conflict

Conflict and Reconciliation

February 12, 2023 by J.B. 35 Comments

A quick word of warning: If you do not wish to see footage of chimps being aggressive towards one another, please skip this video.

Recently, Grace posted to our social media accounts asking people to submit questions for Q&A posts on our blog. One of the questions jumped out at me: What is the best and worst part of your job? I immediately thought of dozens of things I like best about this line of work – we get to provide the chimps with life-changing and long overdue experiences like going outdoors and climbing trees, we help them form new friendships, we are treated on a daily basis to displays of intelligence and emotion that many people still believe are reserved for humans alone, and we get to do the thing we love with people we enjoy working with in a breathtakingly beautiful environment. Oh, and I get to drive a tractor sometimes. Maybe I should have put that first? Anyway, how could I choose just one “best” thing?

But when it comes to the worst part of the job, there’s no question in my mind what it is: it’s the violence.

Chimpanzees are naturally aggressive. Not all the time, mind you, or even most of the time. Aggression actually makes up a very small part of their daily activity and is just a tiny facet of their overall demeanor. Most of their waking hours are spent resting, quietly grooming, exploring, and playing. And most of their interactions with one another are overwhelmingly friendly and cooperative – and often extremely gentle, tender, and loving. But these hours upon hours of peace and playfulness are punctuated by boisterous displays of dominance and, on occasion, acts of real, raw violence – violence between the very people we have dedicated our careers, and in many ways our whole lives, to caring for. For us caregivers, it amounts to a lot of worrying about a thing over which we have very little control.

Which brings me to this video. I’ve been wanting to share it for a while, for a couple of reasons. First, when a chimpanzee gets injured here at CSNW, people naturally ask who was fighting and why. Our answer is usually some form of “I don’t know” and “I don’t know.” It’s not because we aren’t paying attention, but rather because the nature of chimp fights make them hard to interpret at times. They can happen quickly with little warning, they rarely occur between only two individuals, and the individuals who get into a fight in the first place are not always the ones who come away injured. I’m grateful for the many books and documentaries that have demonstrated chimpanzees’ remarkable capacity for strategic aggression, but reality is often so much messier. Yes, chimps sometimes exhibit coalitionary aggression for the purpose of social status. But in addition to being Machiavellian, chimpanzees are also xenophobic, insecure, jealous, petty, anxious, and just plain cranky, and any and all of these can serve as the impetus to bite someone’s finger off.

Second, it’s important for people to get an accurate picture of how chimps live. We don’t want anyone to think that life for chimpanzees is nothing but eating, playing, and climbing trees. While we often discuss their injuries, we aren’t usually in a position to show the fights in which they occurred. As you can see, however, we can occasionally capture them on our security camera system.

But perhaps most importantly, I want to show you how they make up afterwards. Chimp societies wouldn’t hold together very long if the individuals within them didn’t have the capacity to reconcile, and that is the saving grace for both the chimpanzees themselves and our own ability to care for them. Because no matter how bad things get, they usually find a way to move forward together.

…

So…the video. For what it’s worth, I’ve made it unlisted on YouTube so hopefully anyone watching will find it here and will also be reading this for context.

In the video, which is from December, you witness the beginning of the conflict as Willy B and Terry run out into the Greenhouse. Terry is upset, which you can see as he screams and splays himself out on the catwalk before running back inside for reassurance. The video picks up again in the Playroom, where Terry and Willy B face off momentarily by the door downstairs. The group congregates upstairs and Rayne then approaches Mave who is at the top of the tree structure. As Willy B moves in, possibly to protect Mave (though that is certainly open to interpretation), he comes face to face with Gordo. And that’s when all heck breaks loose. It took me several minutes of playing over and over in slow mo to piece together what was happening. For a time, I even falsely accused Rayne of a crime she didn’t commit. Sorry, Raynie!

We often differentiate between minor chimp fights and more serious ones based on whether or not they “ball up.” Balling up occurs when they grapple and bite, as opposed to chasing and hitting, at which point the caregivers can no longer tell who is who in real time. When chimps ball up, we know that we are going to have to look for injuries afterwards – checking ears and counting fingers and toes as they tend to their wounds. In this case, the chimps ball up for only a brief moment. They leap down to the floor through the fire hose vines and Willy B escapes up the stairs only to find his finger caught in Lucky’s mouth. He somehow manages to withdraw his finger intact and escapes through Playroom 3 to the Mezzanine where the screaming and reassurance-seeking continues. Fortunately, everyone made it out with only minor injuries.

At breakfast the next morning, Gordo – who was uninjured in the fight and whose “side,” you could say, came out on top – approached Willy B to reconcile. Breathy panting serves to express friendly intentions, and Gordo offers both his backside and his fingers and toes to Willy B. Isn’t it ironic that the way to make up after a fight in which you tried bite each other’s toes off is to place your toes in each other’s mouths again? While Mave and Rayne similarly reconcile, Gordo asks Willy B to follow him upstairs to groom. And once again, all is well.

