Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest
Hope. Love. Home. Sanctuary
Anna organized an Olympics-themed party for the chimps this morning. Negra wasn’t sure what to think at first, but once she saw the fancy drinks in coconut-rimmed glasses, she got on board.
We didn’t have quite as much snow as they have in Pyeongchang, but we managed to scrape together enough to fill a sled before it all melted.
Lately, Missy and Annie have been doing what they do best – playing all day!
Meanwhile, the humans have been busting their butts to move caging, glass, and other material from the former Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute (CHCI) at Central Washington University before its demolition.
The building had sat largely empty in the years since Tatu, Loulis, and many of the staff and students associated with Friends of Washoe moved from campus to the Fauna Foundation in Canada. When the university determined that the building would be torn down to accommodate construction of a new dorm, they agreed to remove as much reusable material as possible and donate it to CSNW for use in our upcoming expansion. (Click here for a video from local news channel KAPP about the donation). But a jump in the timeline for the building’s demolition meant we had to get the material out with little notice. Thankfully, an emergency call to our local supporters on Facebook was met with an enthusiastic response, and just days later we had trucks, trailers, and lots of manual labor lined up and ready to help. In only a few hours, we loaded thousands of pounds of caging, steel doors, and 270-lb chimp-proof windows…
…and then unloaded it all at the sanctuary.
Alan, an CSNW intern, made the mistake of volunteering on the day that we needed to manually unload the nearly 4,500-lb of glass from the trailer. He is young, however, and likely had the use of his arms the next day, unlike some of us.
Our expansion project has been full of frustrating setbacks throughout the permitting process – lately around the location and design of a new driveway we are required to put in – but we are getting closer! And when we do break ground, we will do so knowing that we will be putting this material to good use and saving thousands of dollars in the process. It is a small but significant part of CHCI’s legacy, and a great way to remember and honor the chimpanzees that taught us so much.
Like us, chimpanzees are social primates. We look to our friends and family for comfort and companionship. We rely on our communities for protection. Our cultures provide us with the knowledge we need to survive.
The desire to be with others is so essential that it is hardwired in apes like us. Without social contact we literally go insane.
But it’s not always easy being social. It comes with a host of trade offs, where individual interests must be compromised for the good of the relationship. It brings with it opportunities for miscommunication and misinterpretation. It leads to jealousy. Cheating, stealing, and deception are all par for the course. And it almost invariably leads to conflict.
All of which are difficult waters to navigate for even the most experienced and even-tempered individual.
Now imagine being Burrito.
Taken from his mother and raised in a lab nursery. Sent to live in a human home for his most formative years. Leased to a circus. And then returned to the lab, where he would live much of his life alone or with only one other individual in a cage barely big enough to walk in.
Or imagine being Jamie.
For nine years she struggled to master the human environment, a world in which she was rewarded for mastering tricks and likely punished for failing to understand or comply. Then, like Burrito, she was ripped from that world and placed in a laboratory with her own kind – a kind that she might not have even recognized as her own – where she would remain for two decades.
It’s common knowledge in the sanctuary community that ex-pet and ex-performer primates are the most difficult to integrate. Many people think the laboratory environment is the most damaging, but at least lab chimps tend to live with other chimps when they’re not on protocol. Being raised by humans is a kind of damage they don’t recover from. It actually deprives them of resiliency. It permeates the way they think and they way they react. You can see it in the way they relate to other chimps, and it even has a measurable physiological effect – the more time chimps spend with humans during childhood, the greater their cortisol (stress hormone) levels as adults.
Nearly every conflict at Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest is instigated or at the very least amplified by Burrito or Jamie – Burrito, through his undirected and ungoverned aggression and Jamie, through her intense need to dominate, manipulate, and control. For both, their worst tendencies seem to be chronically stoked by insecurity. Granted, chimpanzees personalities are complex and influenced by many factors, but it’s hard not to see their extremes as a direct product of their histories.
Just today, a conflict broke out at lunch. It began when Jody calmly took Foxie’s lettuce. Not a nice thing to do, of course, but given their friendly and trusting relationship it would have ended there without incident. But Jamie saw it happen. And Jamie couldn’t stand the fact that Jody was getting away with it. Jamie began screaming from the playroom, which in turn got Burrito riled up. Burrito then launched himself around the room in a frenzied display, eventually slamming into Jody. For the next five minutes, all of the chimps ran throughout the playroom, front rooms, and greenhouse screaming (with the exception of Negra, who took the opportunity to eat her lettuce by herself). It was hard to tell who was chasing who near the end. Exhausted but uninjured, they finally returned to the front rooms and finished lunch.
We often talk about chimpanzee conflicts in Machiavellian terms, as though each move is premeditated and calculated to maximally derive some social gain. This kind of social behavior does occur in chimps, but many fights are about nothing of substance, as best as we can tell. Put simply, it’s hard to be social, and even harder for those whose social lives didn’t even begin until they were young adults.
Fortunately for Burrito and Jamie, the benefit of their presence in the group far outweighs the stress they cause, and the group in turn gives them something they deserved but never had: a messy, loving, quarreling, comforting chimpanzee family.
For Missy, this truly is a magical time of year.
Foxie is one of the more gregarious chimps I’ve known, but even the most social primate needs to be alone once and a while.
At CSNW, each day begins with a group activity – breakfast. When that’s done, the chimps typically head out onto the hill together. Jamie does her first patrol, Missy runs in all directions, Burrito obsessively follows whichever of the girls is cycling at the time…and eventually they head back inside together for some rest. But there’s often one straggler.
This morning, Foxie remained outside, as she often does, atop one of the towers. This is her favorite place to be alone.
I can see why this has become her spot. It’s a great place for her to bring her dolls for private games of make-believe.
Before we purchased the property next door, it was also the perfect location to covertly surveil our neighbor.
It’s a peaceful, private place. Just sit back and watch the river flow by and the cows graze.
Soon enough there will be excitement. There will be stress. There will be politics.
But for a little while, there’s just Foxie.
I am feeling quite lucky today as I just got back from a beautiful family vacation last night! After being away for a little while, the humans at the sanctuary are always happy to be reunited with their chimpanzee friends, and the feeling is usually mutual. I was delighted to see that Central Washington has maintained its mild winter, so the chimps and I celebrated the morning with multiple walks around a snow-less Young’s Hill.
Ellie the neighborhood elk has been spending most of her winter away from the sanctuary, but now that the snow has gone, she made an appearance on the property this morning.
At one point, I saw each of the 7 chimpanzees get some fresh air, including Foxie accompanied by her Dora doll.
More walks are in order this afternoon, so I’ll just leave you with a bonus photo of this much smaller non-human primate we saw leaping through the trees of a Costa Rican national park.
It’s been very quiet here today. Freezing rain has left everything coated in a thick layer of ice, making it nearly impossible to travel to or from the sanctuary.
Jamie didn’t seem too upset by the fact that her two-acre habitat had frozen over. In fact, she seemed to relish the opportunity to stay inside, make a cozy nest with blankets, giant stuffed animals, and her favorite boots, and leisurely flip through a new book about primates.
