Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest
Hope. Love. Home. Sanctuary
Winter isn’t the chimpanzees’ favorite season. They don’t like to be cold or wet, so as much as they’d love to be having adventures outside, they end up spending most of their time indoors. Winter isn’t all bad, though. There’s something to be said for snuggling up with soft blankets on a cold day.
Negra:
Annie:
Jamie:
Going through the photos from this month, I found some gems that hadn’t been posted of each of the chimpanzees. There seems to be a yellow theme going on. Do you have a favorite?
Jamie and Negra are similar in many ways. Jamie, the youngest female at the sanctuary, is the undisputed leader. She rules through a combination of well-considered political strategy and fierce determination.
Negra, the eldest chimpanzee at the sanctuary, is the grandma of the group, but she’s the grandma you don’t mess with.
Jamie and Negra never hesitate to keep their caregivers in line. Both have little patience for (what they consider) incompetence, and they will speak up if someone’s behavior does not live up to their standards. There is something a little demoralizing about displeasing one of them.
The decades Jamie and Negra spent in research labs, being used and abused by humans, could easily have killed their spirits. Many lab chimps give in and give up, and you can’t blame them. We’re so happy that Jamie and Negra have enough fight left in them to keep us on our toes.
Over seven years after meeting and falling in love with her first troll doll, Foxie is still so intensely enamored with these strange little dolls that she carries one everywhere. Today she laid down to rest in the playroom and spent several minutes gazing at her doll before closing her eyes.
This was Missy in her transport cage on her way to the sanctuary in 2008. This cage isn’t much different than the cages she had lived in for the previous 30 years.
We didn’t yet know Missy well on that day in 2008, but we would soon come to learn that she wants nothing more than to move her body. She is a natural athlete, packed to the brim with energy just waiting to be released in a sprint or leap or swing on the fire hose. It is almost impossible to imagine what those decades in cramped laboratory cages were like for her. She must have felt stifled and confined in the worst way.
Seeing her take advantage of the wide open spaces at the sanctuary these days never gets old. This morning, a tire swing way at the top of Young’s Hill caught my eye as it swayed back and forth, and I momentarily wondered what had set it in motion since it’s a rare windless day in Cle Elum. After a second I spotted Missy perched on the climbing structure, just a speck on the landscape.
After we serve a meal to the chimpanzees, there’s usually a few pieces of food on the ground that have dropped on the human side of the caging. The meal server typically leaves the food where it is, and the chimps will go find tools to use to pull it closer, or they’ll grab the attention of a caregiver and “ask” for the food by pointing to it.
Today Anna served the chimps a lunch of broccoli, kale, and bell peppers in the greenhouse. I went out shortly after the meal to see what everyone was up to, and Burrito immediately swung down from the platform where he was finishing his chow, and pointed out some kale and broccoli that had fallen on my side of the caging. After a quick scan for boss Jamie (she’ll occasionally pull rank when we try to offer food to the other chimps), I picked up the dropped food and gave it to a very grateful Burrito.
Sometimes a nap under a soft blanket in front of a sunny window is all you need.
