Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest

Hope. Love. Home. Sanctuary

chimp enrichment

Cheers!

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Happy New Year’s Eve! We want to thank Jody Ubert for sponsoring today for the chimpanzees. Jody, you’ll be happy to know that we had a wonderful little New Year’s Eve party for the chimpanzees today, complete with party streamers and plastic champagne flutes with sparkling apple cider. The chimps loved them!

Today is also the last chance to donate before the end of the year. If you’re on our mailing list, you received this message in your inbox this morning, which includes a link to the Foxie Inspires Us video. Foxie and her friends are in a Holiday Pal competition, too, and I think it’d be really great to see all seven chimps with two full candy canes by the end of 2013. Check the progress here, and support your favorite pal before the ball drops at midnight tonight!

Here is Foxie enjoying some of the cider from today:

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Thank you to everyone who has made the last five and half years of sanctuary so wonderful for the Cle Elum Seven. Cheers to you and yours, and have a Happy New Year!

Jamie and challenges

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You may have figured out by now that Jamie is a tough chimp to enrich. Her mind is so active and she requires a lot to keep engaged. Part of our job as caregivers is to come up with new ways to keep the chimpanzees enriched, and in particular, keeping Jamie busy.

Though raisin boards are already a puzzle in themselves (the chimps usually have to use tools to get the raisins out), it’s even more so when they are just out of reach. Jamie prefers the challenges. She will go right past the raisin boards that are hidden under a blanket and aim for the ones that are harder puzzles to solve.

Here you see she even learns from her own mistakes—the first board she dropped too quickly and it went too far for her to reach. At first she looks around for a tool to grab the raisin board but decides to work on the more accessible one and leave the other project for later (don’t worry—she got that one eventually, too).

After seeing this video (and likely even without watching you know already) I think you will agree that Jamie is amazing.

Thanksgiving

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Negra:

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Annie:

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Jamie (with Foxie in the background):

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Jody:

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Burrito:

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We have so much to be thankful for today: volunteers Patti, Denice, Sandra, and Joel, who spent their holiday caring for the chimpanzees; supporters like Robert Maurer who sponsored today for the chimps; and all of you out there who love the Cle Elum Seven as much as we do. Happy Thanksgiving!

Green Toys!

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And our thankfulness continues! If you saw the blog yesterday, you’ll know that the chimpanzees received many wonderful new gifts from some of our amazing supporters! Well, today the chimpanzees also received new toys from Green Toys! In addition to the ongoing challenge we (and Enrichment Coordinator, Debbie) have of finding things that are new and interesting for the chimpanzees’ active minds (particularly Jamie’s!), as you can imagine, the life as an item of chimpanzee enrichment is not an easy one. So after receiving a variety of Green Toys from our amazing supporters via our Wishlist, we were pretty excited to learn that they are chimp-tested and caregiver-approved! Green Toys are not only environmentally friendly but can take a licking from the chimps and remain relatively unscathed.

Here is Jamie checking out a new dump truck:

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Jamie giving the “bite test” to a submarine as Foxie (who is still loving her new French Dora doll from yesterday!) comes to check things out:

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And Jamie checking out a new airplane (and I am pretty sure thinking she could fly one):

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Missy enjoying some orange “tea” in the tea set:

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Missy:

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Foxie:

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Thank you so much Green Toys for the chimpanzees’ gifts! And also for making great toys which just happen to be great chimpanzee enrichment!

Eye gaze

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Primatology is such an interdisciplinary field—it’s a mix of anthropology, psychology, zoology, biology, and ethology—and depending on a primatologist’s background, they have very different interests. If you have an anthropology background for instance, you might be interested nonhuman primates from the perspective of human origins for group size, culture, linguistics, and so on.

My background is in psychology, so in many of my classes we studied comparative cognition of nonhuman primates and humans. One thing comparative psychologists study is theory of mind. Do nonhuman primates have a theory of mind? That is, do they understand that other individuals have different beliefs, desires, and perception than their own? There’s a ton of behavioral measures that researchers use to determine if an individual—nonhuman or human—has a theory of mind.

One behavior that is evidence of a theory of mind is eye gaze and joint attention. Chimpanzees, like humans, communicate with eye gaze. They use it with each other and with humans, too. For instance if some food has dropped just out of reach, Burrito might get a caregiver’s attention by making some noise, and when they approach him he will look straight toward the food item. If we follow his gaze we see the peanut he’s trying to get. Things like this happen all the time, and for us, common sense would say that of course chimpanzees have a theory of mind. Burrito understands that until he grabs my attention and points it out to me, I am not aware of the peanut lying just outside the caging.

Very frequently we are asked if eye contact is OK with chimpanzees. Well, it is! And they make eye contact quite frequently. It’s one way they communicate with us.

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Happy Chimps

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The chimps here are so photogenic and always look happy, as you can see below:

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Every once in awhile we do catch them when they’ve perhaps woken up on the wrong side of the nest:

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The inimitable Jamie

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Just as humans do, each of the chimpanzees has their own unique personality. And Jamie’s is like a kaleidoscope. She surprises us every day with her strength, beauty, intelligence, creativity, problem-solving abilities, and sheer, well, Jamie-ness. Jamie was my first chimpanzee friend and as such she holds a special place in my heart. While she can be demanding and intense in her relationships with both humans and chimpanzees, she can also be joyful, caring, and so much fun to hang out with. But one thing that Jamie consistently is, is a privilege to know, and an honor to call my friend.

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As Diana mentioned earlier today, it takes a virtual village to care for these seven amazing beings and we are so thankful to all of you who help provide them with the sanctuary they deserve. While this next photo of Jamie was previously posted, it’s one of my favorites and I feel, catches that inimitable spirit of hers. It also reminds me, as does Jamie, of one of my favorite quotes by Federico Fellini, “You have to live spherically – in many directions. Never lose your childish enthusiasm – and things will come your way.” Thank you from the bottom of my heart, for enabling things to come Jamie’s (and all of the chimpanzees’) way.

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