PLANET OF THE RETIRED APES
By Charles Siebert
New York Times
July 24, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/24/magazine/24CHIMPS.html
This past spring, in a secluded patch of forest in northwest Louisiana's
Caddo Parish, a singularly bizarre bit of evolution unfolded. There,
amid
the sun-dappled pines and flitting birds, a pair of 40-something
chimpanzees
named Rita and Teresa -- lifetime research subjects who were originally
taken from Africa for use in NASA's space program -- became American
pioneers of a whole other sort: the first beneficiaries of an inspired
piece
of retirement legislation passed by the United States government. Under
the
watchful eyes of animal behaviorists, veterinarians, enrichment
specialists
and daily caretakers, Rita and Teresa checked in on the afternoon of
April 4
at the recently opened Chimp Haven, the first federally financed,
taxpayer-supported retirement home for chimpanzees.
They arrived in a specially equipped trailer after an eight-hour drive
from
the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research in San Antonio, Tex.
After
receiving full physicals from Chimp Haven's in-house veterinarian,
including
dental checkups for possible extractions or root canals, the two chimps
were
shown to their spacious new sleeping quarters, complete with fresh
running
water and cross-ventilation, multiple windows and skylights, hammocks
made
of neatly crosshatched sections of used fire hose, bedding of warm
blankets
and hay, vanity mirrors, as well as a TV, a VCR and DVD and CD players.
Following a long nap, Rita and Teresa awoke to a couple of banana
smoothies
and were shown the door to their courtyard. As it was recalled to me by
a
staff member, they paused a moment to regard the somewhat otherworldly
prospect of a wide-open, odor-free patio, a playground jungle gym and,
just
beyond the play yard's far walls, their own private five-acre expanse of
grapevine-laced pines and sweetgums. And then, as if in some unwitting
primate pantomime of the very Apollo 11 moonwalk they'd helped to make a
reality, they stepped out into the sunlight and tentatively down onto an
equally unfamiliar earth.
In the months since Rita and Teresa arrived at Chimp Haven, a number of
fellow research chimps have followed in their bold footsteps: Augusta,
Conan, Suzanna, Ellie, Puddin' and Merv, all from the Yerkes National
Primate Research Center, a major facility for infectious-disease and
behavioral research in Atlanta. Another group of chimps from the
Southwest
Foundation in San Antonio came soon afterward. Thirty retirees are now
in
residence. By the time Chimp Haven, parts of which are still under
construction, has its official ribbon-cutting ceremony in October,
approximately 75 chimps will have settled there. When the facility is
fully
completed, sometime in 2006, it will hold up to 200.
Chimp Haven is a happy consequence of the Chimpanzee Health Improvement,
Maintenance and Protection (or Chimp) Act, passed in the final days of
the
Clinton administration. The bill allotted up to $30 million, pending
matching funds from private donations, for the construction of the
facility,
which, with future expansions, could house as many as 900 chimps and
serve
as a template for the nationwide ''system of sanctuaries'' mandated by
Congress to accommodate the country's growing number of surplus
chimpanzees.
Whether or not Chimp Haven is, as its publicity brochure proclaims,
''what
chimpanzees dream of,'' a fellow primate -- a human being, let's say,
also
living in this country in the year 2005, when the future of Social
Security
and old-age pensions is very much in doubt -- could be forgiven for
trying
to pinch himself awake upon encountering the splendors of this monkey
Delray
Beach.
Still, for all of its feel-good aspects and carefully considered
creature
comforts, Chimp Haven is also a reflection of a darker set of realities,
a
particularly topsy-turvy time in the already tumultuous history of our
so-called compact with the wild; a moment when the number of chimpanzees
in
the wilderness is rapidly decreasing and the number of those in
captivity
continues to rise. In fact, while chimpanzees in the wilderness are now
officially designated endangered, those in captivity are not. There are
an
estimated 2,500 captive chimps in the United States, a number that's
difficult to pinpoint because of the many private breeders still turning
out
baby chimps, mostly for private ownership or use in entertainment. Of
the
1,500 or so laboratory chimps, nearly half are no longer being used for
experimentation. Lab chimps today are largely confined to behavioral
studies
and hepatitis and malaria research, and an even greater number may soon
be
rendered unnecessary for research by advances in DNA analysis and
computer
modeling. As for the remaining refugees of entertainment and private
ownership, their ranks continue to swell even though chimps are
unmanageable
much past the age of 6 and despite the fact that advances in computer
animation may soon obviate altogether the need for actual animal
performers.
Chimps are spilling forth now from all quadrants of our keeping --
research
labs, traveling zoos, movie and TV studios, backyard pens -- and an
international network of sanctuaries, in Canada, Europe, Africa and
South
America, along with the United States, has sprung up to accommodate
them.
Indeed, one newly expanded, privately financed sanctuary called Save the
Chimps will soon accommodate more than 250 former lab chimps, the
largest
collection of retired primates in history.
Retirement for chimps is, in its way, a perversely natural outcome,
which is to say, one that only we, the most cranially endowed of the primates,
could
have possibly concocted. It's the final manifestation of the
irrepressible
and ultimately vain human impulse to bring inside the very walls that we
erect against the wilderness its most inspiring representatives -- the
chimps, our closest biological kin, the animal whose startling
resemblance
to us, both outward and inward, has long made it a ''can't miss'' for
movies
and Super Bowl commercials and a ''must have'' in our laboratories.
