Richard Spertzel: Your small ones: mice, rats, guinea pigs, I believe came from... commercial suppliers, anyway, I think. I'm trying to think of the name, it escapes me.
Paperno: The name doesn't matter. What about large ones?
Spertzel: The large ones, the primates, the... basically Rhesus monkeys, all of them I think came from India, but those animals are available here in the States. The donkeys that were involved in the VEE were bought commercially, but that's not a problem: they're all over the US.
Paperno: And where did your animals come from?
Gennadiy N. Lepeshkin: The same types of sources. Except that in our case...
Paperno: But there weren't any monkeys in the USSR.
Lepeshkin: There was the Sukhumi Wildlife Preserve.
Paperno: What wildlife preserve?
Lepeshkin: The monkey nursery at the Sukhumi Wildlife Preserve.
Paperno: And monkeys were bred there for your use?
Lepeshkin: Yes, there were loads of monkeys there. And literally any... they were for sale specifically for all types of research, anywhere in the Soviet Union.
Paperno: And are there types of experiments and research that can only be done, for example, on gorillas?
Lepeshkin: No, we never used gorillas in our work.
Paperno: And what was the purpose of that huge cage on the island?
Lepeshkin: It held four monkeys, small ones. It was a monkey collective.