Diana

Negra and other clips

March 22, 2026 by Diana

I wanted to punctuate the news about Negra with some other daily clips. We were certainly hoping that Negra would bounce back quickly. We first noticed Negra’s weakened legs (even more weak than they normally are) following a brief conflict in her group.

Since arriving, she’s had bowed knees and walked on the outside of her feet. You know she’s not one to exert herself very much. I’ve often marveled, over the years, at how those little legs of hers keep her upright.

She’s clearly having more trouble these last few days, though she doesn’t seem to be in pain, and she’s choosing to climb and move from space to space. We don’t want her to be in a position with the group where she feels she needs to run or jump, which happens fairly frequently with Burrito’s energy and Jamie’s bossiness (interestingly, Jamie very rarely challenges Negra, but when Jamie is mad at someone else, Negra often gets pulled into the drama). Dr. Erin is on the case, of course. She’s adjusting meds, reviewing footage, watching Negra move, and consulting with all of us and others.

I would be lying if I said I wasn’t worried, but I’ve been worried about Negra since the day I met her over eighteen years ago when she was still living in that windowless basement. She seemed frail and old then at 35!

On the positive side, Negra has been in a good mood. She’s handing out back-of-the-hand kisses to staff and volunteer caregivers like she was in a kissing booth.

And she is enjoying the opportunity to eat at Negra-pace, away from the group, which is very, very slowly, with food tucked in her nest for later.

Chimpanzees in Motion

March 8, 2026 by Diana

I hope you had as much fun as I did reading the Month of Love blog posts that highlighted the personalities and stories of each individual at the sanctuary. Huge thanks again to all Chimpanzee Pals and Bovine Buddies who are sponsoring the care and memories of all past and present chimpanzees and cows. Your support is important and meaningful.

Sharing the chimpanzee’s personalities and quirks really illustrates how everyone in our care stands out as their own unique, charming, independent person.

I was thinking about this when I was playing with Burrito today (safely, with mesh between us, of course). His charm, energy, and silliness were turned up to eleven this afternoon. In between headstands and other acrobatics, I captured these images of him:

I would never dream of playing with Jamie the way I play with Burrito. I’ve tried it a few times. Sometimes she allows raucous play for a few minutes, clearly indulging me until she can quickly redirect our time together towards activities that she enjoys, like grooming my boots or walking outside, as we did today:

Jamie was a bit distracted on our stroll. She kept her eyes on The Bray habitat. I’m not sure who, if anyone, she was hoping to see or avoid. There was no one outside as we sauntered around the entire perimeter of Young’s Hill. I had my hood pulled tightly over my head to keep my ears warm from the sharp wind, but Jamie didn’t seem bothered by the gales.

When she got to the Raceway / the entrance to return to her Greenhouse, she paused and looked towards The Bray again. When I noticed Terry walking into the Chute, I thought perhaps that’s who Jamie had been waiting for, but I turned around and she was gone. Was she intimidated by Terry? Maybe she was being bashful? Or perhaps she had hoped to catch the eye of someone else in Terry’s group.

Whatever the reason for her avoidance, it left me with just Terry. So I followed his lead. He walked almost to the top of The Bray and stopped. He sat down, looking at the view below. I do the same thing when I’m hiking. I get to a spot, stop, and turn around to take in both the view and to have a sense of the distance or elevation I’ve gained. Maybe Terry was experiencing awe in that moment. I certainly was.

Love for Missy!

February 22, 2026 by Diana

Continuing our month of love, I have the distinct honor of writing about Missy, in the hopes that she will gain more Chimpanzee Pals.

Missy, in a word, is cool.

She is small in stature, but fits quite firmly in the “small but mighty” category. She packs a lot of muscle and a lot of spirit into a small frame.

Missy was born in captivity in 1975 and was owned by the Buckshire Corporation. She spent many years at the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates (LEMSIP) that was part of New York University. There, she was used for hepatitis vaccine testing and breeding. Missy had two children during her time in biomedical research: Honey B, who lives here now, and Josh, who lives at Center for Great Apes. CGA recently wrote about Josh for an electronic newsletter and shared that he, too is quite small, weighing just 90 pounds! We don’t know Missy’s actual birth date, so we chose a date for her to celebrate: August 23rd.

Missy is very loyal to her boss, Jamie.

When we attempted the introductions between Missy’s group and the group of three that included Missy’s daughter in 2019, we learned that Missy relies on Jamie. I had always thought of Missy as quite self-reliant and confident. When she was separated from Jamie, however, she was as nervous as I’ve ever seen her. Now I think of Missy as a soldier who needs a sergeant. She understands hierarchy and wants to know her place in the order, even if her sergeant can be a bit of a bully (see Love for Jamie).

While Jamie and Honey B are both smarty-pants and mischievous in show-offy ways, Missy is quietly intelligent and clever.

She also knows how to crack herself up. This is one of my all-time favorite caught-on-camera moments of Missy. It’s from 15 years ago, so apologies for the poor quality:

Missy was Annie’s rock for the first decade or so at the sanctuary.

Just tonight, I watched Missy reach out to Annie to give her reassurance and bring her in for a hug when Annie was anxious. To both Missy and Annie’s credit, Annie has blossomed and doesn’t need Missy’s constant presence, but we still consider them best friends.

Missy is best known for being a runner. As soon as she had access to a large habitat, she ran. She’s been running ever since. J.B. described it best back then: “She is like a spring that was coiled up for decades, just waiting to be released.”

Missy has a new running buddy! She is thrilled when George, in the other habitat, challenges her to a race.

She can spot a tomato, her most favorite food in the whole wide world, from a hundred yards away. Her August birthday is perfectly timed for peak tomato season.

Are you a runner? Do you love tomatoes? Do you know someone who is / does? Well, then, it’s clearly time to become Missy’s Pal or give the gift of Pal sponsorship to your tomato-loving, uber cool, athletic BFF!

Missy currently has eleven pals. Thank you to those eleven for loving Missy, and thank you to everyone who has signed up to be a Pal or Buddy this month! Your support gives them the individualized care they deserve and keeps this blog going!

Love for Jamie

February 15, 2026 by Diana

Continuing with the Valentine’s-month blog posts featuring each of those in our care, I made sure to reserve Jamie to write about because I do have a great deal of love for her.

Unfortunately, we don’t know a lot about Jamie’s history. Unlike many of the other chimpanzees at the sanctuary we are not aware of any of Jamie’s relatives. We don’t know where or exactly when she was born. We were told she was owned by an animal trainer until she was nine years old, but we don’t know how she was used. In addition to their use in movies and television shows, it wasn’t uncommon back then for chimpanzees to be used in roadside attractions or even rented out as entertainment for birthday parties. That’s our best guess as to how she was used to make money for her owner.

Many chimpanzees in similar situations, like George who was born on a training compound, were used in the entertainment industry for only a few years before they were deemed too strong, willful, or just too much trouble and cast aside, replaced by younger chimpanzees. At nine, Jamie remained in entertainment longer than most.

She bares the signs of being raised in a human environment. When she first arrived at the sanctuary in 2008, she would choose to wear clothes on a regular basis. She does something I’ve never seen another chimpanzee do: tie knots. Sometimes tied in the scarves that adorn her neck.

Sometimes tied in a nest-blanket she’s weaved through the mesh.

We choose to celebrate Jamie’s birthday on Halloween in honor of her mischievous ways.

Fittingly, Jamieween has become the biggest party of the year at the sanctuary.

I consider Jamie to be a good friend. A friendship that has developed over many years. The kind of friend I can just sit with in relaxed comfort.

I understand some of her frustrations of captivity, notice her need for things to be “just so”, and admire her ability to take charge and run towards potential threats to her group, like snakes.

There’s no question that she can be a bully and has a heightened sense of entitlement (she views all food as belonging to her, unless she says otherwise, for example). This quality can make her a less-than ideal roommate, especially for lower-ranking chimpanzees like Foxie and Annie. And it can lead to some funny moments, like this one years ago that reinforced her reputation for being “the party police.”

Perhaps because of her penchant for intimidation, when Jamie is in a good mood, being silly and playful, there’s really nothing better. And she can be quite funny. Jamie really appreciates when you listen to her and know what she wants. She releases a low moan/groan when she’s truly happy, which can often be when a human goes searching for and gives her the particular boot or book (or both) that she had in her mind.

Making Jamie happy makes everyone happy.

It doesn’t take much for Jamie to get up in the morning, because she has an internal list of items on her checklist for the day. Jamie is most likely to be found busy doing something, whether it’s patrolling her outdoor habitat, demanding something from her caregivers, working on a puzzle, or crafting her own enrichment.

I hope you have fallen even more in love with boss Jamie than you were before!

Big thanks to the 9 Chimpanzee Pals that have already showed their love of this complicated, multi-dimensional, intelligent, admirable, sometimes irascible chimpanzee.

If you would like to show your love and loyalty, I encourage you to become Jamie’s Chimpanzee Pal today.

Love for Nutmeg

February 10, 2026 by Diana

Today is our first in a series of Valentine’s posts about each of the individuals in our care.

We are using the month of love to tell you more about everyone so they can gain more Chimpanzee Pals and Bovine Buddies. We hope to have 30 new pal or buddies by the end of the month!

I wanted to kick off the love with a post about Nutmeg, the steer we lost in March of 2024. Today would have been his 11th birthday.

