To celebrate the Eighth Anniversary of the chimps’ arrival to the sanctuary, we’re taking a quick trip down memory lane. Click here to read about Year One.
As the chimps entered their second year in sanctuary, their physical and emotional transformations were becoming ever more apparent. When they first arrived, their hair was sparse, their skin was pale, and their muscles were atrophied. These early photos of Jamie speak volumes.
Some bore not just the scars of experimentation, but also indelible, haunting reminders of their traumatic pasts in the form of prominent identification tattoos. Jamie was CH-522.
To our great relief, the tattoos became harder and harder to see as their bodies recovered from years in that windowless basement. By Year Two, their hair had begun to grow in, their skin had darkened, and their faces – once frozen and nearly expressionless – were overflowing with personality.
As Diana mentioned in her Year One post, our resources were extremely limited in those early days. With our goal of freeing the chimps from that laboratory basement accomplished, we set our sights on improving their sanctuary home as best we could. Thanks to support from our amazing donors and volunteers, we were able to convert the chimps’ modest outdoor area into a four-season, convertible greenhouse so that they could bask in warm sunlight even on the coldest winter days:
With their bodies healed and their sanctuary home upgraded, the chimps did what happy chimps do best – play! It was amazing to watch them throw off the weight of all those decades in the lab.
Thank you for all you do for the chimps.
They have come so far. Thank you.
That image of Jamie makes my heart stop. Shocking and disturbing. I actually took a screenshot of both images of Jamie (top and bottom) and reviewed them side by side. This may sound strange, but in that first photo I can see the Jamie we know now. As flat and expressionless as her eyes are — I swear I still see determination. What else could keep her alive for all those years. And I really enjoyed the “Oh Neggie” video. Who else would make a nest and lay down to play tug!?! Oh Neggie!
Can I ask, how many of the chimps have tattoos and what biomedical labs issued their tattoos?
Look at all you have accomplished in 2 years time. Your resources may have been extremely limited, but your imaginations and hearts were limitless.
Hi Kathleen – I’d have to look at our records to be sure, but most of the chimps have a tattoo somewhere. LEMSIP gave their chimps large, prominent tattoos across their chests. Other labs tattooed their ID number on their legs or inner thighs. I believe that the Cle Elum Seven collectively have tattoos from LEMSIP, White Sands Research Center (later known as The Coulston Foundation), and Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research (now know as Texas Biomed).
Thank you for the reply J.B.. Not something I like to think about but seeing Jamie’s tattoo etched across her chest in this post really got me thinking about it. I always feel that it is so easy to discount the life in front of you as a living, breathing, sentient being if you give it a number instead of a name (and this applies to the intake of dogs in county shelters too). I am sure it is much easier to test, probe and control “CH-522” than it would be if you called the chimpanzee “Jamie”. Give an animal an actual name and you can’t help but look into their eyes — that’s when you are captured by the person within. No one deserves to be a number, certainly not our Jamie.
I agree completely, Kathleen. It’s important for people to know that these chimps had both names and numbers in the lab, but there’s no doubt that seeing a large ID tattoo across a chimpanzee’s chest helps “dehumanize” them (for lack of a better word). I’m always dumbfounded when I hear people excuse the abuse of an animal by saying that “they were raised for that purpose”, whether it’s a lab animal or a farm animal. What on earth would that mean to the animal? How would it change their experience? But for some reason human psychology seems to work that way, logic be damned, and thinking of a chimp as a “lab animal” rather than an individual helped a lot of people ignore or excuse what was being done to them.
I’ve always thought that the gradual fading of Jamie’s tattoo was a perfect metaphor for her experience these last eight years.
Having witnessed the transformation first hand it still takes my breath away when I see the comparison.