Retirement homes are, in a sense, where we've been trying to get chimps
all
along: right next door.
A Little Piece of Heaven
The narrow two-lane road to Chimp Haven winds through a sparsely
populated
stretch of forest, punctuated here and there by trailer parks and
roadside
farms, a few new housing developments and, just up the road from the
entrance to the Eddie D. Jones Nature Park, the paint-chipped hull of
the
Macedonia Baptist Church. Chimp Haven's 200 acres are situated within
the
grounds of the park, which assures the chimps a relatively good buffer
from
human encroachment. The only other tenants are a cemetery for war
veterans
and the Forcht Wade Correctional Center, a state prison with its own new
geriatric facility for aging lifers.
A prison work crew was scything a field in the park not far from Chimp
Haven's entrance gate the afternoon I arrived. One prisoner pulled back
from
his work as I drove up and he locked eyes with mine, a searing, deeply
unsettling stare that suddenly had me wondering if there wasn't
something to
the rumors I'd heard that the inmates weren't pleased about their new
neighbors. I'd ask Forcht Wade's assistant warden, Anthony D. Batson,
about
this later that afternoon, making an impromptu visit to the correctional
facility after leaving Chimp Haven. Batson came to the front desk and
showed
me to his office, a veritable museum to the Tigers, Louisiana State
University's beloved football team. He told me the prisoners were
certainly
aware of Chimp Haven, having access to TV and newspapers, and doing
occasional work in the area, but that he hadn't heard them express any
particular opinions about it. ''A number of guys have asked me what
would
happen if one of the chimps gets out,'' he said. ''Whether they'd have
to go
get it. But we both have our escape procedures. Theirs is a modern,
up-to-date, first-class containment facility. They're on top of it. Of
course, they tranquilize. We don't tranquilize.''
At the request of Chimp Haven's president, Linda Brent, a behavioral
primatologist specializing in chimpanzees, I timed my arrival at Chimp
Haven
for a few days before any chimps arrived, so that the retirees could get
acclimated to their new environment and to one another with as few
distractions from humans as possible. Brent, an expert in
captive-chimpanzee
management, is a slight woman in her early 40's with a Midwestern
country-girl swagger. She wrote her dissertation on infant chimp
development, conducting her research at Gombe National Park in Tanzania,
the
site of Jane Goodall's pioneering work on wild chimpanzees. For Brent,
the
experience of seeing chimps in the wild, ''just walking by, doing
whatever
they want, whenever they want,'' as she put it, changed her life. Now,
after
17 years of being what she calls ''the entertainment director'' for the
research chimps at the Southwest Foundation in San Antonio, she could
hardly
contain herself when talking about Rita and Teresa's imminent arrival.
''It's been since the 1960's that they were in the wild,'' she said
''We
don't even know where they were taken from. The records from back then
aren't very good. Just the fact that you could import them -- that was
done
away with in the early 70's, which is why they started breeding programs
for
research. But I think they'll be fine. They'll be nervous at first. They
aren't used to trees. That type of thing.''
At the beginning of my tour of Chimp Haven, I walked out into one of the
facility's two wooded areas, accessed from the chimps' bedrooms and play
areas through a system of metal chutes. Each section is a five-acre
wedge of
woods, secured with a combination of 8-foot-deep moats (chimps, being
all
muscle, sink like stones) and 17-foot-high concrete walls with inset
metal-barred apertures running their entire length, so that even from
their
pastoral remove the chimps can look back toward the hubbub of the
facility's
central residence. A number of Chimp Haven's incoming retirees will
still be
sexually active and, chimps being quite promiscuous, all the males will
be
vasectomized, thus allowing them to ''express their normal behavioral
repertoire,'' as Amy Fultz, Chimp Haven's primate behaviorist, put it.
Fultz worked with Brent at the Southwest Foundation in San Antonio,
doing
behavioral studies and devising what they call ''enrichment'' activities
with the research chimps there. In 1995, she and Brent founded Chimp
Haven,
which then was dedicated primarily to gathering concerned primatologists
and
chimpanzee specialists to start devising a way of dealing with the
country's
growing number of surplus chimpanzees. The great lab-chimp surplus is,
in
large part, an unforeseeable consequence of AIDS. In 1986, the National
Institutes of Health began an aggressive breeding program that nearly
doubled the number of research chimps in the country, on the seemingly
logical but ultimately incorrect assumption that our closest genetic kin
would serve as ideal models for developing a vaccine. Chimps, it turns
out,
can contract the virus, but they are virtually immune to its effects.
Suddenly faced with the huge ethical and economic problems of what to do
with so many surplus chimpanzees (each chimp costs roughly $10,000 a
year to
maintain), the National Research Council issued a report in 1997
advising
Congress against euthanizing the chimps, calling instead for some way of
properly repaying them for services rendered. With the urging of a
consortium of animal-welfare organizations known as the National
Chimpanzee
Research Retirement Task Force, and with support from numerous
laboratories
and various zoological organizations, the Chimp Act passed unanimously.