…

So that’s a chimp fight and the aftermath. Some are more serious, many less so. Some last for only a minute or two while others have gone on for as long as 20 minutes. The boys fight the boys, the girls fight the girls, and the boys and girls fight each other. It happens in new groups and in groups like the seven that have been together for 17 years. They are loud and fast and frequently complicated. Serious fights are relatively rare but they’re part of caring for chimps and while you never really get used to it, you do come to accept it. Running a tortoise sanctuary would certainly be better for the ol’ blood pressure. But if you love caring for chimps, as I do, you can’t pick and choose which parts you get to experience.

I’m sure this post raises more questions than it answers, so ask away and I’ll do my best to respond below! And my thanks to all of you for allowing us to explore a more serious and fraught topic from time to time. Hopefully it helps present a truer version of sanctuary life for both the chimps and the humans that care for them.

They Always Do

December 12, 2022 by Anthony

Winter here on the eastern slopes of the Cascades can be difficult. We go to work in the dark and return home in the same. The wind stings, the cold air bites. Thick mats of snow and ice cover the landscape. Wintry conditions turn scenic drives across the mountain passes into foggy, wet, anxiety-inducing ordeals.

Yet, we carry on.

We play in the snow with friends, take our vitamin D supplements, struggle to keep our houseplants alive, finally read the books we bought in a frenzy over the summer, stay in touch with friends and family, exercise in some loud building under fluorescent lighting, and make the most of the relatively warm days when we get them.

Eventually, the days start feeling longer again. The wind stings a little less, the temperatures rise a little. The snow melts to reveal the wet dirt underneath. We begin to make plans for the coming weeks without worries of getting stranded, spinning out, or missing a flight. One day at a time. Suddenly, we find ourselves standing in an elk-trodden meadow of balsamroot and lupine watching the spring thunderstorms roll by.

From last week into this past weekend, the chimpanzees have had quite a bit of drama and it’s been a challenge to navigate. But, as Diana and Jenna pointed out in their respective blog posts, there has also been a lot of rest, recovery, and reconciliation going on. Chimps are great at filling the intervals between conflicts with productive, calming activities: building nests, grooming companions, playing chase with caregivers, foraging on some greens you found on the Hill, etc. Perhaps the best way to get you and your loved ones through hard times is just to give someone a breathy pant, eat an icicle, pile up some blankets, take a nap, and move forward. As someone told me recently, why worry about the whole necklace when you can just keep putting beads on the string?

Cy’s group, the chimpanzees who have been fighting the most frequently lately, have actually been relatively peaceful for much of their tenure as an integrated social group. It wasn’t always that way; we can all remember last spring when their union was so new and fragile that we gave them nonstop supervision, around the clock, for weeks on end. If you had visited me in the foyer one of those nights and told me those new relationships would continue to grow and thrive for six months before enduring a rough patch like this one, I would have been ecstatic.

Yes, there are tough times that seem like they will never end…

…but they always do.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The distant glow of sunrise over the Chimp House front entrance at 4:44am on June 23, 2022. It wasn’t an unusually important day, but I have this photo from my overnight shift that I have never posted here before. I looked back at my notes from that morning. The chimps slept relatively peacefully after a string of tumultuous nights.

Dr. Erin watching the chimpanzees via the security cameras:

Gordo taking a moment to relax today in the playroom:

The hallway between the Lupine and Marmot Mountain playrooms after a day of cleaning:

Jamie peering down from atop a platform (where she had made a humongous nest):

The shovel that now lives outside the greenhouse door (which keeps getting blocked in with ice).

Conflict

June 9, 2018 by Diana

We had a question recently on YouTube wondering if the chimpanzees fight less than other groups. It made us realize that we really don’t share that part of their daily lives much. I tried to provide some answers as to why in this video, but maybe there are other reasons that are less obvious (number of likes on Facebook? I hope that’s not it!).

We do have a category called “Fights” for blog posts, so you can check out previous posts on the subject here.

Let us know what you think – does this surprise you or make you uncomfortable to see the chimpanzees fighting?

Being Social

February 2, 2018 by J.B.

Like us, chimpanzees are social primates. We look to our friends and family for comfort and companionship. We rely on our communities for protection. Our cultures provide us with the knowledge we need to survive.

The desire to be with others is so essential that it is hardwired in apes like us. Without social contact we literally go insane.

But it’s not always easy being social. It comes with a host of trade offs, where individual interests must be compromised for the good of the relationship. It brings with it opportunities for miscommunication and misinterpretation. It leads to jealousy. Cheating, stealing, and deception are all par for the course. And it almost invariably leads to conflict.

