Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest
Hope. Love. Home. Sanctuary
The love of Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest donors never ceases to amaze me.
You all exceeded the $15,000 goal for Giving Tuesday, and there are still several hours left in the day, so I’ve bumped up the goal to $20,000!
I know why you’re so generous. It’s the same seven reasons that motivate me.
Burrito:
Annie:
Jody:
Negra:
Foxie:
Missy:
Jamie:
and their lives at the sanctuary:
THANK YOU!
Today is the seventh day of thanks highlighting seven different donors and their seven ways of donating + the seven chimpanzees at the sanctuary!
For a recap of the first five posts, day one featured legacy donor Bruce Davidson + Burrito, day two featured event donor Kathy Cochran + Annie, day three featured recurring donor Julie Olson + Jody, day four featured challenge and competition donor Monica Best + Negra, day five featured wish list donor Vicki Fagerlee + Foxie, and day six featured major donor Karen Emmerman Mazner + Missy.
Today I’m featuring stock donor Joan Z., but I have a difficult time thinking about all of the donors that were not featured this week, so really today is featuring everyone.
Joan recently offerred to put up a matching challenge for Giving Tuesday by way of transferring stocks to the sanctuary, and I’m going to talk more about that generous challenge tomorrow.
Really quickly, though, I want to be sure that everyone knows that transferring stocks to the sanctuary is super easy. All the information you need is on the donate page, and you can just send us a quick email or give us a call to let us know when you are making the transfer.
There are potential financial benefits to you for transferring stocks rather than cashing them in (if you’ve held them a year or more). Talk to your broker about the details, but, in a nutshell, you can avoid capital gains tax by transferring stocks to nonprofits rather than cashing in the stocks, so you’re able to potentially give more to the sanctuary. Pretty cool if you’re in the position to be thinking about these things! Our current policy is to cash in the stocks when we receive them, so we get the donation within days. Big thanks to Joan and everyone who has donated securities!
I have barely scratched the surface of all of the ways that people give to the sanctuary! I could have profiled hundreds of people. I think that’s the beauty of Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest – each person finds their own way to support the chimpanzees and it takes everyone to give the chimpanzees the sanctuary home that they deserve.
Some people give their time by volunteering in the chimp house, as board members, or as event volunteers. Shawn, for example, is our first maintenance volunteer. He comes out on weekends and helps J.B. with all kinds of maintenance projects in the chimp house and around the property.
Others donate their professional services. Lori and Kathleen, who both live many states away, donate their graphic design services to create beautiful and compelling graphics for campaigns and events.
Some donors have arranged fundraising events on their own or asked their friends and family to donate to the sanctuary rather than give gifts for birthdays, weddings, and holidays.
There are a lot of ways to give! And most of you choose to give in several different ways. It’s a beautiful thing. Donors are the heart of what makes this sanctuary possible.
Jamie, the boss, can be hard to please, but I believe she would give a head nod of approval if she understood all of the ways that supporters contribute to her health and happiness and the long-term stability of the sanctuary. She plans to be around for many more years and demands that each day be a full one – as it should be.
Today is the sixth day of thanks highlighting seven different donors and their seven ways of donating + the seven chimpanzees at the sanctuary!
Today I give thanks to major donor Karen Emmerman Mazner and I share some photos of the always busy Missy.
For a recap of the first five posts, day one featured legacy donor Bruce Davidson + Burrito, day two featured event donor Kathy Cochran + Annie, day three featured recurring donor Julie Olson + Jody, day four featured challenge and competition donor Monica Best + Negra, and yesterday, day five, featured wish list donor Vicki Fagerlee + Foxie.
We were thrilled to have Karen as our honoree at this year’s HOOT! gala, and she gave the best speech that explained why she decided to give a large contribution towards the Bring Them Home Campaign for Expansion. Here’s just a bit of what she said (it still gives me goosebumps):
If you’re a person who, like me, tears up when watching the videos of Foxie with her Troll dolls, Burrito being goofy, and Jamie bossing everyone around and you want more Foxies, Burritos, and Jamies to live out their lives with Troll dolls, goofiness, and bossing humans around then please join me in supporting CSNW’s efforts to bring more chimpanzees home to sanctuary.
I want more chimpanzees to know that their lives have changed for the better because they feel it in their new environment, in the people who care for them, and in the grass beneath their feet. They feel it every time they say “no†and a human says “ok, your body belongs to you†instead of “I’m doing it anyway.â€
Karen has put a lot of trust in us to fulfill our shared goal of providing a home for more chimpanzees. She knows that we’ve faced some headwinds in our efforts towards this goal. We were really hoping that 2017 would be the year that we would welcome more chimpanzees to CSNW, but we are okay working on a different timeline. We remain determined to do whatever we can to help the remaining chimpanzees in laboratories find their sanctuary home. We are eager to break ground for the Phase 1 construction of the expansion next year, which will benefit the seven chimpanzees already here in addition to preparing for more chimps. Karen’s donation will make that possible.
Missy seemed like an appropriate chimpanzee to feature with this post. She takes full advantage of all that the sanctuary has to offer. Obstacles simply do not deter her – she’ll find a way around them or just conquer them.
