and malaria, we are told.

Hundreds of millions of dogs, cats, rats, mice and primates are used and killed every year in the name of science. Many experiments are agonising, unreliable and pointless. In a recent British Medical Journal article, researchers who compared animal experiments and clinical trials concluded, ?Animal studies are of limited usefulness to human health because they are of poor quality and their results often conflict with human trials.? Whatever pro-vivisection people may say, bearing in mind that they always have vested interests, experimenting on animals is cruel and should be stopped. Animals are not ours to kill.

They are not ours to do as we please with, regardless of what our inflated egos may tell us.

And the cruelty to animals should alarm us all.

Laboratories always claim that they take good care of the animals before they are actually used as guinea pigs (ironic how telling the term is, huh?) but investigations undertaken by animal rights organisations such as PETA show systematically that this is not the case, that those animals are cruelly mistreated regardless of what the companies officially say. Any wonder? The argument that animal experiments help save human lives doesn?t hold anymore now that it has been proven un true and that alternative methods are known to exist. So what other reasons are there to condone so much suffering apart from financial gains? Money made in blood? Biosphere Limited is awaiting the green light from government. Government?s response will be the test of the kind of civilisation we believe in. Will it be money made in blood and at the expense of so much suffering?

Or will our rulers? compassion shine through it all?

This is a test. Now is the time to pass it.