Chimp Haven was awarded the contract to construct and maintain the
government's new chimpanzee-sanctuary system in September 2002, and when
a
group of local developers and the Caddo Parish Commission offered up 200
acres of parish parkland, all the pieces for constructing the flagship
of
that system were in place.
Every aspect of Chimp Haven has been carefully considered, right down to
the
grief counselors for the staff for when the chimps pass away. Touring
the
facility's huge main kitchen, I saw refrigerator shelves lined with rows
of
''apesicles'' -- plastic cups filled with a frozen fruit-juice
suspension of
raw vegetables and fruit. Against the opposite wall, alongside a popcorn
maker, stood a massive container of primate biscuits -- essentially dry
hunks of vitamin-and-protein-enriched kibble. Set out on a long metal
food-preparation table were rows of turf boards: square sections of
thick
plastic covered with AstroTurf onto which staff workers were getting
ready
to smear a mixture of peanut butter, nuts and seeds, which the chimps
must
ferret out with their fingers. Insofar as the better part of a
chimpanzee's
day in the wild is spent foraging for food, many of these enrichment
devices
at Chimp Haven are geared toward alleviating the boredom of having three
squares regularly served up to them.
''Everything we use here we try to evaluate on a scientific level,''
Fultz
explained when I asked her about some of the other enrichment items I'd
been
shown: crayons and chalk, giant plastic toys and Nylabones (basically
big
dog-chews), Mighty Mouse and Woody Woodpecker videotapes and television
sets, specially rigged with clear plastic coverings to protect the
electronics. Chimps have very strong and immediate likes and dislikes.
Observational evidence to date has revealed that chimps find
nature-sound
CD's soothing. Younger chimps prefer kids' movies, Disney specials,
''Barney'' and the like. The mature chimps' tastes, on the other hand,
tend
toward melodrama and anything with lots of action and aggression. Soap
operas like ''Passions'' and ''General Hospital'' are big hits, the
latter,
it seems, because lab chimps have gotten so used to people in white
coats.
''The Jerry Springer Show'' and N.F.L. football games are also quite
popular. Golf, baseball and PBS programming (except, of course, for
nature
shows) are not.
Along with indulging acquired tastes, however, Chimp Haven
simultaneously
strives to revive long-dormant inherited ones. Most surplus chimps were
born
in captivity and, after years of proximity to and interaction with human
beings, they are, as primatologists say, ''highly enculturated,'' or
habituated to life on human terms. Indeed, staff members cited a
particular
sense of urgency about getting Rita and Teresa to Chimp Haven. They are
among the few remaining wild-born captive chimps, and it was hoped that
they
would ''remember what they did as little kids,'' as Brent put it, and
teach
those habits to their captive-born brethren, animals that have
essentially
become hybrids of us and them, a cosmopolitan monkey for whom a sudden
and
complete severance from us and our ways would constitute the next form
of
abuse.
In short, the place is a veritable chimpanzee Jurassic Park, a shining
example of just how far we can extend the inherently paradoxical process
of
trying to liberate and dignify a wild creature within captivity. It's
all a
direct answer and antidote to the days of the old inner-city-zoo ape
house,
where all that the inhabitants got was the equivalent of a tiled public
lavatory stall with a token section of log and a metal nameplate secured
out
front, a dot on a silhouette of Africa indicating the captive's original
home. By the exit of those old ape houses there was sometimes one of
those
silly mirrors with bars painted in front and a caption below that read,
''The Most Dangerous Animal of Them All.'' Chimp Haven is, in essence, a
result of one long, serious look in that mirror.
Earlier on the morning of my visit, I stopped by the Chimp Haven office
in
downtown Shreveport to meet the executive director, Linda Koebner. A
lifetime New Yorker, born and raised in the Bronx, where she still lives
part time, Koebner is something of a pioneer in chimp retirement. In
1974,
she transferred nine chimpanzees from the no-longer-operational
Laboratory
for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates in Tuxedo, N.Y., to a
new
home on their own island in a habitat facility known as Lion Country
Safari,
in Loxahatchee, Fla. Koebner showed me film clips of the chimps' initial
arrival to that island. It was some time before three of the chimps, ,
Swing, Spark and Doll, could even be coaxed from their cages, having
known
only those until then. Once outside, Doll shot up to the top of the
nearest
tree. Spark held to his cage even as he was leaving it, and then nestled
alongside the open door, where he ripped away an attached packaging slip
and
put it over his face. He kept gingerly pawing at the ground, as if
testing
its reliability. Koebner could observe her newly freed charges only from
the
far side of their moat. (Full-grown chimpanzees are several times as
strong
as humans and can be quite dangerous.)
Nineteen years after the chimps' arrival on the island, however,
Koebner,
accompanied by a habitat employee wielding a movie camera, was allowed
to
try a firsthand visit. In the film you can see a couple of chimps coming
forward from the far side of their island toward the same climbing
platform
that Koebner's boat is fast approaching. ''Hey . . . remember me?''
