The huge number of wild monkeys used for research purposes, more than half of them in the USA, has alarmed conservationists all over the world. The author of this article shows how wild stocks especially of rhesus monkeys have declined as a direct result, and suggests ways in which the wastage now going on could be avoided until research workers become sufficiently alarmed at the prospect of no more wild animals being obtainable to put money into breeding their own supplies. The author is drawing on more than ten years' experience of collecting zoo animals and research primates in Africa and south-east Asia and twenty odd years of zoo animal maintenance.