Archives for November 2012

Take Action Tuesday: Decision in Las Vegas tomorrow

November 20, 2012 by Debbie

Recently, Converse shoes had a poster in the UK subways featuring a fear-grimacing chimpanzee. After hearing from concerned advocates, they pulled the ads! And, they agreed to never use primates in promotions again. This great news demonstrates that letter writing really is very powerful, and every letter counts.

Since your letters make a difference for our chimpanzee friends, please take a minute to write a letter to the Clark County commissioners to urge them to deny Mike Casey’s permit application to continue to house his chimps in a residential neighborhood in Las Vegas. If you have already written a letter, please share the alert! You can use the sample letter as an example, or use your own words. Be sure to emphasize that this is not only a public safety concern, but it also the right thing to do. Chimpanzees don’t belong in back yards, at birthday parties, at car dealer openings, or on film sets. Captive chimpanzees suffer in these situations, and they belong in sanctuaries that can meet their needs. They get better when they get to a sanctuary (see Jamie below for proof of that). There is sanctuary space available for these chimps.

Here are just two examples of the way chimpanzees are affected by being in Mike Casey’s life:

Travis, born at Mike Casey’s former facility in Missouri and sold as a “pet” to a woman in suburban Connecticut, escaped from his owner, mauled a woman, and died after being stabbed by his owner with a butcher knife and then shot by police.
A trainer hit a chimpanzee on the German set of the movie Speed Racer (a production for which Mike Casey’s company was responsible) in front of an “animal welfare” monitor. You can read the full review at AHAfilm.org (and look for ratings and reviews – they don’t make it easy to link to specific reviews!).

The hearing is tomorrow – so don’t wait, write your letter today!

And for a reminder of what sanctuary can do, take Jamie (a former “entertainer”). Here she was in June 2008, shortly after her arrival:

And here she is now:

Speak up on behalf of Jamie and all the chimpanzees out there who still need our help.

Routine and Choices

November 19, 2012 by Elizabeth

As much as possible, we make a point of sticking to a daily routine here at the sanctuary. We think it’s important that the chimpanzees know what to expect each day and when to expect it. (I’d imagine that one of the horrors of laboratory life would be never knowing what’s going to happen to you next.) We serve breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the same time each day. The chimpanzees are asked to shift to a separate area of their enclosure if they’d like to participate in the meal. Since we never enter an enclosure with the chimps — last Tuesday’s fight serves as a great reminder why — we need them to leave an area before we can enter to clean. Once in awhile someone chooses to skip a meal and stay out (usually Missy when she’s looking to have the Playroom to herself for a little while), in which case we just put off cleaning until the next meal. The vast majority of the time, though, everyone willingly shifts for the meal and we’re able to access the area they’ve evacuated. Since this is part of our daily routine, none of the chimpanzees are ever blindsided by the consequences of their choices. If Missy chooses not to shift for a meal, she knows that she’s also choosing not to eat that meal. She also knows that another meal will be offered a few hours later. Most days, if someone stays out for breakfast, everyone will shift at lunch and we can do our Playroom cleaning then. Very occasionally, someone will stay out for both breakfast and lunch and we’re unable to clean until dinner. Whatever happens, we have to remain flexible. Chimpanzees are intelligent and willful, and when they’re given the opportunity to make their own choices — like they are in good sanctuaries — they will.

Today Missy and Annie have skipped both breakfast and lunch to hang out in the Playroom. (If Missy chooses to play hooky from a meal, Annie almost always joins her.) It’s a rainy, gray day and I can’t blame them for not wanting to stray too far from their nests. If they choose to come in for dinner, Jackie and I will clean the Playroom then. If not, we’ll try again tomorrow morning. Either way, we’re happy that Annie and Missy and the rest of the Cle Elum Seven are now able to make their own choices for the first time in their lives.

Sleeping Jody

November 18, 2012 by Jackie

Since her injury, it’s been all about Jody on the blog this last week. We like to mix things up for you as much as possible, but I snapped a few photos of her in and out of sleep in the front rooms this morning and I couldn’t resist sharing them. She has one of the prettiest faces I’ve ever seen.

What a difference a few years can make

November 17, 2012 by J.B.

Sometimes it’s nice to reflect on how things have changed for the Cle Elum Seven.

Jody in the lab in early 2008:

Jody on her first day at Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest:

Jody on Young’s Hill:

Did you know that Jody has her own Facebook page?

Tough chimps

November 16, 2012 by Jackie

Not only is Jamie one of the most intelligent people I know, she’s also one of the most intense. While she can occasionally be insecure about her position as the boss of the group, she can also come across as super tough and confident. And apparently she’s feeling pretty confident lately because I was looking through photos from the last week and couldn’t help but notice how hardcore she looks in almost every photo. She is one tough cookie!

but despite all that toughness, she also has a sweet side:

And speaking of tough chimps, for those of you wondering about Jody today, her toe is looking better and she seems to be feeling fine. It always amazes me how tough chimps are and how quickly they heal, even from pretty serious injuries. Just Wednesday, I cut myself on my hand and you would have thought there was a 6 year old in the chimp house! No actual tears were shed, but it was close. And then there’s Jody, who lost part of a toe just the day before, and she’s out exploring Young’s Hill like it’s no big deal. Hats off to hardcore, resilient chimps!

Fighting

November 15, 2012 by Diana

The chimps had a big fight on Tuesday night during dinner. I haven’t witnessed a fight of that intensity that lasted that long in years. The Cle Elum Seven do have minor conflicts all of the time. If you’re not familiar with chimps, you might think these squabbles are all-out brawls, but after you’ve seen a few, you get accustomed to how chimps fight. Once a quarrel breaks out, generally everyone joins in, so at CSNW, there are seven chimpanzees screaming and running around. Usually it is just a lot of posturing and often very little physical contact (as I mentioned in this blog post). Tuesday was a bit different.