Koebner
keeps repeating in a soft, breathy voice to Swing and Doll, waiting now
at
the edge of the climbing platform. As the boat arrives, Koebner pauses a
moment, then reaches across the prow and, within seconds, she is being
enveloped, her slight frame slipping in and out of deep, alternating
hugs
from Swing and then Doll, each politely waiting turns for another
embrace of
their sobbing liberator.
Us and Them
The sophistication of the chimpanzee mind has been well documented in
the
near half-century since Jane Goodall's pioneering studies of chimps in
the
wild. Chimps learn and use American Sign Language. They have been taught
to
do math fractions and have demonstrated the intelligence level of a
5-year-old. They have a clear sense of self-awareness. Hold a mirror in
front of a chimp with a toothache, and he'll immediately set about
pulling
back his gums to find which tooth it is that's hurting. Chimps feel
sorrow
and remorse. They will mourn the death of a friend or a relative. They
are
even thought now to have the rudiments of their own culture.
''When we went and started looking at different populations of chimps
across
Africa, we found variations in behavior that could not be explained in
the
usual biological ways,'' William McGrew, a field primatologist and
professor
of anthropology at Miami University in Ohio, told me. ''They are passing
on
behavioral patterns that seem to vary from place to place, and group to
group, and from generation to generation, and we were sort of forced in
a
way into the cultural analogy as a way to explain it because the
traditional
biological ways for explaining it wouldn't suffice.''
Two years ago, McGrew, who has been observing chimps in the wilds of
East,
Central and West Africa for more than three decades, came upon a group
of
chimps in southeastern Senegal that were living in caves. ''No one had
ever
seen it before,'' he said. ''I mean, chimpanzees, you think of them
swinging
through the trees. But at the peak of the dry season, when it's very,
very
hot, these chimps retreat into the cooler caves, and they take food with
them and have a siesta and a picnic.''
Clearly, the more we understand about the complexity of the chimpanzee,
the
more complicated keeping them -- be it for research or for our own
amusement
-- becomes. There was a certain innocence and naivete about our earliest
containment and representation of them as conveyed in the
anthropocentric
framing of the first ape houses or movies like ''King Kong'' and
''Mighty
Joe Young.'' Now, however, we and they seem to be caught somewhere
between
that original childlike exuberance over having them close to us and an
increasingly subtle and discomfiting awareness of just how close to us,
in
every way, they actually are. We can see so clearly in the chimpanzee
some
former and formative version of ourselves that, if only as a further
extension of the very vanity that led us to co-opt them in the first
place,
we are compelled to find them better and more civil accommodations.
Many established zoos have now erected habitat-minded enclosures that
allow
chimps some semblance of their natural social groupings and behavior.
Privately financed sanctuaries, meanwhile, have sprung up across the
country, even as private breeders go on churning out more chimps for
entertainment or private ownership. In either role, chimps have only
five to
six years of viability before they grow too strong and willful to be
controlled. Most of them end up spending the rest of their 45 to 50
years,
on average, in breeding compounds, research lab facilities or roadside
zoos.
Even established zoos now regularly turn away former pet and entertainer
chimps, because of their aberrant personalities and often antisocial
behaviors.
I met a number of these chimps this past spring at a 100-acre sanctuary
known as the Center for Great Apes in Wauchula, Fla., a veritable
Hollywood
Squares of washed-up ape actors, far more accustomed to humans and
movie-set caterers' tables than to other monkeys and monkey chow. After I said
hello
to one 24-year-old, a former five-shows-a-day entertainer named Roger,
he
stood in his enclosure, thrust his chest forward and threw one arm
straight
up in the classic stage-show ''ta da!'' pose. Roger was originally
trained
for work in the Ringling Brothers circus. After his trainer retired,
Roger
ended up in a roadside zoo in Kissimee, Fla., called Jungleland, from
which
he was eventually rescued by the founder of the Center for Great Apes,
Patti
Ragan. Like many of Ragan's other charges, Roger has a number of odd
behavioral tics and psychological scars that can contribute to sudden
outbursts -- like those that characterized the much-publicized mauling
this
past winter by two retired entertainment chimps of a visitor to a
California
sanctuary.
''They will take an instant like or dislike to different people,'' Ragan
told me, ''especially if they're loud, or if they talk to them in a
certain
way, or if they're domineering. Whenever Roger sees a tall, white-haired
man
of a certain type of build, he becomes incredibly frightened and goes
into a
screaming rage, banging his head. There's something in his history. It
just
sets him off. Sometimes, in the middle of the night here, when I have
all
the surveillance cameras on in the different enclosures, I'll get up for
a
drink of water, and I'll see Roger just sitting up alone in the dark,
holding on to his cage, rocking.''
Monkey Purgatory
I witnessed pathologies similar to Roger's in the spring among the
inhabitants of a former biomedical research facility known as the
Coulston
Foundation in Alamogordo, N.M. Each day near dusk on the treeless,
sun-bitten outskirts of Alamogordo, the shrieking, cage-rattling clamor
of
captive chimpanzees fills the high-desert air. Suppertime is the usual
catalyst. On the early April evening I showed up there, however, a
stiff,
unseasonably cold wind stirring dust and tumbleweed, it was the
fast-spreading news of my approach that was setting off the occupants.
