Song of the Day 1/30: Alice in Chains, “Lab Monkey”
The residents of a small town in Georgia are about to be outnumbered by monkeys, and they’re not happy about it. Bainbridge, Ga., population 15,000, recently approved construction of a $396 million facility to breed macaques for medical research that will eventually house 30,000 of the creatures.
Laboratories have been scrambling for monkeys since China stopped exporting them to the U.S. during the Covid crisis, so proposals for breeding facilities are popping up to meet the demand. You can imagine how well that goes over with the neighbors.
Use of other animals for testing – the cute ones, like dogs, cats and rabbits – has dropped in recent years, but the need for monkeys has increased, to the point that non-human primates are now No. 1, with more than 100,000 of the animals in testing facilities in the United States. Most will be euthanized after testing ends.
The song is latter-day AIC, from the 2013 LP “The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here,” but it still sounds grungy. Gotta give it to Jerry Cantrell for soldiering on.