The fight seemed to start between Missy and Annie. Though they really are best friends, Missy is dominant to Annie. Dominance is often asserted around access to food, so sometimes Missy reminds Annie of her lower rank by getting upset if Annie tries to take food. Because of these occasional reminders, Annie can be a little nervous. Annie used to be quite on edge a lot of the time, and if she thought someone was going to become upset by something she was doing, she would have overly exaggerated submissive behaviors, which often included screaming (I found a good description of submissive behaviors on Jane Goodall’s Lessons of Hope website). These days, Annie is much more confident and much less anxious, but a hierarchy among the chimps remains and is frequently reinforced in obvious and subtle ways. So, I can’t say exactly what started the fight, but it was something between Annie and Missy involving food. The start of the fight, however, often doesn’t matter. Once a fight gets going, it’s an opportunity to reinforce rank as well as get out any pent-up anger, so the “target” changes throughout the duration of the conflict. Maybe this sounds familiar? If you’re in a fight with a loved one (or not-so-loved one), I bet you’ve noticed the subject of the fight drifts from the initial topic to anything that been bugging you lately. And if it’s a fight within a group of several people, the person that everyone is focused on can change throughout the quarrel. Chimps aren’t so different.

The fight on Tuesday moved from the greenhouse, to the front rooms, and then into the playroom. There’s really nothing we as caregivers can do to end a conflict among the chimps. Once they’re going, there’s nothing that will take their focus off of the fight. Watching a fight does reinforce why we have such strict safety protocols and why we never share the same space as the chimps without a secure barrier (steel fencing, electric wire or chimp-proof glass) between human and chimpanzee. Chimps can go from peacefully eating dinner to a giant conflict in a matter of seconds.

One thing that we do is make sure there are no areas that would create a “trap” that a chimp could get stuck in without an avenue of escape. So, with that in mind, Elizabeth opened up the doors between each of the front rooms to the playroom even though we had not completed the spot cleaning for the evening. We do not attempt to isolate chimps during or after a conflict – we just give them room and allow them to work things out. Fighting and making up is an important part of living cohesively in a group of chimpanzees.

So, all we could do was watch and wait for the fight to end. Most squabbles last just a minute or two, but this fight went on for at least 15 minutes. One of Negra’s seemingly self-appointed jobs is to let out a loud pant hoot towards the end of the fight. We’ve come to describe this as Negra attempting to end the conflict. With this conflict, Negra let out her “ending pant hoot” at least four times. She seemed ready for the fight to be over and to get on with the rest of dinner; but this fight was intense, and the other chimps just kept going. During the fight, I remarked to Elizabeth how much smarter Burrito has become about conflicts. He used to throw himself in the middle, get all of the girls mad at him, and end up getting beat up. He’s still involved in conflicts, but stays more on the periphery and concentrates on getting reassurance from Foxie, who seems to give reassurance to anyone and everyone who wants it – that’s why we think of her as the mediator of the group. Even though we’re accustomed to the chimps fighting, it’s not a time that we think to break out the cameras, so we don’t have many photos or videos of fights, except for these photos of the end of a squabble that I took a few years ago.

Once the fight finally ended, we looked everyone over for injuries. Jamie’s behind was bleeding, but it didn’t look too worrisome. Jody was the worst off – she had a cut above one of her eyes, a few cuts on her arms, and a very bloody toe. We realized a little while later that one of her toes was severed completely. This probably sounds horrific, but it’s all part of what happens when chimps fight. We’re actually lucky that we don’t see more injuries. During conflicts like this, chimps go for ears, toes, fingers, scrotum – basically parts that stick out that can be bitten.

Jody was taking some time to rest while the other chimps were inspecting their own and each others’ wounds. You might imagine that having a toe bitten off would cause excruciating pain, but chimpanzees’ experience of pain seems to be quite different than that of most modern-day humans. The best example of this among the Cle Elum Seven was a fight pretty early on when Missy’s top lip was split open to the degree that you could see her teeth in between the new two halves of her top lip. Within minutes after the injury, she was pulling on it and biting the rough edges off, and not long afterwards, she eagerly ate several pieces of grapefruit with no signs of pain whatsoever. With no intervention from us, aside from medication (luckily we had seen this type of injury before and knew it could heal on its own), her lip “zipped” back up in a matter of a week or two, and within a month there was barely a trace of the injury.

We have Jody on pain reliever, just in case, as well as antibiotics, and we’re monitoring her toe very closely. We’re sending photos to our veterinarians and keeping them updated several times a day. We’re hoping that Jody’s foot will be able to heal on it’s own. If there are signs of an infection despite the antibiotics, it could be due to bone fragments left in the toe, and we’d most likely have to perform surgery to amputate the rest of the toe – a fairly minor procedure, but it would be the first surgery in CSNW’s history. Let’s hope we won’t have to go that route!

Here’s a photo of Jody from yesterday, the morning after the fight. She wasn’t even favoring her injured foot as she walked all over Young’s Hill:

Missy in her element

November 13, 2012 by Elizabeth

There is no doubt that Missy is the athlete of the Cle Elum Seven. Her strength, agility, and playfulness amaze and amuse us everyday. Young’s Hill is her playground. Whether she’s climbing the tall bamboo, sprinting up and down the hill, or walking “tightrope” on the fire hose, she’s always on the move.

Most of yesterday’s snow has melted, allowing the chimps to venture out onto the hill without having to walk in the cold stuff. There are still plenty of patches to eat, though, so there’s been lots of activity outside today despite the chilly temperatures. Missy has been having a great time.

She did quite a lot of tightrope walking: