I am inclined to agree if it weren't for the importance of at least some of the research being done with primates as model organisms. I am against using primates in advertisements, keeping them in zoos (except for breeding purposes) and all other entertainment, though.
I used to talk to a man named Jim Cronin who lived in Dorset before his death and ran a sanctuary called Monkey World (you may know it it was an animal planet tv series for a while). He told me that 90% of apes in captivity are the result of circumstance, by that i mean he had over 600 primates on site at that point and that about half were rescued from laboratories a quarter liberated from being props of street entertainers and the remaining quarter were born in captivity and were deemed unfit for reintroduction to Jane Goodall's "sanctuaries" (although they're more like a small national park) in Africa.
Equally a few years later in my animal management diploma we had a guest speaker from Borneo who affirmed the statement.
Primates are rarely taken from the wild for the pet trade explicitly, poachers kill the families in their entirety in order to sell the flesh as bush meet to the locals and to sell the bones to witch doctors and other crack pot bullshit peddlers. They make a lot of money off of this, the babies of the families are sold off as pets although i know for a fact that in most parts of Uganda a baby gorilla is only worth about the same as to knuckle bones of a silver back.
Point being MOST zoos don't take the animals from the wild because rescue animals are so numerous as it is.
primates aren't particularly reliable for medical testing from what i'm told mice work a lot better for it. What i can tell you for sure is that primates can be killed by the common cold but most are able to live comfortably with HIV or AIDS.
