chimpanzee

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.