Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest

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Archives for January 29, 2014

Snowballs!

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The chimpanzees (and humans) woke up to several inches of snow this morning! We started the chimps’ morning by offering them icicles before breakfast, a favorite treat! As I prepared to open the door to Young’s Hill, the chimpanzees all crowded around, food grunting in anticipation of being able to eat some snow. Once the door was open, no one wanted to venture all the way out, but they all sat in the doorway reaching out (and over) one another to grab handfuls of snow. And much to our surprise, Jamie even through a few “snowballs” at caregiver, Debbie, before heading into the greenhouse to enjoy her snack.

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Burrito chose a quiet spot by the door to Young’s Hill where he could eat to his heart’s content:

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Then for the first time in days, the sun came out! Even Negra left her cozy nest to spend some time in the warmth of the greenhouse and enjoy some snow snacks. Between the excitement of the snow and a bright, sunny morning, the chimpanzees’ moods seemed to all be lifted today. The chimp house was full of laughter, games, and food grunts all morning. After we cleaned the playroom we filled the chimpanzees’ wading pool and some buckets with snow and sprinkled it with some seeds and dried fruit for their morning forage.

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Annie enjoyed several mouthfuls of snow. I don’t know how she kept from getting “freeze brain.”

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While most of humans are not usually too happy to see snow, I am so glad it provided some great enrichment and an exciting day for my chimpanzee friends.

Shop AmazonSmile to help the chimps

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Amazon.com recently launched a program called AmazonSmile. You may have noticed there’s a link to signing up on the sidebar of the blog that looks like this:

Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest

The simple explanation is that you follow that link and that leads you to a page to sign up for AmazonSmile and designate Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest as your charity to receive funds.

I signed up myself and wanted to explain a little bit more about how it works. The most important thing to know is that, in order for your purchases to help the chimps, you have to login in to smile.amazon.com (instead of just amazon.com) every time you shop.

So, you may as well take that link – smile.amazon.com and bookmark it. Once you’ve designated Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest as your chosen charity, when you sign in to shop it should look like this (yours won’t have the word “prime” if you don’t also use amazon prime):

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Then you just shop normally and 0.5% of eligible purchases will go to the chimps! I haven’t shopped around too much to determine what purchases are eligible, but this is from amazon’s FAQ about the program: “Tens of millions of products on AmazonSmile are eligible for donations. You will see eligible products marked “Eligible for AmazonSmile donation” on their product detail pages.”

The donations through AmazonSmile will be made to us 45 days after a calendar quarter ends, so it will be a little while before we know how much we’ll be receiving.

And in case you had the clever idea of buying a bunch of stuff and returning it – amazon is way ahead of you – they will not count returned items in their donations.

Thanks for taking advantage of all of the many ways that you can help the chimpanzees. There are a few more listed here: www.chimpsnw.org/you_can_help/single/help-us-fundraise

And here’s some chimpanzee smiles from your favorite chimp BFF’s Annie & Missy:

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