My
escort, Carole Noon, and I were still some 75 yards away from Building
700
-- the first in a series of eight long single-story chimp residences
that
make up Coulston's barrackslike compound -- when the ruckus began, a
slow
series of hoots quickly swelling to shrill screams followed by intense
pounding, the same pattern repeating from building to building, off into
the
distance.
''How's our boy Ollie doing?'' Noon muttered into her walkie-talkie.
Noon, a husky-voiced woman in her late 40's with piercing blue eyes and
long, sandy-blond hair tied back beneath a Save the Chimps cap, was
asking
after a resident of Building 700 named Oliver, an adolescent male who
had
the cornea of his right eye badly scratched in a tussle with another
chimp
and needed to be anesthetized in order to be treated.
''Still sleeping,'' came the reply.
The better part of Building 700's facade was, like all the others at the
facility, covered in thick sheets of plastic to hold in heat around the
chimps' outer cages during the winter and early spring. I therefore
didn't
see the advance scout for the building's 59 other chimps until Noon and
I
were about to enter. He was a massive, thick-limbed male hovering
directly
above us, clutching to the uppermost reaches of his cell, trying to size
me
up through the same murky polymer prism that was rendering him a dark
apparition, as if from some drug-induced dream.
''In the old days,'' Noon explained, ''they couldn't even go out in the
cold
months. Now they can at least be outside, and we can clean the inner
cages.''
Of the captive chimpanzees in the United States about to enter into
retirement, the greatest number of them don't live under federal
auspices
and are not on the way to Chimp Haven. They reside at the former
Coulston
Foundation, 260 chimps in all, the lot of them soon to become residents
of
Noon's Save the Chimps island sanctuary outside Fort Pierce, Fla. A
200-acre
patch of former orange groves, the sanctuary is being expanded into a
series
of 12 three-acre islands to accommodate the influx.
Noon originally founded Save the Chimps back in 1997 when the United
States
Air Force -- which had been leasing its flight-training chimps to
research
labs since the early 70's -- decided to get out of the chimp business
altogether. Offering its surplus inventory up for bids, the Air Force
awarded most of the chimps to Frederick Coulston, a native New Yorker
who was among the first scientists in the country to perform toxicology and
physiology experiments on primates back in the 1940's. Coulston, who
died in
2003, would go on to become the country's primate maven, owning well
more
than 600 chimps, then roughly half the nation's total, in the mid-90's.
Noon, with the support of Jane Goodall and other prominent
primatologists
like the chimp sign-language specialist Roger Fouts, successfully sued
the
Air Force for custody of 21 of their former chimps on the grounds that
they
had not honored a commitment to fully safeguard their welfare.
Meanwhile,
she raised more than $2 million to erect her Fort Pierce sanctuary to
house
the chimps she had saved.
In 2002 the Coulston Foundation, having already lost its N.I.H.
financing
after a series of Animal Welfare Act violations led to the deaths of
dozens
of chimps, filed for bankruptcy. With the help of a $7 million grant
from
the Arcus Foundation, a philanthrophic organization with a broad range
of
causes, Noon acquired the Coulston facility and all 266 of its remaining
residents (300 of the others ended up in another private facility). She
moved into a 28-foot-long house trailer at the rear of the grounds and
with
the help of local contractors and Save the Chimps staff members set
about
trying to soften and brighten the place's many hard, dark edges. Half a
million dollars was spent to remodel the cages alone, expanding them outward
and upward, with overhead ''penthouses'' allowing the chimps their first
views of the sky and of the nearby Sacramento Mountains. In the two and
a
half years since Noon took over, fairly hellish quarters have been
upgraded
to a kind of primate purgatory, where the occupants now await
deliverance to
their future island paradise.
''So,'' Noon said, showing me through the entrance to Building 700,
''you
ready to be horrified?''
Seated before me on the cement floor of a narrow, rank-smelling
ante-room to
Building 700's main chimp cell block were Jocelyn Bezner, the staff
veterinarian, and the staff caregiver, Jen Feuerstein, the two of them
staring through the bars of a portable pen at the soundly sleeping
Oliver.
Bezner was holding one of Oliver's huge black, leathery fingers, which
jutted out between the bars. I slowly sidled up to the cage and -- I
suppose
because I could -- grabbed another finger, gently squeezing the weighty,
inordinate humanness of it.
Through the pair of swinging doors just behind us, Oliver's mates had by
now
worked themselves up into a full-fledged frenzy. Noon opened one of the
doors to say hello and try to settle things down a bit. Inside was a
picture
of true bedlam: opposing rows of cages, 12 deep, chimps everywhere
swaying
and dashing, whooping and screeching. A chimp named Devon seemed to be
the
maestro of the mayhem, grabbing hold of the bars of the cage nearest the
door, madly thrusting toward and away from them, screaming.
Just then I felt Oliver's finger twitch slightly in my palm, and
suddenly he
was sitting bolt upright, eyes wide. His face was fixed in a kind of
hysterical grin that gradually expanded, as if trying to get more air,
into
a soundless, slow-motion version of a chimp's fright scream, finally
culminating in a series of short, breathy, high-pitched squeals.
''It's O.K, it's O.K.,'' Bezner kept repeating to him softly, and then
once
more to the rest of us. ''He's just hallucinating.''