Young’s Hill, the chimpanzees two-acre habitat, was named after past major donors Karen and Don Young, who donated a large gift to get the hill construction started, in addition to other large gifts for other projects like the greenhouse and the veterinary clinic trailer.
Missy loves Young’s Hill. She especially seems to enjoy the first exploration of the day. I tried to get some photos of Missy on the hill yesterday morning. This is always a challenge, because she is usually a blur of motion. She ran, climbed, and swung from one structure to another – leaving virtually nothing untouched.
She would stop very briefly when she reached a destination, quickly survey her surroundings, and then leap away again to continue her exploration.
We have a whole heck of a lot to be thankful for here at Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest. We have an amazing team of staff, board members, and volunteers, and a huge network of supporters spread all over the world.
It would take us years to highlight each donor (wouldn’t that be fun, though!). Trying to be realistic, I decided to take this week of Thanksgiving to tell, in brief, the stories of a few different donors as representatives of the many ways that people support the chimpanzees.
With seven days and seven types of donors it seems appropriate to also highlight the seven chimpanzees while I’m at it, right?!
So, today, on day one, I’m starting the week in a big way by highlighting Bruce Davidson and Burrito.
We were first introduced to Bruce Davidson over two years ago via the nephew of long-time donors Margaret Parkinson and Karen Creason. Bruce had begun thinking about getting his will in order and wanted to designate a large portion of his estate to go towards a nonprofit. Here’s Bruce in his own words,
When I saw the original KCTS piece on the sanctuary years ago I was struck by the “audacity” of a relatively small group of people with relatively limited funds dedicated to doing what they could to make a difference. “How about we start out by saving seven? Seven. That’s seven who won’t hurt anymore.” The Audacity of Hope indeed.
Bruce has visited the sanctuary twice and this last summer we were able to show him the additional parcels of land that we had acquired and were working on acquiring (more news on that soon!). Here’s what I didn’t realize would happen with a donor whose focus is entirely on a potentially large gift that will happen (hopefully) far in the future: it has been a huge source of motivation. We know that Bruce has put the trust of his legacy in the sanctuary, and we are inspired to live up to that profound level of trust.
If the need still exists, we all want the sanctuary to live far beyond our lifetimes, and Bruce is going to be a part of making this possible. Isn’t that amazing?!
If you’re curious about becoming a legacy donor, you can check out this page on our website: www.chimpsnw.org/you_can_help/single/leave-a-legacy.
So, Burrito…
This morning when I entered the chimp house, Burrito greeted me with the usual mix of, let’s call it “assertiveness” and playfulness that is his typical greeting towards me. This means that he first needs to get out a bang or a spit towards me before he gets down to the business of play. He had a big pair of plastic tweezers that he handed/pushed towards me, which I proceeded to use as a back-scratcher, finger-grabber, and stomach-tickler.
It’s just a fact that, while Burrito can be downright intimidating:
there is no way to resist his charm:
Jody had some enthusiastic greetings for her friends this morning…
Most people accept that chimpanzees are intelligent, but can they read minds? Not in a Carnac the Magnificent kind of way, but rather, do they know what other chimpanzees may or may not know? Can they take the perspective of another individual and alter their behavior accordingly? In other words, do they have what’s known as a Theory of Mind?
If you spend time around chimps you probably wouldn’t doubt for a second that they do. But one of the roles of science is to challenge our casual assumptions and force us to abandon complex explanations when simpler ones will do. For years, scientists tried to determine whether chimps were truly capable of acting on knowledge of other individuals’ mental states. They ran experiments in behavioral laboratories to try to tease out the answers. For example, would chimpanzees understand that a blindfolded researcher was incapable of telling them where food was hidden because she could not see it being hidden? The results were often inconclusive and it’s not hard to understand why. How often does someone sit blindfolded in a chair in front of you while someone else hides food around the building? What a strange thing to do. And since humans are always in cahoots anyway, who’s to say they didn’t know where the food would be before putting the blindfold on? If the chimpanzees could read minds, they’d probably wonder how we lost ours.
Field experiments offer an alternative to the more contrived situations found in the lab. Recently, a group of researchers studied how wild chimpanzees in Uganda change their alarm calls based on whether they think those around them are aware of the threat or not (read a summary here, or go here for the full article). Not surprisingly, chimps that heard a resting call from a hidden loudspeaker prior to discovering an artificial snake on a trail made a greater effort to alert those around them than when they heard alarm calls from the same speaker. They assumed that other chimps would not make resting calls if they were aware of the snake, and as a result they issued more alarm calls and stayed longer by the snake to point out the threat to those who needed to be informed.
In others words, the chimps’ responses to the sight of a snake were not simply reflexive, the way we might scream when startled. Rather, they were calculated in such a way as to ensure that critical information was given to those who needed it. From one mind to another.
I have to admit that I do wonder about the ethics of exposing wild chimpanzees to fake snakes and recorded calls, and a quick check-in with a trusted friend in the field confirmed that these experiments can have a negative impact if not done correctly. You certainly wouldn’t want to desensitize wild chimpanzees to snakes or fill them with the fear that snakes suddenly lurk around every corner.
I mention all this because a) it’s in the news, b) it’s interesting, even if you already assumed that chimps had this ability, but most importantly, c) it’s a great excuse to update our compilation of chimps reacting to snakes as CSNW:
The one, the only…Burrito.
