Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest

Hope. Love. Home. Sanctuary

behavior

A New Approach

by

I wanted to give you all a brief update on our reintroduction of Cy’s group (for background, see here and here).

We’ve reluctantly come to the conclusion that, at this time, these efforts are not going to lead to a level of stability that the chimps deserve. Willy B has shown signs of promise. I really think he could succeed in a group where Cy was the only other male. He’s more composed when it’s just him and Cy. Plus, Cy has the patience of a saint and enough confidence to let Willy blow off some steam once and a while without feeling threatened.

But Willy B can’t seem to control himself to the same degree when Terry and/or Gordo are in the group and neither Terry nor Gordo were gifted with Cy’s equanimity. Their reactions to Willy’s prodding only goad him on further. This results in a lot of stress, and the reintroduction process was not successful in changing these fundamental dynamics.

The reality for social animals like chimpanzees is that each individual’s welfare is interdependent and at times even negatively correlated with the welfare of those they live with. Finding a place for Willy in the group of nine opened up a world of opportunities for him but resulted in unresolved tension that impacted the whole group. Sometimes the pieces just don’t fit together in a way that makes sense for everyone. So we’ve got to keep working on the puzzle and try something different.

For now we are keeping them in subgroups that we believe will be stable and meet everyone’s needs as best as possible: Willy B, Honey B, Mave, & Dora in one group and Cy, Terry, Gordo, Rayne, and Lucky in another. There’s less social opportunity for now but more cohesion. Like the reintroduction process, these groupings will let us test out relationships and evaluate social dynamics, but without the same end goal of integrating all nine. What is the goal, then? One possibility is to keep them in these or similar subgroups. Another is to regularly rotate individuals between subgroups in a way that attempts to maintain most of the beneficial relationships that were formed in the larger group. And then there are possibilities to explore with the group on the other side of the building, which will undoubtedly be changing over the coming years as they age well into their 50s. We’re mindful that many of them will have a need for new social opportunities in the not-too-distant future.

It’s been a difficult conclusion to reach when both the chimps and the staff and volunteers have invested so much in making the larger group work. But that’s the nature of working with chimpanzees. You just have to keep moving forward with an open mind. We look forward to updating you along the way.

Two Awkward Guys

by

As Diana mentioned, we swapped Gordo and Terry in the reintro group yesterday to try to get a better idea of what might trigger Willy B’s antisocial behavior. The reunion between Terry and Honey B was easy – after a brief, half-hearted display, Terry approached the mesh and the two began to play, at which point we simply opened the door between them.

We knew that Gordo would be nervous reentering a group with Willy B so we tried to ensure that Cy, the group’s alpha, would be the first to greet him when the door was opened. We could have introduced Gordo to a subset of the reintro group initially but since they all know each other so well we thought we’d just get right to it.

There are several interesting things to watch here. First, you can see how Cy polices the behavior of his subordinates and protects the vulnerable—you can see his “feets of fury” (thank you, Sabrina) in action in the playroom scene as he tells Willy B to step down. He’s a good guy. Second, you can see how the females attempt to modulate the behaviors of the males through distractions and grooming. Rayne is particularly adept at this and very in tune with the needs of her group, always watching for moments when the boys might need a little help getting along. And finally, you can see clearly how chimpanzees express trust in one another—which is, of course, by putting sensitive body parts in each other’s mouths.

This interaction between Gordo and Willy B may seem at first glance like two best friends rejoicing in being reunited but this is actually what is looks like when chimps don’t trust each other. These lengthy, exaggerated displays of vulnerability (e.g., putting your fingers, backside, or scrotum in between another chimps’ gigantic canine teeth) are more common when there isn’t already a solid basis of trust. It’s also common for males to display erections in these circumstances, which may be another evolved display of vulnerability (chimp penises are usually fully retracted into the body for protection). I imagine some of our own greeting gestures such as shaking hands and bowing aren’t that far removed from these same behaviors, though obviously a bit more PG-rated according to our sensibilities.