After a few moments, Oliver tilted back over to sleep, in spite of
Building
700's racket. Noon signaled that we should leave to let things simmer
down.
As we were headed toward the door, Bezner went over to Devon's cell and
in a
beautiful, clear soprano, began bringing Devon and his fellow cellmates
back
down to earth with the Irving Berlin standard ''Cheek to Cheek'':
''Heaven,
I'm in heaven. . . . ''
Chimps crave such attention. They also will go out of their way to get
it,
as I learned firsthand during the following day's tour. We started at
the
compound's former breeding building, Building 300, referred to now by
Save
the Chimps staff members simply as the dungeon. It was a similar
arrangement
of long, opposing rows of adjacent cement and steel cages, enclosures
that,
before Noon's modest renovations, were only slightly larger than the
minimum
5 feet by 5 feet by 7 feet required, to this day, by federal law for the
lifelong keeping of animals that grow as tall as 5 feet and weigh as
much as
200 pounds. ''O.K., picture these cages,'' Noon said, narrating her way
down
the central corridor, ''but without penthouses, without the windows,
without
the hammocks, without the blankets, without the toys, without any
enrichment. Just steel and cement boxes.''
Before we went in, Noon had us wait outside the set of rolling chain
link
gates at the head of the Building 300's cell block so that staff members
could get the chimps to their outside cells, thus clearing the way for
our
passing. The building's occupants, however, were proving to be somewhat
uncooperative that afternoon.
''Oh, no!,'' Noon said, scrunching up her shoulders and then calmly
starting
away from the front gates, revealing the feces-splattered back of her
blue
denim work shirt. Plum, a female chimp in one of the first cages, had
somehow managed to peg Noon through an opening in the gates no wider
than a
foot. Within seconds, a worker at the back of the building was
struggling
his way toward us, head down, arms flailing, Plum's successful strike
having
set off a feces-flinging and water-spitting maelstrom. Chimps are
remarkably
good shots with both.
''They don't really like it,'' Noon said, dropping her work shirt into a
washing machine in a staff laundry room just around the corner. ''Any
normal
chimp I know wipes their foot off when they step in it. But these
chimps?
Well . . . when you start thinking this is fun, it suggests a deep
disturbance, and it's sick.''
Before heading back that afternoon to the Save the Chimps headquarters,
where I'd avail myself of the staff lavatory for a quick stand-up bath,
Noon
took me to see the small cinder-block building in which toxicology
experiments had been conducted. Inside were two large, adjacent cages.
One
side of each cage could collapse inward, making the cage about the width
of
a chimp, to facilitate the injection of whatever drug or disease was
being
tested. As I was peering inside one of the cages, Noon shut the building
door. The place went pitch dark.
''O.K.,'' she said. ''Your number's up. You're called in for research.
If
you're lucky you've got a guy next door. You've got a squeezable cage
and
you're getting a drug in ever increasing doses to see what happens. And
that's your life.''
As we were leaving, Noon noticed me staring at the only other fixture in
the
room, what looked for all the world like one of those elevated,
wall-mounted
TV stands you see in hospital rooms.
''You got it,'' Noon said, walking off. ''That was their enrichment.
It's
amazing they're not more maniacal than they are.''
The Research Quandary
''That one there is a chimpanzee brain,'' Patrick Hof, a professor of
neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan told me one
afternoon this past winter, the two of us standing in a giant walk-in
cooler
of brains just down the hallway from his office. On the same shelf as
the
chimp brain (''about half the size of an adult human's,'' as Hof
described
it) were those of gorillas and orangutans, each one adrift in glass
containers of formaldehyde. On a separate set of shelves at the rear of
the
cooler was an assortment of marine-animal brains: dolphin, porpoise,
killer
whale. Just below them, at the base of a huge Rubbermaid garbage pail,
was a
sperm-whale brain, like the one housed in Moby-Dick's skull. It was
about
the circumference of a cafe table. On the shelves opposite the chimp and
gorilla specimens were a number of human ones.
An expert in aging and its effects on the brain, Hof is an unexpected
beneficiary of today's chimp boom. Chimps in captivity live about twice
as
long as those in the wild do. Males in the wild rarely make it to 30,
owing
to the wilderness's daily stresses and conflicts. Most captive chimps,
by
contrast, are now not only reaching human retirement ages; they are also
developing all the same attendant ailments: arthritis, diabetes, cancer,
heart disease, obesity. Everything, it seems, except for brain disorders
like Alzheimer's and dementia.
''They prove to be a real problem of geriatric veterinary medicine,''
Hof
explained, referring to the aged chimps, ''and yet at the same time they
offer an extraordinary opportunity for us to learn more about the
evolution
of aging. And it may well be a unique opportunity, because I don't think
there will be that many more generations of chimpanzees behind the
current
ones, because it's just too complicated and expensive to keep them.''
In fact, our increasing appreciation of the chimpanzee's bioevolutionary
complexity may be bringing us to the point where the most significant
knowledge we can gain from chimps is best obtained simply by letting
them be
themselves, either in what's left of their natural habitat or in or our
best
re-creations of it. In a sense, the saga of our keeping of the chimps
has
now come full circle. The chimps themselves have become the edifying
mirror
of the old ape houses. They are offering us the best view into our own
nature. Indeed, much of the work being done now with chimps is focused
on
behavioral and neurological science, where researchers from a variety of
disciplines, from evolutionary biology to neurology, are often engaged
in
observational studies in which the healthier and more natural the
environment is for the chimp, the more reliable and useful are the
results.
