Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest

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Willy B in the Recovery Room

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As Grace blogged about yesterday, Willy B took a trip to the clinic yesterday to get some stitches in his right nostril. He has recovered pretty quickly from the anesthesia but will still need to spend a few days apart from his group in order to let his injury heal.

Today he got a visit from his friends through the window between the front rooms and the Lupine Playroom. They were thrilled to get a good look at him and make sure he was doing well.

Gordo and Mave doing an inspection:

The busyness of daily care and planning for Hoot! continues here at the sanctuary so please forgive this short little update!

Chimpanzee Violence

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A couple of days ago, there was fight in the chimp house that resulted in a significant injury to one of Negra’s toes. We are monitoring it to determine if intervention will be necessary, and she’s on antibiotics and pain relief.

You’d never know that she had the injury unless you actually saw it, though – Negra’s behavior is no different than normal and she was showing no signs of being in pain, even before we started her on the pain relief.

I’m just going to throw some photos of Negra in here. They aren’t from today, but they do show what Negra’s behavior is generally like:

Negra protruding lip sleep

She is getting some extra attention from the other chimpanzees because any injury is of interest to the group, with other chimps always wanting to inspect and groom wounds.

burrito grooming negra

 

Chimpanzees can be really intense. We’ve shared information about conflicts and injuries before, and I’ve linked to a few blog posts on this topic at the end of this one, in case you are interested in further contemplation on fighting and making up as a chimpanzee. And there was this story about a conflict that resulted in one of Jody’s toes being bitten off (don’t worry – there are no gory photos in the post).

You may or may not have noticed that a few of the chimpanzees at Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest are missing parts of ears, fingers, and toes. Most of these injuries occurred before the chimpanzees came to the sanctuary, though some have been from conflicts that have taken place in their sanctuary home.

Burrito's eye

 

I accept that chimpanzees can be extremely violent. I respect that serious conflict is part of their natural behavior in social groups. That doesn’t always mean that I can just shrug off conflicts and injuries. It can be difficult to process the many facets of  chimpanzees and to know that sometimes one chimpanzee who I care deeply about will hurt another chimpanzee who I care deeply about and that this will happen when I am the one responsible for the health and well being of all of the chimps here.

Maybe this is a little heavy of a blog topic.

It got me thinking about human relationships too. I often find myself explaining minor chimpanzee conflicts, which may seem like a major conflict if you’re not familiar with chimpanzees, as equivalent to a heated human verbal argument. I wonder, though, if that’s not a good comparison. After all, humans are also incredibly violent to one another.

Let’s face it, being a social primate is not that easy. We gain a lot with our social relationships, but we still have competing interests that have to be worked out one way or another; and then sometimes we’re just in a bad mood.

A recent non-invasive study of a wild population of chimpanzees was just published that found an increase in the hormone oxytocin during conflicts. Oxytocin, sometimes referred to as the “love hormone,” is perhaps most known for studies that have shown surges of the chemical in human and other animal mothers when they are with their newborns, and it’s thought to intensify the mother-infant bond. Clearly, the full extent of what oxytocin does and when it is produced is expanding. The theory put forth in this article and others about the increase of oxytocin during conflicts is that it bonds chimpanzees to their group and against a common adversary.

Perhaps the oxytocin-surge aids in the post-conflict bonding that happens with chimpanzees as well. Reconciliation is at least as important as the conflicts themselves in chimpanzees – they generally come together within minutes of a conflict ending in pairs or groups and inspect each other and groom.

Perhaps the immediate reconciliation aspect of fighting is the lesson that humans really could take from chimpanzees.

 

As I said above, we’ve covered the topics of aggression, conflict, violence, and reconciliation of chimpanzees  in other posts before. Here are a few past blog posts if you are interested in more perspectives on these topics:

Full Spectrum Chimpanzees

Conflict

Conflict and Reassurance

Conflict and Reconciliation

Reassurance

The True Nature of Chimpanzees

 

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Holiday Wishes

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I was adding some items to our Amazon.com wishlist and it dawned on me that most blog readers probably don’t know too much about the working space for the human primates (staff and volunteers) at the sanctuary, so I snapped a couple of photos to show you so I can talk about some things that we’d really love to have.