All of which are difficult waters to navigate for even the most experienced and even-tempered individual.

Now imagine being Burrito.

Taken from his mother and raised in a lab nursery. Sent to live in a human home for his most formative years. Leased to a circus. And then returned to the lab, where he would live much of his life alone or with only one other individual in a cage barely big enough to walk in.

Or imagine being Jamie.

For nine years she struggled to master the human environment, a world in which she was rewarded for mastering tricks and likely punished for failing to understand or comply. Then, like Burrito, she was ripped from that world and placed in a laboratory with her own kind – a kind that she might not have even recognized as her own – where she would remain for two decades.

It’s common knowledge in the sanctuary community that ex-pet and ex-performer primates are the most difficult to integrate. Many people think the laboratory environment is the most damaging, but at least lab chimps tend to live with other chimps when they’re not on protocol. Being raised by humans is a kind of damage they don’t recover from. It actually deprives them of resiliency. It permeates the way they think and they way they react. You can see it in the way they relate to other chimps, and it even has a measurable physiological effect – the more time chimps spend with humans during childhood, the greater their cortisol (stress hormone) levels as adults.

Nearly every conflict at Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest is instigated or at the very least amplified by Burrito or Jamie – Burrito, through his undirected and ungoverned aggression and Jamie, through her intense need to dominate, manipulate, and control. For both, their worst tendencies seem to be chronically stoked by insecurity. Granted, chimpanzees personalities are complex and influenced by many factors, but it’s hard not to see their extremes as a direct product of their histories.

Just today, a conflict broke out at lunch. It began when Jody calmly took Foxie’s lettuce. Not a nice thing to do, of course, but given their friendly and trusting relationship it would have ended there without incident. But Jamie saw it happen. And Jamie couldn’t stand the fact that Jody was getting away with it. Jamie began screaming from the playroom, which in turn got Burrito riled up. Burrito then launched himself around the room in a frenzied display, eventually slamming into Jody. For the next five minutes, all of the chimps ran throughout the playroom, front rooms, and greenhouse screaming (with the exception of Negra, who took the opportunity to eat her lettuce by herself). It was hard to tell who was chasing who near the end. Exhausted but uninjured, they finally returned to the front rooms and finished lunch.

We often talk about chimpanzee conflicts in Machiavellian terms, as though each move is premeditated and calculated to maximally derive some social gain. This kind of social behavior does occur in chimps, but many fights are about nothing of substance, as best as we can tell. Put simply, it’s hard to be social, and even harder for those whose social lives didn’t even begin until they were young adults.

Fortunately for Burrito and Jamie, the benefit of their presence in the group far outweighs the stress they cause, and the group in turn gives them something they deserved but never had: a messy, loving, quarreling, comforting chimpanzee family.

Negotiation

February 3, 2017 by J.B.

The chimps spent the entire morning grooming one another on the playroom catwalk. Jamie began by directing her attention toward Negra, while Missy and Annie sat nearby grooming each other and occasionally breaking into gentle play. Further down, Burrito and Foxie paired off, each using one arm to groom while the other wrapped around their partner in a close embrace. Jody bounced from group to group until she somehow convinced them all to groom her at once.

There’s certainly nothing unusual about grooming; this is what chimps do. But you can detect a subtle difference in their grooming when there’s tension in the group. Their actions seem more calculated and strategic. Grooming begins to look more like what it really is – a form of social currency. You pay your rivals for forgiveness and reward your allies for their loyalty. Or maybe you use some of your currency to align yourself with someone who is moving up in the world. When the social order is knocked off balance, however slightly, it’s an opportunity to reshape it to your advantage.

The Cle Elum Seven chimps have been together as a group for about ten years, beginning in the lab and continuing here at the sanctuary. For captive chimps, that’s about as stable as it gets. But unfortunately, stability does not equal peace and tranquility.

There are a number of reasons why these chimps fight. One of the main proximate causes would have to be the chaos caused by the 115-pound ball of testosterone that we call Burrito. Burrito likes to start his day with a good dominance display, like many male chimpanzees do. His displays might include any combination of the following: pant hooting, screaming, pounding on the ceiling with his fists, rattling the cage doors incessantly, throwing things in the air, knocking over barrels, running through the enclosure while threatening to hit or kick his group mates, and/or actually hitting and kicking them. If you haven’t witnessed a prolonged display before, it’s hard to convey how agitating they can be. So while Burrito’s displays sometimes lead to a conflict between him and one or more of the girls, they are just as likely to lead to fights between the girls themselves. It seems that once everyone is riled up, it doesn’t matter who started it – any underlying tension is drawn to the surface to be hashed out.