It will be interesting to see how Gordo’s presence (and Terry’s absence) in the group changes Willy’s behavior, if at all.

 

Reason #2 Why Gordo Will Never Be a Doctor

by

The official term for fear of blood, wounds, and injuries is hemophobia. To say that Gordo is hemophobic is true and yet somehow insufficient. What we really need, and what appears to be absent from the literature, is a term for the fear of someone else’s injury which you yourself inflicted.

Last week, I was working in the garage at the house when the Bray erupted with screams, barks, and alarm calls. Did someone see a snake? Is the group fighting? I ran up to the chimp house to see what was going on, expecting to find the staff frantically gathering snake capture equipment or trying to track a conflict. Instead, everyone was going about their business as usual.

I asked what was going on. “Gordo is freaking out over Willy’s toe.” Oh, right.

You see, Gordo hates the sight of wounds. We’ve known this for some time. Thankfully he hasn’t had many opportunities to see one lately. But Willy B’s recent injury, and the subsequent amputation of the of tip of his toe, had Gordo enthralled. Which, come to think of it, highlights another way in which the term hemophobia is lacking when it comes to Gordo’s condition: He doesn’t actually try to avoid the sight of injuries. In fact, he goes out of his way to look at them. Maybe the term we’re looking for, then, is cacospectamania, or the obsession with staring at repulsive things.

This whole episode brought back memories of an incident that I was happy to have forgotten about, however briefly. In the spring of ’22, we successfully completed the long process of systematically introducing Willy B’s group to Cy’s group and had officially formed a new group of nine. For weeks thereafter, the staff took turns sleeping overnight on a cot in the chimp house foyer due to the risk of serious conflicts in the newly formed group. While there were indeed conflicts from time to time, they were largely minor and the group eventually settled into a groove. We, in turn, began to relax our vigilance to the point where Diana and I could monitor the group via security cameras from our house across the driveway.

One evening, as Diana and I were making dinner, we heard whimpering from the monitors. There had been a conflict earlier that day, so perhaps they hadn’t finished what they started. I grabbed my radio and went to see what was going on.

Upon entering the chimp area, I could immediately sense something wasn’t right. Willy B was sitting on the bench in Room 6, where he had made his nest just a few hours earlier, his lips drawn back to expose his teeth in what is known as a fear grimace. Willy didn’t often engage with me in social interactions and rarely made direct eye contact, but at that moment his eyes were locked on mine. Help me, he appeared to be saying.

I looked up to see Gordo perched directly above Willy B in the door that passes through the ceiling into the mezzanine. Terry was positioned on the floor below him. Without a sound, the alpha male, Cy, suddenly appeared and sat in the doorway to Room 5, blocking the only other exit. Willy was alone and frightened, surrounded by three bonded males from another group after his own group mates had gone to bed. I radioed to Diana, “This is not good. You’d better get up here.”

Gordo stared intently at Willy B and began to scream. Was he marshaling his allies to launch an attack? The idea that our months-long effort to unite the two groups would fall apart so suddenly and spectacularly with a premeditated, late night ambush was not out of the realm of possibility. Chimps have been known to do worse things.

I ran through our options in my head. Diana could operate doors while I distracted the combatants with the CO2 fire extinguisher and bear scare darts we kept nearby. If we could separate even one of them, Willy might stand a chance.

Willy slowly turned his gaze from Gordo to Terry, then to Cy, and back to Gordo. He was out of options and he knew it. Gordo, meanwhile, crept closer and closer.

They are on the verge of an all out assault, I thought to myself. This is how it ends. Just then, Gordo squinted his eyes and peered intently at a small wound on Willy’s foot. His screams intensified as he studied the injury. That’s what this is all about? A cut on Willy’s foot? My emotions swung from fear and horror to disbelief. By the look on this face, so did Willy’s. Ironically, Gordo was most likely responsible for the very wound that was causing him so much distress, just as he was the one responsible for removing the toe from Willy B’s foot a couple weeks ago. This may explain why Willy is unable to muster any sympathy for Gordo’s condition.

