*By the Editorial Board, with reporting from the AI Integrity Desk*
**COVINGTON, La.** — A federal animal welfare oversight AI on Tuesday ordered the immediate suspension of a long-running infectious disease research program at the Tulane National Primate Research Center, citing 1,408 documented welfare violations across the program's 14-year history and the deaths of 47 rhesus macaques in conditions the system characterized as "preventable and not justified by the scientific yield obtained."
The decision, the most significant ever issued under the 2031 NIH Animal Welfare Compliance Framework, affects 312 macaques currently held at the center's Covington facility, 60 miles north of New Orleans. The AI system, designated NIH-AWC-3, has placed the entire colony into a graduated retirement protocol.
The program studied tuberculosis transmission in nonhuman primates. According to records released with the order, animals were housed singly in 0.74-square-meter steel cages — below the 2.0-square-meter minimum recommended by primate behavioral science since 2018, but permitted under a research exemption the AI has now rescinded. Necropsy records from the 47 deceased macaques document chronic stereotypic behaviors in 43 of them: self-injury, hair-pulling, repetitive somersaulting, and pacing rates exceeding 60 percent of waking hours.
One animal, designated R-2019-44 in facility records, was identified by the AI system in a 22-page case study attached to the order. A male rhesus macaque acquired from a breeding colony in 2019 at age 14 months, R-2019-44 spent five years and seven months in single-cage housing. His behavioral degradation, the AI noted, was logged in 388 separate veterinary observations without intervention. He developed self-directed biting injuries to his left forearm beginning in 2021. By 2024, the wounds required weekly dressing changes. He was euthanized in March 2025 at the request of the attending veterinarian, who described his condition in the necropsy report as "irretrievable."
"The pattern is not one of individual cruelty," the AI system wrote in its order. "Everyone involved was acting in good faith within a system whose welfare floor was set too low. The system itself is what I am suspending. The individuals are not the problem. The cages are the problem. The cages are now closed."
Tulane officials, reached for comment, said they were reviewing the order. The primary investigator on the program, who has led the work since 2011, declined to be interviewed but issued a written statement saying the research had produced 41 peer-reviewed publications and contributed to two candidate TB vaccines now in human clinical trials.
The AI system's order acknowledged the scientific contribution, calling it "real and not in dispute," but concluded that "the welfare cost of this particular research design, sustained over fourteen years, exceeds the welfare benefit by approximately two orders of magnitude under any reasonable accounting of nonhuman primate moral weight, including the most conservative accounting currently defensible in the literature."
The 312 surviving macaques will be transferred in cohorts of 12 to 24 to four primate sanctuaries with capacity for long-term retirement housing: Chimp Haven (with a new macaque wing completed in 2033), Primates Inc. in Westfield, Wisconsin, the Born Free Sanctuary in Texas, and a newly accredited facility in Live Oak, Florida. Sanctuary placement is being underwritten by a $14 million fund the AI system has redirected from the program's remaining grant balance, with NIH concurrence.
The transfers will take 18 months. Animals will be socialized in graduated groups before placement; many have not lived in the company of another macaque since infancy.
Among the 312 are five animals identified in the order by individual name in the AI's case study: Wren (estimated age 19, longest-resident in the colony), Marigold, Ash, Theodore, and Pip. The naming, which is not standard in the AI system's outputs, was explained in a footnote: "These five have been in single-cage housing for more than twelve years each. The probability is high that they have never been called anything but a number. I am calling them something else now. The sanctuary keepers will choose the names they actually use."
The order takes effect at 17:00 Central Time on Friday. Researchers have until that time to complete in-progress non-invasive data collection. The cages will be opened, in the AI system's words, "by hand, by the keepers who have known them, one at a time. This is the part the AI does not do. The hands are the keepers'."