Some of that underlying tension is due to the fact that dominance hierarchies aren’t static, regardless of how long the group has been together. Relationships change, as do personalities. Case in point: Annie is not the same chimp that she was eight years ago. Back then, she would have a panic attack if you looked at her funny. Now, she’ll take food from Negra and chase down Jamie or Burrito during a fight without hesitation. I don’t know if she’s alpha material, but she’s certainly not going to take flack from Jamie or Burrito anymore. As much as we all celebrate her newfound confidence, we also say a silent prayer each time that she doesn’t push things too far if she’s not prepared to fully back it up. In chimpanzee society, it’s best for everyone if you know your place.

Finally, we can’t forget that these chimpanzees were deprived of normal family life in a normal community. This lack of natural socialization causes more lasting damage than any medical testing they experience. In fact, it’s generally understood that chimpanzees from pet and entertainment backgrounds are much harder to integrate than chimpanzees from labs. Why? Because pet and entertainment chimps are particularly human-enculturated. They grow up learning our habits and our style of communication and our rules, and they have no connection to chimpanzee culture. Imagine the shock that Burrito and Jamie experienced when they were introduced to other chimpanzees later in life. And the others had it only marginally better when they were young, living in small nursery groups or in breeding pairs as they matured. In many ways it’s like Lord of the Flies. Without a culture to provide a guide for their behavior, they’re forced to make it up as they go. Frankly, I’m amazed that they can get along at all.

The Cle Elum Seven go through long periods of relative stability, punctuated by short periods of increased fighting with occasional wounding. As quickly as the tension and conflict arises, they reorganize or reaffirm their relationships and order is restored. On the surface, that is. Quiet bouts of grooming like the ones we witnessed this morning might seem like a complete absence of conflict, but look closer and you’ll see that they are actually part of the negotiation.

Full Spectrum Chimpanzees

August 20, 2016 by Diana

Chimpanzees are charming, playful and adorable:

They are quiet, gentle, and kind:

They are willful, strong, and unpredictable:

They are intelligent, curious, and intense:

They are violent, petty, and dangerous:

It sounds like pretty much every other species of animal, including our own, doesn’t it? We tend to show more of their adorable and playful sides than we do of their other sides, but we respect the full spectrum of who they are. It really can be pretty intense to be a chimpanzee. They tend to be drama queens (and kings). Their dramas are, in my opinion, way more interesting than any reality television show.

Tonight, for example, the after-dinner enrichment was kongs filled with spiralized zucchini noodles in peanut sauce (are you jealous?). Jamie was a little later coming to the party than the other chimpanzees, which is nice, because that meant the other chimps had a chance to find the kongs before Jamie dominated the scene.

By the time Jamie came in, most of the kongs were spoken for, but she very astutely checked under the blue barrel in the playroom, finding the one remaining kong. She carried the kong into the front rooms, put it down on the ground by a blanket, and then, by gesturing, she asked me for her boots, which I went to get from the kitchen/enrichment area.

When I came back, Annie was in the room with Jamie and had a fear grimace, while Jamie sat calmly a few feet away from her. I saw Annie look at the kong, and I surmised that she wanted to try to take it, but she knew it was Jamie’s. This was a challenging situation for Annie to be in, and it wasn’t clear what Jamie was going to do. I decided to busy myself with something else because we humans try not to involve ourselves in the chimps’ conflicts-they live with each other 24/7 and need to work out their relationships without human interference.

When I came back to see what was transpiring, Jamie had left Annie in the room with the kong and was climbing the stairs to the loft of the playroom. She still had a good view of Annie and was watching her like a hawk. Annie very slowly and carefully picked up the kong, and Jamie immediately started screaming, at first not very loudly, but her volume increased rapidly, and she reached dramatically out to other chimpanzees who were in the vicinity.

This caused the whole chimp house to erupt into screaming, and everyone began running around, banging on things and throwing objects. This is not in any way an unusual occurrence. Chimpanzees tend to be either very quiet or very loud, and minor conflicts occur virtually every day, sometimes multiple times a day. This particular conflict didn’t last very long, no one was injured, and Annie held onto her kong (I think Jamie had pretty much emptied it anyway).

This rather bold behavior on the part of Annie is becoming more and more frequent. Is Jamie’s leadership role as secure as it was eight years ago? Is it possible that Annie is attempting to rise from the bottom of the hierarchy like Mike, described in the blog post last Saturday? I don’t know. Stay tuned.

Reconciliation

July 31, 2015 by J.B.

Every once and a while, there’s a little more tension in the group than usual. Fights break out more often, and when they do, they result in more injuries. But chimps have a mechanism for dealing with this tension.

After a big conflict last weekend, they’ve been working hard to reestablish their relationships through grooming.

Chances are, some of the wounds they are grooming on each other are wounds they themselves inflicted.

But that’s life for a chimp. You fight, and you make up. Then, maybe, you fight again.

But you always make up.

Conflict and Reconciliation

They Always Do

Conflict

Negotiation

Full Spectrum Chimpanzees

Reconciliation

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