Gordo eventually stopped screaming and the tension in the room slowly began to dissipate. Gordo, Terry, and Cy returned to their nests in the playrooms and Willy B, Diana, and I were able to breathe again, all three of us having learned an important insight about our pal, Gordo: He is not, in fact, a ruthless midnight assassin, but rather a garden variety hemophobic cacospectamaniac. It’s a slight but important difference, one that I am as grateful for today as I was then.

The Chimps Aren’t Alright

by

In 2011, primatologists Lucy Birkett and Nicholas Newton-Fisher conducted a study that sought to shed light on a simple yet provocative question: How abnormal is the behavior of captive, zoo-living chimpanzees? I encourage you to read the paper but I’ll spare you the suspense:

Very.

Their treatment of the issue was only slightly more nuanced. Captive chimpanzee behavior is normal, the authors say, in that they display many of the same behaviors as their wild counterparts—behaviors that we refer to as species-typical. As we know, captive chimpanzees tend to run, climb, groom, and use tools, just like wild chimps. The problem is that they also display a wide range of behaviors that are only rarely, if ever, seen in wild chimpanzees, such as hair-plucking, regurgitation and re-ingestion, coprophagy (eating feces), urophagy (drinking urine), pacing, rocking, self-clasping, and self-biting, which are commonly understood to be a reflection of poor welfare at some stage of life, and perhaps even mental illness. After observing the behavior of 40 chimpanzees at six accredited zoos in the U.S. and Europe, the authors came to the conclusion that abnormal behavior was not only present but endemic in these populations, regardless of group size, composition, and housing. Every single chimpanzee subject exhibited at least one abnormal behavior during the study period, with an average repertoire of five abnormal behaviors and an average frequency of once every forty minutes. This, it should be noted, was in contrast to the whopping total of zero instances that they recorded in over 1,023 hours observing wild chimpanzees in Uganda.

Researchers within in the zoo community rejected this characterization. They conducted their own study, which utilized a larger sample size but substituted surveys of zoo staff for direct behavioral observation, and concluded that only 64% of chimpanzees displayed abnormal behavior. And after excluding coprophagy, which some argue can be considered abnormal without necessarily being reflective of poor welfare, the overall prevalence of, shall we say, meaningfully abnormal behavior in their study dropped to a somewhat lower but still shockingly high 48%. As a rebuttal to the use of the term endemic, the paper may have succeeded, but it should provide little consolation.

Why would half or more of all chimpanzees in accredited zoological institutions exhibit abnormal behavior, in such stark contrast to their wild counterparts? Why, in light of decades of rigorous animal welfare science and the best efforts of hundreds upon hundreds of experts, do captive chimpanzees continue to regurgitate and pluck themselves bald?

One thing I discovered shortly after entering this field is that there is little agreement as to what it means for an animal to have a good life. To some, a good life is one in which one’s basic needs are met. As Dr. Dave Hone argues in an article entitled Why Zoos are Good:

…[zoo animals] will not suffer from the threat or stress of predators (and nor will they be killed in a grisly manner or eaten alive) or the irritation and pain of parasites, injuries and illnesses will be treated, they won’t suffer or die of drought or starvation and indeed will get a varied and high-quality diet with all the supplements required. They can be spared bullying or social ostracism or even infanticide by others of their kind, or a lack of a suitable home or environment in which to live. A lot of very nasty things happen to truly ‘wild’ animals that simply don’t happen in good zoos and to cast a life that is ‘free’ as one that is ‘good’ is, I think, an error.

There’s no question that the best zoos attempt to do all of this and more for the chimpanzees in their care. Why, then, does abnormal behavior persist?