As we share on his bio page, Nutmeg was born at Farm Sanctuary on February 10, 2015. His mom Betsy, along with Honey, were dairy cows purchased for a reality TV series called “Utopia”. When the show ended, after Honey’s daughter Meredith was born on set, the veterinarian and the show’s producer didn’t want to send pregnant Betsy and her new family back into the dairy industry. Seeking an alternative, and lucky for Nutmeg and his family, they found Farm Sanctuary. Like his cow companions, he came to our sanctuary on November 2, 2018 from Farm Sanctuary‘s Northern California shelter when it closed.

Nutmeg was best known for looking intimidating but being a big softie who still relied on his mom for comfort. He had a boyish charm that he shared with other sanctuary residents, which I wrote about in this blog post. Nutmeg was also known for his enviable curly red hairdo.

He liked tractors (seriously) and scratching his big, lovable head:

In the fall, he was most likely to be found picking apples right off the tree in the winter pasture. I will forever think of that particular tree as being Nutmeg’s.

What got Nutmeg out of bed in the morning was probably Betsy or Honey getting out of bed first and him dutifully following their cue.

Nutmeg was the first steer I got to know well, and I am thankful for every moment I was able to spend with him.

Nutmeg currently has two in memoriam Bovine Buddies. Thank you to them for continuing to honor his memory and his influence on the sanctuary. If you’d like to join their herd, you can become his Buddy here: https://chimpsnw.org/you-can-help/be-a-bovine-buddy/

Pucker Up

February 8, 2026 by Diana

We have a treat for you today! I am sharing a guest blog post by board member and chimp house volunteer Dr. Lori Sheeran, who is a Professor of Anthropology at Central Washington University.

Dr. Sheeran was inspired by last month’s publication of a scientific article entitled, “A comparative approach to the evolution of kissing” in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. The article by authors Brindle, Talbot, and West explores the evolution of kissing in Asian and African monkeys and apes.

We thought it would be a great guest blog topic with Valentine’s Day coming up! Please enjoy learning about kissing in our evolutionary kissing cousins from Lori:

To study kissing, scientists first needed to define it: “…a non-agonistic interaction involving directed, intraspecific, oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer (Brindle et al., 2025, p. 1).” I know, not much romance in that definition! The researchers recognize that kissing may occur in sexual and platonic contexts, and that its function likely differs in each context, but they were unable to separate those two contexts in their review of kissing reported in the primate literature.

They also explain that for any given behavior, such as kissing, researchers can think about answering “HOW” questions and answering “WHY” ones. For kissing, HOW questions might include studies focused on the form and context of the behavior, how the behavior is learned, and at what developmental stages it occurs.

WHY questions tend to focus on the evolutionary purpose of the behavior, which usually relates to how it affects the kisser’s survival and reproduction. Here, a researcher might focus on whether those individuals who kiss (or kiss well) have more reproductive opportunities than those who do not kiss (or who kiss poorly).

Kissing occurs in many species, including non-primates, but the authors note that the most information on it currently exists for African and Asian monkeys and large-bodied apes (orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos). Gibbons and siamangs, sometimes referred to as the small apes, have not been reported kissing, or at least not yet (some gibbon and siamang species, however, do have “love songs” and pairs sing to each other).

The authors’ preliminary results indicate that kissing may have evolved independently in African and Asian monkeys and in large-bodied apes, due to the apparent absence of kissing in gibbons and siamangs. Large-bodied apes’ kissing may have evolved as early as 21.5 million years ago, before the orangutan, gorilla, chimpanzee, and bonobo lineages diverged, because nearly all of these species kiss—with the possible enigmatic exception of eastern gorillas. Thus, as is true for human societies, there is variation in the presence or absence of kissing among large-bodied apes, which opens the possibility that it is a learned and socially transmitted behavior—culture!

The authors had little information on platonic kissing, but I find it interesting to speculate on how this might be an important affiliative behavior. Kissing entails vulnerability, so engaging in it shows some degree of trust in one’s kissing partner. It might occur within primate groups in contexts similar to other affiliative behaviors such as grooming: to repair relationships after a disagreement, to reinforce bonds between parents and children, or to show concern for an injured or bereaved relative.

If you have a chance to pucker up with those you love this Valentine’s Day (human or not!), you might spare a moment to thank our ape ancestors for inventing this marvelous behavior.

Feel free to thank Lori in the comments for this guest blog post!

And if you’re looking for some Super Bowl content, see Chad’s blog post from a few days ago :).

Winter Sun

January 25, 2026 by Diana

The sun was out today, and the chimpanzees took advantage of it!

Mave can most often be found lying down. She’s a pretty chill, not very athletic individual. She also is still getting comfortable being in The Bray habitat, after years of avoiding the great big outdoors.

That’s why it has been surprising to see that Mave is the biggest fan of the shaky bridge that was constructed by founder Keith and friends last summer!