Primatologist Robert Yerkes once said, “One chimpanzee is no chimpanzee.” Spend a single morning watching the Cle Elum Seven and you will know exactly what he meant.
friendship
JAMIE and friendship on the 5th Day of HOOT!
I had a realization not long ago. It occurred to me that Jamie is one of my best friends. We have mutual interests (shoes, being outdoors, eating grapes), we’re generally happy to see each other, we have routines that have developed over time, and I think we’ve established a mutual respect for one another over the years, which has been heightened by the two of us working on Positive Reinforcement Training this last year.
You may have gathered from previous posts, that Jamie is not exactly obvious best friend material… but that’s part of what makes our friendship all the more meaningful to me.
For this 5th day of HOOT! with just two days left before the big event, I share with you this photo of my friend Jamie:
I have another friend that I would like to acknowledge today. Pam Lehnert and her husband Marc Warner. I am indebted to them both for helping to make HOOT! 2016 not just your average event, but a beautiful and (literally) heart-filled one.
Pam has been an event volunteer since our very first gala in 2009 and there is no way I would be organizing this level of event without her help.
Pam and Marc not only gave their time and labor towards HOOT!, they also are Chimpanzee Champion Sponsors of the event!
A big thanks to them and to all volunteers who helped plan and will be working on Saturday!
Friends spending time grooming
Foxie and Burrito spend the better part of the afternoon grooming one another on the top platform of the Greenhouse today. These two chimpanzees are pretty close friends. But, just because they are friends does not mean they don’t fight. This morning, during one of Burrito’s displays, he chased a screaming Foxie as she ran from the playroom area of their indoor enclosure out to the Greenhouse. She got low to the ground and he ran right over her, slapping her along the way.
This is not unusual behavior for chimpanzees, but luckily grooming is a great way to make up after a fight.
Missy and Annie sat nearby, alternating between grooming and playing.
Trust
It takes a lot of trust for two chimpanzees to play together. Many play behaviors are variations on fighting behaviors – chasing, wrestling, stealing, slapping, hitting, etc. – and as play gets more aggressive, it’s easy to misunderstand your partner’s intentions. When the chimps first arrived at the sanctuary, Foxie and Annie would occasionally attempt to play, and it almost always ended up as a fight. They just didn’t have enough trust in one another.
Things sure have changed.
I wouldn’t say that Foxie and Annie are best friends now, but they certainly have come to understand each other more and they even engage in rough and tumble play from time to time without it erupting into a conflict. This morning, Foxie even allowed Annie to playfully steal (and dismember!) one of her Dora dolls. That’s when you know you are a member of Foxie’s inner circle.
Annie
Annie and Missy have been best friends for years.
In fact, their friendship was evident during our very first visit to meet them in the laboratory. But the relationship wasn’t always equal. Missy has very clearly always loved Annie, but for Annie, it was more than love. For a time, she was completely dependent on Missy. She would become visibly anxious if Missy even started to play with another chimp. And when Young’s Hill was built, it made it possible for Missy to go off on her own and not even be within Annie’s sight. When that happened, Annie would sit at the bottom of the hill, rocking, and waiting for her friend to return safely.
Thankfully, Annie has grown more confident since then. These days, she seems totally content to sit on the hill by herself while Missy is off patrolling with Jamie.
It seems that Annie has learned to navigate the world on her own, even if it’s only for ten minutes at a time.
So Like Themselves
This morning I was contemplating how we as humans view chimpanzees and how my own views of chimpanzees have changed after getting to know many different personalities. And then I got to the computer and saw these photos that J.B. had taken this morning while strolling with Jamie and Missy.
I know most of you reading this already know how seriously we take safety, but for those who might be reading for the first time, I like to make sure it’s clear that J.B. was safely on the outside of the double electric fence when he took these photos.
No fence, however, prevents us from taking part in the lives of the chimpanzees – Jamie insists on her human caregivers joining in her strolls. And Missy sometimes comes along for the exercise, fun, and companionship too.