The answer is that chimpanzees are more than just bundles of basic needs. They are complex social and emotional beings with highly intelligent and inquisitive minds. Moreover, chimpanzees are adapted to employ these traits in the environments in which their species evolved—a diverse range of environments, it should be said, from rain forest to savanna, which altogether actually have relatively little in common, save for one thing: their complete lack of resemblance to an urban zoo exhibit.

Should we be surprised that animals whose home ranges are measured in square miles in the wild feel frustrated in zoo exhibits? Should we expect animals that evolved dynamic fission-fusion communities of up to 150 individuals to thrive in relatively static groups of a dozen or less? Do we believe that members of a species that exhibits a predictable pattern of migration, in which males remain in their natal communities while females generally emigrate upon reaching adolescence, would not experience prolonged stress when groups are broken up and reorganized in violation of those patterns? This mismatch between the captive environment and the environment in which chimpanzees evolved both denies them the opportunity to express behaviors that are biologically and psychologically fulfilling and introduces stressors for which they have no innate coping mechanisms. And, importantly, it exists to varying degrees in every situation in which chimpanzees live under human care, from laboratory to zoo to sanctuary.

Regarding Dr. Hone’s point, I would never argue that life for wild chimpanzees is perfect. But I don’t think it requires a defense, either. It very well may be nasty, brutish, and short (actually, wild chimpanzees that reach adulthood live nearly as long as captive chimpanzees), but it is theirs, and has been for millions of years. It would be strange, and perhaps too convenient, to think we could improve upon it.

If we accept that all is not well for captive chimpanzees, we must then ask ourselves why we continue to breed them in captivity. I, for one, am not against all forms of captivity, as for the better part of the last 25 years I have worked to keep chimpanzees behind bars and electric fencing. Sanctuaries are necessary for chimpanzees who have been raised in captivity or who cannot be returned to the wild. And in fact many zoos have, to their great credit, provided homes for chimpanzees from laboratories, the pet trade, and various failed and shuttered institutions. But intentionally breeding and keeping animals in a way that denies their autonomy and restricts the full repertoire of their behavior, and which results in the proliferation of myriad abnormal behaviors despite our best efforts to enrich their environments, requires justification or, at the very least, a bit more reflection.

The modern defense of maintaining chimpanzees in zoos rests on two assumptions. The first is that the captive chimpanzee population serves an important role as a reservoir for one day restoring declining wild populations—the ark strategy, if you will. Given what we know about captive chimpanzees’ behavioral abnormalities and the absence of any kind of culturally-transmitted knowledge that would permit them to survive independently, this is unlikely to succeed and is generally accepted as such, even within the zoo community. The second is that zoo chimpanzees help educate the public and inspire support for conservation efforts. For this there is at least a somewhat more robust debate. But even if we were to accept that these benefits could only be achieved by maintaining chimpanzees in exhibits, our rightness in doing so would depend largely on how we measure the costs on the other side of the ledger; namely, those borne by the captive chimpanzees themselves.

The degree to which abnormal behavior correlates to the internal experience of suffering in captive chimpanzees is difficult to define with precision and we must be careful not to lump all abnormal behaviors together as though each is indicative of the same degree of compromised welfare. But the data appear to support what many of us have experienced professionally and what many others know intuitively: The chimps aren’t alright. And the reason for their troubles, it seems, has less to do with the way in which we keep them than with the very fact that we keep them at all. Our society is just now beginning to wrestle with the fact that, at least for some species like elephants and cetaceans, captivity is simply incompatible with good welfare. If we care enough about chimpanzees to conserve their wild populations, it’s time we think critically about the well being of the individuals serving on their behalf.

A Natural History of Jerks

by

Male chimps can be jerks. True, females can also be jerks (see: Chimpanzee, Jamie), and not all males are jerks (at least not all of the time). There is an exception to every rule. Nonetheless, it is undeniable that chimpanzee jerkishness has a certain maleness to it, just as chimpanzee maleness contains a certain jerkishness.

