Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest
Hope. Love. Home. Sanctuary
Something new and cool for all of you to check out (if you haven’t already): http://chimpsanctuarynw.ning.com/
It’s a new social network for people who support the work of chimpanzee sanctuaries. It’s a pretty neat way to communicate with one another, find out what’s going on and talk about chimps. You can personalize your page as much or as little as you want. Hope to see some of you blog lurkers on there soon 🙂
Here are a few still shots from yesterday
I had to take one “before” shot of the cornbread peeps and the Passover Harrosset on Matzah (hope I got that right!). We really can’t thank the volunteers and supporters enough for making Easter, and everyday, such a treat for the Cle Elum Seven and the CSNW staff too!
One of the many, many things that I like about chimps is they like what they like – they aren’t as influenced by human hang-ups and ideas about what’s “snack” food and what’s “just a vegetable”. Thanks to a donation from a far, we bought some fresh produce Easter morning that the chimps don’t get frequently – cucumbers, green onions, sweet potatoes and coconuts. Jody and Missy were competing for who could grab as many green onions as they could.
And here is a man and his treasured coconut
The party seemed to be still going on this morning… Foxie was eating a coconut when we arrived (quite happily), and Missy and Annie did not even consider coming in for breakfast. After breakfast, Jamie donned an Easter bonnet (or perhaps more of a Spring gardening hat) briefly:
Nothing like a good face-grooming in the afternoon
Today I discovered a new game with Foxie. I was having difficulty throwing her troll doll back to her (some days my aim is just off), so I put it in a sock and tossed it up, my thought being that she would have more to grab on to. It worked like a charm, and Foxie actually really liked the sock! She almost immediately flung it over her neck, walked down the stairs and began playing with it in front of the mirror. I am sure other chimpanzees have done this before, but it was the first time I have personally seen a chimp play in front of a mirror. She was so enamored with her own reflection playing, that she completely ignored Missy’s attempts to get her attention. For the rest of the day, Foxie carried around the sock, sometimes in her hand, sometimes over her shoulders, and once on the top of her head. Every once in a while she would go back to the mirror and play.
One year ago, before the Cle Elum Seven arrived at Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest, I posted a blog entry with a link to a radio interview with Charles Siebert on This American Life.
Today, Siebert had an op-ed printed in the New York Times entitled Something Wild. Here is an excerpt:
There is something about chimpanzees — their tantalizing closeness to us in both appearance and genetic detail — that has always driven human beings to behavioral extremes, actions that reflect a deep discomfort with our own animality, and invariably turn out bad for both us and them.
Siebert uses specific examples of chimpanzee individuals to illustrate humans’ uncomfortable relationship with our closest evolutionary relatives, and our stubborn desire to make them fit into our concepts of of who they are, which manifest not from observing and appreciating chimpanzees as a distinct species, but from our attempts to make them our human-like playthings as “pets” and “entertainers” or human surrogates in biomedical research.
Siebert explains what I have observed of captive chimpanzees – they live in a world of lost identity. They did not have the opportunity to grow up within a chimpanzee culture, but they cannot fit into our human culture either, no matter how hard we try to force them to.
Sanctuaries like Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest try to make the best out of the inherently unjust situation of captivity. We allow the chimpanzees to be who they are, which is sometimes a strange mix of learned “human” behaviors and a renewed expression of their instinctual chimpanzee selves. Our deepest hope is that we can provide for those in our care while working to ensure that one day sanctuaries like ours will not be necessary because chimpanzees will no longer be used for human purposes.
Please be sure to tune in to Nightline tonight for a very important story about how chimpanzees are treated in laboratories. I just previewed some of the footage and it’s heartbreaking. Knowing Jamie, Burrito, Foxie, Negra, Annie, Missy and Jody were in similar facilities… There are no words!