We pride ourselves in taking good care of the chimps and giving them as much as we can on a modest budget, while always making improvements to the building and their lives. We are able to do this because we don’t give ourselves big salaries or buy fancy stuff, we rely on a terrific group of over thirty regular volunteers, and we get so much donated – from blankets to toys to produce to toilet paper (that last one is for the humans, in case you were wondering).

Most nonprofits earn a significant amount of their annual income in December, so we’ll soon be asking you to help us reach our year-end goals and we’ll have a special Chimp Cheer page on our website for those who give. If you would rather give gifts though, there are a few things we could use. Take a look at the photos below and visit our Amazon.com wishlist to see how you can put a smile on our faces.

Here’s a view of the kitchen area where we do all of the food prep for the chimps. Notice the worn floor mat and the lack of a coffee maker. We have a new kitchen mat on our wishlist. The carafe of our coffee maker broke a couple of months ago and I tried to do the most environmentally friendly thing by just replacing the carafe, but two ill-fitting carafes later and we still don’t have a working coffee maker. We don’t need anything fancy – I put a simple one on the wishlist. Or maybe you have a used one you’d like to donate? We don’t give caffeine to the chimps, but we’re okay with our own caffeine habits.

kitchen

Here’s a view inside the fridge (and me waving to you in the reflection), which is on the other side of that ratty-looking mat. We wash all of the produce we get and then put it in bowls. I put a few more sets of bowls on the wishlist, trying to avoid the cheap plastic ones that break pretty quickly.

Inside fridge

And here’s a view of the transition from the kitchen to the enrichment area (the shelves with all of the bins) and “office” (where the chairs are). Eventually it would be nice to have a larger freezer and another fridge, but we don’t have the room right now, so we make use of every possible storage space available.

freezer and fridge

Notice the precarious-looking pile of stuff next to the enrichment bins in the photo below. We could use a small shelving unit that fits so we can better take advantage of that space. I put a unit on the wishlist. We’d want the one that is 18″ deep x 24″ wide x 72″ tall.

Thanks to Jim Spencer, we have a lovely shed right outside the door. The shed stores enrichment too, and we switch out the bins once a week so the chimps’ toys don’t get too boring. We also keep some food, like nuts and dried fruit in the shed. We always welcome new bins! The specific ones we use are on the wishlist.

bins in shed

And here is the chimp house “office.” J.B. and I live in the house on the property and we’ve converted the master bedroom into additional office space (perhaps I’ll share those photos later), but this is where we make all of the videos and upload photos to the blog, among other things. The laptop we’re using is my old computer. The screen went out about a year ago, so we hooked it up to a monitor. We’ve been having some trouble with it and I’m afraid it doesn’t have much longer to live. We use iMovie to put our blog videos together, so we’d LOVE a new MacBook Pro with a screen that works. Not surprisingly, this is something you can get through Amazon.com too.

chimp house office

It’s difficult to see in this photo, but the small bin to the right above holds our cameras. I keep my Canon digital SLR camera here so we can get good shots of the chimps that we use for brochures, calendars, the website, etc. We have a basic canon PowerShot for video-taking (purchased for us last holiday season), which we all really like. Thinking about Young’s Hill, though, we’ll need something with a better zoom that takes higher-quality video. So, I’ve put an all-in-one Canon SLR camera with HD video capabilities on the wishlist. We can use our existing zoom lenses and get some amazing footage of the chimps on the hill.

There’s even more stuff on the wishlist and if you have any other ideas for gifts for the sanctuary and want to talk it over with someone, feel free to contact me or another staff member: [email protected] or 509-699-0728. Thanks!