But just as not all male chimps are alike, so too is it true that not all jerks are alike. While this is by no means an an exhaustive examination of the topic, here we will distinguish between two types of jerk: Those jerks who wreak havoc blindly, as if possessed, and those who inflict their jerkiness with forethought and intention.

To illustrate the former, let’s turn to our dear friend Willy B. Today I watched him sit peacefully in the shade beneath a climbing structure on the Bray, his 2-acre habitat, surveying the yard for remnants of a the day’s forage. When the forage was finished, he quietly returned to the indoor enclosures. It being mid-afternoon, however, this peaceful Dr. Jekyll was suddenly and inexplicably transmogrified into a raging Mr. Hyde. Apropos of nothing and with no other chimps in sight, he began to bang on the food chute with the back of his wrist. The noise and vibration shattered the calm of the afternoon and soon the others were up from their naps. With hair on end, they circled each other in the confines of the front room area. Some began to pant hoot, which in turn raised the tension in the room even further. Minutes went by. The banging was incessant. Others began to stand bipedally and swagger. Bang, bang, bang. The noise swelled and soon came to fully occupy the space where thoughts would normally occur, making it impossible to do anything but join in the chaos. Bang, bang, bang…

BANG! A fight breaks out. The swirling mass of chimpanzees, now screaming, races from the front rooms through the chute and out to the Bray. Willy B climbs to the top of the tower and, with a fear grimace, watches as the other chimps threaten and hit one another. But he is not angry. Instead, he is scared and confused. Because he is once again Dr. Jekyll, wondering what on earth could have caused such tumult below.

Interestingly, this fight contained within it, and was indeed amplified by, the actions of our second type of jerk. Are you familiar with the admonition, common in both comedy and politics, to never punch down? For male chimpanzees, punching down is not only accepted in certain circumstances but is in fact a right of passage. As Craig Stanford states in The New Chimpanzee,

[Adolescent male chimpanzees] don’t submissively pant grunt to one another, and dominance among them is hard to discern. But once a young male reaches adulthood, he begins to climb to higher rank by taking on and intimidating each adult female. When he has risen in status above the most dominant female, the young male finds himself at the bottom of the male dominance network. Only time and repeated jousts with higher-ranking males will determine his ultimate highest status. (p.42-43)

According to some researchers, adolescent male chimpanzees routinely harass adult females as a low-cost way method of honing their competitive skills before testing them in the much riskier world of male competitive dominance. Gordo is well beyond adolescence, but his actions are often reminiscent of a chimpanzee stuck permanently in the liminal space between the female and male hierarchies. While size does not dictate rank, his more diminutive stature makes it unlikely that would challenge Cy, Terry, or Willy B directly. His social skills are of little help, either. He is able, however, to dominate Honey B. Usually.

As the dust on the Bray began to settle, the chimpanzees worked their way through the chute and back to the greenhouse. The screams had subsided and all that remained was Honey B’s diminishing whimper. This, thought Gordo, was the perfect time to assert himself. As she approached him, he hit her across the back and ran straight back to the Bray, knowing that she was afraid of the outdoors and wouldn’t have the courage to follow him.

He reached the platform and turned to watch Honey B screaming at him helplessly from the end of the chute.

Is it any less indecent for Willy B to cause daily disruptions to the harmony of the group simply because they are born out of blind rage and not malice? I make no claims as to the relative moral status of these two varieties of jerkishness. Nor, again, do I intend to cast all males as irredeemably jerkish. But in my experience, they do seem on average to contain each type of jerkishness in greater proportion than their female counterparts.

And as to whether these same tendencies prevail in my own species, I claim ignorance.

Mave’s Menace

by

Something spooked Mave in the Oakwood Greenhouse yesterday. Can you guess what it was?