For some, however, the chimp remains an indispensable tool for medical
research, and some have expressed fears that by endorsing the retirement
of
even a select number of chimps, the government might be opening the
doors to
their removal from research altogether. Stuart Zola, director of the
Yerkes
National Primate Research Center, fully supports animal sanctuaries but
argues that there will always be a need to study chimpanzees. ''The only
thing we can predict with certainty is that there are going to be new
epidemics that will arise, as they have throughout history, and the
chimp is
going to be a unique animal model.''
Joe Erwin, a former curator of primates at the Brookfield Zoo in
suburban
Chicago, who for the past three years has worked as an independent
consultant to research labs looking to improve their facilities, also
cites
the continuing importance of chimps for research. ''That chimpanzees can
be
surplus to research needs strikes me as quite unlikely and
shortsighted,''
he told me. ''It is my impression that there is no chimpanzee on earth
from
which humans cannot learn something useful -- without in any way
compromising the health or well-being of any individual chimpanzee.''
There are several major facilities that still have chimpanzees --
Yerkes;
Southwest in San Antonio; the Alamogordo Primate Facility situated on
the
grounds of the Holloman Air Force Base some 15 miles from the former
Coulston Foundation; the Michale E. Keeling Center for Comparative
Medicine
and Research in Bastrop, Tex.; Bioqual, a biomedical facility in
Rockville,
Md.; and the New Iberia Research Center in Louisiana, the world's
largest
chimpanzee lab. Of these, not one is quite so bleak as the former
Coulston
Foundation. Each has made efforts to give chimps at least some outdoor
access and group interaction, as well as various enrichment and
behavioral
care from trained primatologists.
Still, both the Alamogordo Primate Facility and New Iberia have been
targets
of recent lawsuits involving animal rights violations, and both cases
are
still pending. And while overall standards at research facilities have
been
improving over the years, there is no getting around the inherent
constraints and hardships on both the chimps and those who work with
them on
a daily basis. It is no coincidence that a number of the people now
involved
in the retiring of chimps were former employees of research labs. ''Most
people end up leaving because they can't do it anymore,'' Jen
Feuerstein, a
former staff member at Yerkes, told me. ''They can't be the bad guy
anymore.
If a chimp is on study, you have to participate. You have to separate a
young chimp from its mother and send him or her to the main center for
research. A lot of people sort of seal themselves off and stop caring
because it's too painful to care. They go and do the bare minimum to
keep
the chimps alive, and then they go home.''
There is no handy list of the dividends gained over the years from chimp
research, and many of the results are mixed. In the early 1930's, long
before ethical restrictions were imposed on research techniques, a good
number of chimps were sacrificed to various brain-mapping and other
invasive
approaches that yielded a great deal of early data on the evolution of
the
primate brain. On the other hand, notwithstanding the early heroics of
the
Air Force's chimpanauts, it is most likely that the space program would
have
gone ahead as planned without them, as would the use of seat belts, for
the
early trials of which a number of Air Force chimps were reportedly used
as
living crash-test dummies in the early 60's.
In 1996, after several injections with H.I.V., one chimp at Yerkes named
Jerome did finally develop AIDS, but it was a mutated strain that proved
to
be of little value in the search for a cure in humans. Jerome became so
sick
that he was eventually euthanized. Important information, however, was
gained in early testing about the pathogenesis of the disease and the
use of
therapeutic antibodies, and a limited number of previously infected
chimps
are still being used for H.I.V. research in an attempt to understand
precisely why chimpanzees are so resistant to developing AIDS,
information
that could prove of some use to humans. But one of the greatest recent
rewards of chimp research has been the hepatitis-B vaccine. Strides are
also
currently being made toward developing vaccines for hepatitis C and
respiratory syncytial virus (R.S.V.), which is potentially lethal in
newborn
babies.
''In an ideal world they'd all be swinging in the forests of Africa,''
McGrew, the field primatologist, said to me. ''But I can understand how
they
got into labs, and I'd be a hypocrite if I said that I haven't benefited
from it. I take the hepatitis vaccine developed from chimpanzees before
I go
to Africa to study them.''
Some scientists, however, say that they believe we might soon effect an
ideal solution to the chimp-research quandary, thanks to some of the
very
technological advances that chimps have helped to foster. For instance,
scientists at Washington University in St. Louis and M.I.T. are
completing
the mapping of an entire chimp genome. It belonged to a chimp named
Clint, a
longtime Yerkes resident who recently died of heart disease. Many
scientists
now say that the use of the DNA database and human tissue samples will
obviate the need for research on chimps or any other animal, the results
of
which, they argue, are often misleading and inapplicable to humans. The
recently appointed scientific director of Europeans for Medical
Progress,
Jarrod Bailey, is now leading a campaign to end research on animals, not
on
the basis of animal rights but rather on the grounds that such methods
are
by and large archaic and have prevented scientists from making the best
use
of new technologies.
