Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest

Hope. Love. Home. Sanctuary

histories

Love for Willy B

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I have to confess, I chose Willy B as my subject for this “Love for…” series on a day that he was being particularly difficult to love. He had woken the other chimps up four times the previous night with his incessant banging and antagonizing, and thanks to the magic of closed circuit camera technology, I’d also had the pleasure of lying awake and listening to his late night performances. The lack of sleep initially made it hard for me to muster up much sympathy for the guy. But isn’t that the perfect time to remind myself—and you—what makes him so deserving of our love?

Willy B was born on November 30th, 1990, at the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates (LEMSIP) in New York. According to his records, his father was Stu. His mother is known to us only by the number that would have been tattooed across her chest: 526. The “B” in Willy B’s name served as a reminder that although he was born at LEMSIP, one or both of his parents belonged to the Buckshire Corporation, making Willy B their property, too. Like his companions, Willy spent much of his childhood in a cage suspended off the floor.

When LEMSIP ended its chimpanzee program in 1996, Willy B was transferred with over 30 other chimpanzees to the Wildlife Waystation in California. He would remain there until 2019, when it too began to close down.

We selected Willy B and his companions, Honey B and Mave, to be the first of the Waystation chimpanzees to move to CSNW due to their small social group and relative isolation at the facility. Willy was our main road trip companion for the 1,000-mile journey, as his transport cage occupied the space just behind the driver’s seat. And I am still feeling the adrenaline from the time he went from sound asleep to trying to topple the van over with his intense cage-shaking on a busy section of I-5 in Central California, all in the blink of an eye.

Little did I know it then, but that incident would be a metaphor for life with Willy. I’ve written about his challenges before so I won’t belabor the point here, other than to say that he has thus far had a hard time remaining in good standing in social groups with anyone other than his two original companions, who have a tolerance for his shenanigans worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize. But knowing how he was raised, we shouldn’t wonder why he struggles with being social. The question is, why don’t they all?

And when you consider how far he has come, Willy’s story is less a tragedy and more a story of hope. Watching him overcome his fear of the outdoors was one of the most inspiring things I’ve been privileged to witness.

And despite the two-year integration of Willy’s group and Cy’s group ultimately ending in failure due to Willy’s chronic self-sabotaging behavior, he managed to make many new friends who often brought out the best in him. He will certainly have more opportunities for additional companionship in the future.

Even when he’s at his most chaotic, you can’t help but love Willy for his endearing quirks. Like the way he plays chase with his caregivers—no eye contact allowed! Or his childlike amusement with Slinkies and bouncy balls. Or his incessant requests to watch videos on our phones, specifically videos of the cute girls (like Jamie) next door. Or the way he is compelled to maximize the crunching sounds when he eats lettuce and celery by chomping down with his molars with his mouth wide open.

It’s true, Willy B can be a but much sometimes. There are times when he is even too much for himself, and he has to find a quiet, secluded place to reset.

I talk a lot about how much I admire Cy and Rayne, and they deserve every ounce of our admiration. But do all of our heroes have to be so noble? What about the guy that was born with the deck stacked against him and gets just a little bit better each day? What about the guy who has to struggle to be good? Isn’t that struggle itself something to be admired? True or not, this is what I will be telling myself when Willy B wakes us up again tonight.

Because I love Willy B, despite who he is and—even more so—because of who he is. We’re so grateful for his Pals who feel the same way, and we hope you will consider sponsoring him, too.

Being Social

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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.