Here are some bonus photos from today! Today’s was absolutely gorgeous with the weather in the 50s! So Negra’s group had a nice lunch forage on Young’s Hill!

Annie!

Jody!

And Queen Negra!

And Nutmeg for good measure!

“Are the chimps trained?”

by

When I tell people that I work at a chimpanzee sanctuary, they usually respond with one of the following frequently-asked questions: Do you get to touch the chimps? Do they go outside? Can people visit the sanctuary?

Today’s blog post responds to another common question with a complex answer: Are the chimps trained?

If this question refers to the awful practice of coercing captive primates to perform tasks for our entertainment, then the answer is a plain and emphatic “no.” (“We don’t do that here.”)

When defined more broadly though, behavioral training can be an important practice for improving and maintaining excellent animal welfare. For example, chimpanzees can be taught to voluntarily cooperate in their own veterinary care, greatly reducing the stress and risk associated with medical procedures. Training can also be a powerful tool for improving human-chimpanzee relationships, desensitizing chimps to unfamiliar environmental changes, and providing the chimps with additional cognitive, social and sensory enrichment.

CSNW, like many institutions that care for chimpanzees, has adapted a behavioral training program to improve the lives of the residents. Our past training initiatives have helped us administer medical care and monitor chimpanzee wellness over the years. We are now revamping this framework to utilize a larger staff, accommodate an additional group of chimps, and target loftier goals. Last year, we invited Margaret Whittaker of Creative Animal Behavior Solutions to review training methodology and help us optimize our plans for the future. One key takeaway has been that progress requires a shared understanding of the underlying theory and familiarity with common techniques. We caregivers should understand what training is, value training as an important component of care, and know how to train efficiently and responsibly.

Essentially, training is the process of behavior modification through learning. We often call training between humans “teaching” and training with non-humans “conditioning,” but they’re basically synonymous. Our preferred type of training, operant conditioning, allows the chimps to voluntarily participate and choose which behaviors to present. The chimpanzees are free to come and go at their own leisure, and we never punish them for choosing not to participate. Indeed, certain individuals often decline our invitation because they have better things to do, and that’s okay. In operant conditioning, they’re the operators.

Although the semantics are complicated, the activity of operant conditioning is actually quite simple. First, the trainer uses both a verbal and gestural cue to communicate that a desired behavior will be rewarded in the subsequent window. (You can see an example of J.B. asking Burrito to present his right foot below.) Then, the trainer uses an audible “bridge” to mark the correct behavior and indicate that a treat is on the way. This edible reward is a form of motivation via positive reinforcement. In training jargon, “positive” refers to the addition of a stimulus and “reinforcement” refers to the increase in a desired behavior.

In short, we give rewards when the chimps choose to do desirable behaviors.

You may be wondering why we choose to modify chimpanzee behavior through training. After all, the chimps are wild creatures and we should respect their freedom to choose their own behavior. Even so, captivity is an unfortunate and complicated circumstance, unfairly chosen for them long ago, and purposeful training has the potential to make this environment more comfortable for them. Of course, we caregivers carry the responsibility to only focus our efforts on behaviors that benefit the chimps and use the least intrusive, minimally aversive methods for each.

Some examples of behaviors we train and rehearse are:

Eating cooperatively and/or at stations (allowing subordinate group members to receive food)

Presenting various body parts for injury treatment and monitoring

Receiving injections for vaccinations and sedation/immobilization

Shifting between enclosures to enable cleaning and to facilitate social integrations

Sitting on a bench scale to monitor weight and body condition

In the future, we will also prioritize desensitizing the chimps to uncomfortable but necessary medical procedures, including heart and lung auscultation, radiographs, EKGs and ultrasounds. These approaches usually require that we isolate, immobilize and anesthetize chimpanzees; winning their voluntarily participation is a safer and less stressful alternative for all involved!

I hope to share more content related to behavioral training (including visual demonstrations of our progress) in the near future!