''We are a very technological species,'' Carole Noon said to me at Save
the
Chimps in Alamogordo. ''We can come up with something better. Something
less
cruel.''
Looking at the Stars
Every other week or so from now until early next winter, a specially
outfitted trailer like the ones that delivered Rita and Teresa and their
fellow research chimps to Chimp Haven will make the two-and-a-half-day
journey from the former Coulston Foundation in New Mexico to Noon's
island
paradise outside Fort Pierce, Fla., delivering 10 chimps at a time until
all
260 have been transported.
The day after my tour of Coulston, I flew with Noon to Florida to have a
look at her compound there. Set in the midst of a flat expanse of orange
groves and swampland is a huge island of verdant knolls, jungle-gym
platforms, suspended catwalks and earthen culverts, dotted with
shrubbery
and trees and huge black blobs, which, as we pulled up in a golf cart to
one
fenced-off corner of the island, suddenly began to move, gamboling
toward us
in near-upright, front-fisted strides.
''Just to have that option of running,'' Noon said, gesturing at the
chimps.
''That's what tickles me so much about this property. It's one of the
prettiest places in all of Florida, and guess who's moving in. Not rich
people.''
I found it a bit disconcerting at first to see the chimps in such a
setting.
It wasn't just the complete anomaly of chimpanzees swinging and striding
against a backdrop of Florida orange trees. Somehow getting even the
merest
glimpse into their actual selves only further distinguishes them and
diminishes us. A diminishment accentuated, in this case, by the fact
that
these chimps appeared to be so much larger than the ones back in New
Mexico,
for the most part because they've all got most of their health and hair
back.
''That guy Waylan,'' Noon said, pointing to an outsize male muscling his
way
toward us, then settling alongside a female named Dana, ''is the largest
chimp I've ever known. And the sweetest. Waylan is very shy. Born in
captivity. Didn't know how to be around other chimps. So when it was
time to
get Waylan to meet somebody, I said to myself, Who out of all these
people
can he meet? And I thought, Dana. She's 42, born in Africa, and she's so
socially sophisticated. So nice. So I open the door to let them meet.
Waylan's afraid. She climbs up and sits in the doorway. She looks at
Waylan
and literally takes his chin in her hand and lifts his face so he can
look
at her. That's Dana. She is the queen.''
Lunch hour for the Save the Chimps staff members that afternoon soon
gave
way to lunch hour for the chimps. We were sitting at a picnic table
beside
the compound's headquarters when Noon stood up and clanged an
old-fashioned
ranch dinner bell hanging from a post just overhead. She waited a moment
and
rang it again.
''That did it,'' she said. ''Here they come.''
Off in the distance, we could see the black blobs move again, row upon
row
of them, coming across the island's grassy mounds, past the strung
catwalks
and huge platform jungle gyms, toward the chimps' central housing
quarters.
Noon and I and some of the staff members started over to meet them. Once
all
the chimps had made their way inside, the feasting began, chunks of
fresh
cucumbers and carrots and oranges giving off, in stark contrast to
Coulston,
the strongest aromas in the place.
''The difference is pretty amazing,'' said one staff member, Chance
French,
a former employee of Noon's at Alamogordo. ''A lot of the chimps we
bring
from New Mexico will be balding. But the minute you bring them here they
stop plucking. They stop smearing feces around. It's 100 percent
better.''
French told me that during the back-to-back hurricanes that walloped
Florida
last year, he and the other staff members took all the chimps there into
the
main housing quarters and laid in food and blankets and supplies for
everyone, and, side by side in adjacent cells, human and chimp rode out
the
storms together. ''The first hurricane, we were there for two nights,''
he
recalled. ''It was a weaker storm but very slow-moving. Kept going and
going. The second hurricane was one night. Through both storms, I
expected
the chimps to be more alarmed, but they were mostly passed out,
sleeping,
and we were wide awake, glued to the radio.''
After lunch, Noon made sure all the doors leading back outside from the
chimp's housing were secure, so that staff members could clean up the
island, much of it strewn with toys, baby dolls, plastic buckets, wheel
carts and so on, like a vast kids' playground. Noon took that
opportunity to
escort me across the island, out to the very center. It felt oddly
exhilarating: we were in their place now, on their footing, and on the
horizon around us were the 11 other soon-to-be-completed islands, each
with
its own pastel-hued housing, all the colors bright and upbeat --
''everything as different from Coulston as possible,'' Noon said. ''No
associations.''
As we started back across the island toward the chimp's quarters, Noon
recalled a night back at Coulston when, after the renovations to the
cages
had been completed, the chimps were allowed to move into their outer
enclosures and could see the dark desert sky for the first time. Until
then,
they had been locked inside each day by 4 p.m. As she sat on the steps
of
her trailer that night at the back of the facility grounds, Noon said
she
could hear all of the buildings talking. Everyone was talking.
''I understood some of it,'' she said. ''It was, Look at the stars, and
Look
at the moon, and What do you think all of that is about? and How long is
it
going to last? But then they started saying something I didn't
understand. I
struggled to make sense of what it was. And here's what I think they
were
saying. They were announcing themselves to the world. They were saying,
We
live here. We exist.''
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