Today, Missy got an extra surprise – Jamie’s Halloween / birthday bag that was left at the top of the hill yesterday (see the Jamieween video for reference).
After taking a look in the bag, I’m guessing Missy ran down the hill at breakneck speed – not because of what she saw, but because this is what she likes to do. She sometimes joins Jamie in strolling down the perimeter, but Missy’s speed is usually on “fast,” and she really enjoys running down from the very top of the hill, leaving us slower folks in her dust.
Jamie, on the other hand, makes sure that her human walking partner is keeping up:
Walking around the hill is perhaps Jamie’s greatest pleasure. This is the face of contentment:
Many people, when first learning about chimpanzees, are in awe of how similar they are to humans. And, in fact, many behavioral researchers have spent years comparing chimpanzees to humans in so many ways – language ability, counting prowess, puzzle-solving, teamwork, etc, etc, etc. I think this is what first interested me in non-human great apes. And it still does. It’s remarkable to see Jamie communicating her desires with her human caregivers using gestures, using a (plastic) screwdriver, drawing with a ball point pen, playing with an iPad, and many other activities that she enjoys. And their similarities don’t end on the individual level – observing the social interactions of chimpanzees often really does resemble watching a human reality show – strong personalities and lots of drama.
But what I like most about chimpanzees now, and I think what more and more people are being drawn towards, is their chimpanzee-ness. It’s true that they are so like us, and we, in turn, are so like them, but what they are even more like is themselves, and that’s what makes them fascinating, wonderful, and deserving of protection.
Grooming is so cool
We’ve talked about the importance of grooming among chimpanzees before, and it’s pretty well known what an essential aspect of life grooming is for most primates. Below is a video of very good friends Burrito and Foxie grooming, with Missy (off-camera), occasionally also grooming Burrito.
There’s a lot of cool things about grooming. In a comment on a post back in 2009, I mentioned some of the following:
The basics: aside from the social aspects, grooming is the removal of dirt and debris and the tending to wounds (licking and picking scabs). It’s why chimpanzees don’t need baths – they do a really good job of cleaning themselves and each other – no water necessary.
The debris found on the grooming partner is not necessarily consumed, even though the lips are usually involved in grooming because chimpanzees use their prehensile lips, almost like another set of fingers, for many activities like inspecting objects, turning the pages of a magazine (in captivity), and especially in grooming.
Increased grooming often occurs after a conflict to reassure and/or “make up” with one another and to cement social bonds. Grooming has a calming affect, which is easy to see when you observe chimpanzees grooming one another. A study of wild chimpanzees that used non-invasive methods to collect urine samples after grooming bouts found that oxytocin (sometimes referred to as “the love hormone”) levels were higher in bonded grooming partners than in samples collected of chimpanzees who had not been grooming or had been grooming with a “non-bond partner.”
Regarding lip movements during grooming: it is common for chimpanzees, as well as other primates, to “lip smack” or “teeth clack” or make other “sympathetic mouth movements” when grooming (also when performing other fine motor behaviors – like many of us who move our tongue a certain way when we’re really concentrating on a task).
Each chimpanzee does his/her own thing, Burrito is a lip smacker (he may teeth clack on occasion too), Foxie is a teeth clacker, and Annie makes raspberry sounds with her lips. The intensity of the mouth movement/noise will increase if something (especially a wound or scab) is found during grooming.
Some scientists have hypothesized that these sympathetic mouth movements were an evolutionary step towards spoken language. Our friend Gabriel Waters and [former] Central WA University professor Dr. Fouts published a study on this theory a few years back: http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=1349990, and there was a book with this premise called Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, which I admittedly still need to read, that argued that gossip for humans is what grooming is for chimpanzees and other non-human primates.
So, with all that information, here’s the video of Burrito and Foxie strengthening their friendship through grooming today: