Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest

Hope. Love. Home. Sanctuary

Archives for August 2025

Foxie’s Favorite

by

Today, Foxie and her twin baby doll friends went for a stroll around Young’s Hill.  It’s unusual to find Foxie out and about without at least one of her “babies”.

Since her recent birthday, Foxie has been toting around one or more of her brand new dolls everywhere she goes.  She takes them to meals, she naps with them, she plays games with them, and she goes on long walks with them.

Foxie LOVES her dolls!  She carries them in her mouth, on her back, or in her pelvic pocket.  She kisses them, tosses them, asks caregivers to babysit them, and she even disciplines them when needed.

Dolls are Foxie’s absolute favorite form of enrichment!

My favorite form of enrichment is a good book, especially a thriller!  I’m currently reading The Only One Left by Riley Sager.

What’s your favorite form of enrichment?

Speaking of enrichment…our wish lists are chock-full of enrichment items and other staples that can be donated to keep our chimps as happy and healthy as can be!  Thank you for checking it out!

Happy Birthday, (human) Terry!

by

Thanks so much to Mike Stockdale for sponsoring today in celebration of August birthday revelers, his wife, Terry, along with Foxie and Missy AND with extra love for George!

“I would like to sponsor a day of sanctuary for Foxie and Missy during their birthday month, an extra special treat to welcome George and to celebrate my wife Terry’s 75th birthday on August 14th.”

What a month of celebrations! Terry, all of us here wish you the best birthday yet and many thanks to you and Mike for choosing to include the chimpanzees in your lives and special days! We appreciate you! Missy hopes you get lots of tomatoes for your birthday! 😉

Foxie (who just turned 49 on August 8th!):

Missy (who is turning 50 on August 23rd!):

And sweet George, who we recently welcomed!

Jamie’s Favorite Pages

by

Jamie is well-known around here for her love of books. She definitely has her favorites—books and magazines she can’t get enough of, topics like Lucy the Bonobo, cowboy boots, mummies, and larger-bodied apes. We can’t forget her fascination with Architectural Digest and Dwell. Jamie is always open to venturing outside her usual genres to try new things, but today, I found her with one of her all-time classics: a National Geographic.

What I find so endearing about Jamie is that when she really likes something in a book or magazine, she will tear it out and put it in her pelvic pocket, you know, for safe keeping. Often, we have to check with her while we are cleaning to make sure we are not throwing away a special page that she was saving for later. Otherwise, she will make you sift through the trash for her beloved saved page later. Most of the time it is easy to spot a page Jamie will want you to save, because it has been folded many times due to being stored in her pelvic pocket. That is usually is a good sign to us that we should take it out and put it in a safe place, until we can return it to her.

As you go through this photo series and video, you will notice pages of the magazine in both pelvic pockets.

Bonus photo series of Annie in the greenhouse:

Asking Caregivers Their Reason Why

by

Today, I asked some of the caregivers “Why chimps?. Out of all the jobs in the world and all the species of animals, how did you end up working with chimps?

Here are some of their answers (some of it is paraphrased):

Why chimps?

Krissy: It is something that is hard to put into words. It was a childhood desire that I had forgotten about,  and didn’t remember until I heard about CSNW in my fifties.  I started volunteering and soon realized I needed to make a career shift into chimpanzee care.  It was the right decision!

J.B.: At the beginning, it was because of how similar they were to us. Now, it’s because of how challenging chimps are and how every day is something new. Also, a short commute.

Amanda: Their intelligence and their emotional capacity. It’s also what I feel we owe them based off of everything humans have done to them. It’s a debt we can never repay.

Kelsi: Their brilliant minds, how resilient they are, how mischievous they can be, and how they always keep you on your toes.

Intern Sarah: Why not?

Ellen: I got the opportunity to intern with chimpanzees at another sanctuary (Chimp Haven) during college and loved getting to know them and their personalities, and seeing the love and relationships they built with their caregivers. I knew I wanted to continue to make a difference in the lives of sanctuary chimps, and have worked with them every since graduating!

Sabrina: I saw a chimp at the Oregon Zoo in the 1980’s and she threw poop. I found it quite funny.

Anna: I always wanted to work with animals and was hooked after meeting the sign language chimps at the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute.

Jenna: I have always been drawn to great apes since I was a child, but specifically loved orangutans. It wasn’t chimps until I completed an internship at Fauna Foundation in 2019 that I had an “AHA!” moment. I was hooked.

Enjoli (a new caregiver we haven’t introduced yet! Coming soon!): I’ve always loved primates. They’re incredibly smart and are charismatic. They deserve to be in a sanctuary with caregivers who care, have a variety of enrichment, ability to make their own decisions, and do what they want with their day.

Sky Walking

by

The original publication mentioned in the video from Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution is called: Foraging strategy and tree structure as drivers of arboreality and suspensory behaviour in savannah-dwelling chimpanzees. Click here for the link to the publication.

Click here for one popular science translation of the study: Walking on Two Legs May Have Evolved in Trees, Not on the Ground.

There’s more to the study than the quick video above. It includes discussion of the type of habitat in Tanzania where the study chimpanzees live. Unlike the dense forest ecosystems where many chimpanzees live, the habitat of the site in Tanzania is called savanna-mosaic, which always strikes me as poetic or romantic or something. It’s thought to be similar to the type of ecosystem where early humans adapted to thrive.

I was talking about the study with J.B., and that conversation caused me to think about studying chimpanzees in order to learn more about humans or human origins.

I’ve definitely said it before, but it doesn’t hurt to reflect again on how and why chimpanzees have been bought/sold/traded by humans in the pet, entertainment, and biomedical industries. They are frequently thought of and used as stand-ins for humans, yet they are different and separate enough that humans tend to feel less moral obligation towards them.

Their likeness to us has been, all to often, to their detriment. I don’t think that’s the case in this particular study. I do find theories about early humans interesting. But I think it is the case in an update to another story that has been in the news.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog post sharing a sad update to the Tonia Haddix / Chimp Crazy saga. If you missed that update, you can read the full post here. Just two days ago, Haddix was finally sentenced to almost four years in prison for lying under oath that a chimpanzee named Tonka had died, when in fact she was secretly keeping him in her basement. She has not yet been charged for the second chimpanzee she was trying to hide just months ago.

Her lawyer made a statement that Haddix had a difficult upbringing and history with humans, so had turned instead to animals for comfort. I think it was clear in the documentary Chimp Crazy that she felt chimpanzees in particular filled a need she had, even referring to Tonka as being more of a human than a chimpanzee. If she saw evidence of that it was because the humans around him were attempting to assimilate him into their world, rather than seeing him for who he is.

Haddix is an extreme example of this warped vision, but it’s easy to slip into this view because chimpanzees are so similar to humans and so culturally and socially adaptive. Celebrating and understanding their differences is perhaps more important to helping them than seeing their similarities.

I hope we can do both.