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nw

Board Member Profile: David Brotherton

July 31, 2013 by Diana

We have some largely unsung heroes that are a big part of Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest – our Board of Directors who volunteer countless hours overseeing the organization. We decided it’s about time we sung about them, so this is the first of a monthly series of blog posts about our amazing board members and how they became involved with the sanctuary.

We currently have ten board members and are looking to fill a few open seats. This post is about our outgoing Board President David Brotherton.

David Brotherton

David learned about the sanctuary through a long-standing board member, Bruce Wagman. David and Bruce share a love of live music and, though they live in different states, often attend shows together.

David first met the chimpanzees more than three years ago. His introduction to the group involved Jody spitting quite a bit of water on him. This baptism left him with the distinct impression that the chimps were not there to entertain, but were giving him the choice to either help out or get out. He chose to help.

David brings to the board a wealth of strategic communications experience as the founder and director of Brotherton Strategies, a Seattle-based consulting firm that works with a wide mix of grant making foundations and socially minded corporate clients. Before getting involved in public relations, marketing and brand strategy, he worked in Washington D.C. as a congressional speech writer and political reporter. Perhaps we should have him report on the politics of the Cle Elum Seven!

David has a passion for Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest and is eager to see the organization thrive long into the future with a firm strategic plan in place. He gushes about the amazing supporters of the sanctuary and describes the organization as unlike any other that he’s known or supported.

He recently served one term as the Board President and is now helping Kimber Leblicq transition into that role. His tenure as president spanned an important period in the sanctuary’s history. David helped guide us through the Taylor Bridge Fire (and not just in a governance role – he brought tortilla chips and beer to the staff and volunteers the day after the fire and allowed us a few moments of relaxation and laughter). He then oversaw the search to hire our no-longer-new Executive Director Jennifer Whitaker.

With the support of one of his clients, Provitro Biosciences (formerly known as Booshoot), David also introduced the chimps to the bamboo now flourishing on Young’s Hill, which the chimpanzees have been loving ever since. Now that I think about all he has done these past few years, I realize that I actually owe him a beer!

Feel free to leave a comment for David below this post.

Filed Under: Thanks, Volunteers Tagged With: board, chimp, chimpanzee, chimpsnw, csnw, david brotherton, directors, northwest, nw, Sanctuary, seattle

We’re Looking for a Development Manager

May 31, 2013 by Diana

Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest is hiring! We are looking for someone with fundraising experience to fill the brand new position of Manager of Development.

We are so excited to be expanding our staff with this very important role. Get all of the details on our Job Opportunities page or download the position description in pdf format here. If you have questions after looking over that material, email Jennifer.

Please share widely!

Jamie is looking forward to another staff member to boss around:

Jamie close up

 

Filed Under: Fundraising, News Tagged With: chimp, chimpanzee, csnw, development, Fundraising, job opening, manager, northwest, nw, Sanctuary

Happy Birthday, Tracy Headley!

December 29, 2012 by Diana

Today was sponsored by Elizabeth Porter as a gift to her daughter, Tracy Headley. Tracy is a fan of Foxie, so I found a few photos of Foxie to go with the blog post.

Tracy will be happy to know that Foxie had a really great day today. I put a big bucket of snow in one of the front rooms and Foxie snacked from the bucket all afternoon (troll dolls in hand, of course). At one point, Foxie noticed that the cover of the television was partially removed. When I asked her if she wanted to watch a movie and moved toward the t.v., Foxie became really excited. So I put in a dvd that included some Dora the Explorer episodes. She was so immersed in the cartoons, that she barely noticed lunch being served by volunteer caregiver Connie. Foxie also played chase with Jamie and Missy.

All in all, I’d say Foxie had a great day. We hope you did too, Tracy! Thank you and your mom for being such great supporters of Foxie and her friends. Happy Birthday!
foxie with new trolls

web for tracy Foxie sit playroom troll doll pr IMG_0142

web Foxie string of trolls5_MG_2561

web Foxie throw blue troll doll in air about to catch playroom IMG_0100

web for tracy Foxie troll doll look close enrichment party birthday outdoor area sent to birthday donors IMG_5403

Filed Under: Foxie, Sponsor-a-day, Thanks, Trolls Tagged With: chimp, csnw, Foxie, northwest, nw, Sanctuary, Sponsor-a-day, tracy headley

Industrious Jamie

December 29, 2012 by Diana

Jamie, as you probably know, is a very industrious chimpanzee person. Sometimes we create enrichment projects for her. Other times, like today, Jamie assesses the objects that we put out for the chimps and takes it upon herself to come up with a project of her own making (see video below).

Jamie took a well deserved rest this afternoon after all of her industrious work. Note the carefully placed boots in her nest:

jamie in her nest

 

Filed Under: Chimpanzee Behavior, Construction, Enrichment, Jamie, Sanctuary Tagged With: chimp, chimpanzee, cowboy boots, csnw, intelligence, Jamie, nest, northwest, nw, Sanctuary, tool use

Fighting

November 15, 2012 by Diana

The chimps had a big fight on Tuesday night during dinner. I haven’t witnessed a fight of that intensity that lasted that long in years. The Cle Elum Seven do have minor conflicts all of the time. If you’re not familiar with chimps, you might think these squabbles are all-out brawls, but after you’ve seen a few, you get accustomed to how chimps fight. Once a quarrel breaks out, generally everyone joins in, so at CSNW, there are seven chimpanzees screaming and running around. Usually it is just a lot of posturing and often very little physical contact (as I mentioned in this blog post). Tuesday was a bit different.

The fight seemed to start between Missy and Annie. Though they really are best friends, Missy is dominant to Annie. Dominance is often asserted around access to food, so sometimes Missy reminds Annie of her lower rank by getting upset if Annie tries to take food. Because of these occasional reminders, Annie can be a little nervous. Annie used to be quite on edge a lot of the time, and if she thought someone was going to become upset by something she was doing, she would have overly exaggerated submissive behaviors, which often included screaming (I found a good description of submissive behaviors on Jane Goodall’s Lessons of Hope website). These days, Annie is much more confident and much less anxious, but a hierarchy among the chimps remains and is frequently reinforced in obvious and subtle ways. So, I can’t say exactly what started the fight, but it was something between Annie and Missy involving food. The start of the fight, however, often doesn’t matter. Once a fight gets going, it’s an opportunity to reinforce rank as well as get out any pent-up anger, so the “target” changes throughout the duration of the conflict. Maybe this sounds familiar? If you’re in a fight with a loved one (or not-so-loved one), I bet you’ve noticed the subject of the fight drifts from the initial topic to anything that been bugging you lately. And if it’s a fight within a group of several people, the person that everyone is focused on can change throughout the quarrel. Chimps aren’t so different.

The fight on Tuesday moved from the greenhouse, to the front rooms, and then into the playroom. There’s really nothing we as caregivers can do to end a conflict among the chimps. Once they’re going, there’s nothing that will take their focus off of the fight. Watching a fight does reinforce why we have such strict safety protocols and why we never share the same space as the chimps without a secure barrier (steel fencing, electric wire or chimp-proof glass) between human and chimpanzee. Chimps can go from peacefully eating dinner to a giant conflict in a matter of seconds.

One thing that we do is make sure there are no areas that would create a “trap” that a chimp could get stuck in without an avenue of escape. So, with that in mind, Elizabeth opened up the doors between each of the front rooms to the playroom even though we had not completed the spot cleaning for the evening. We do not attempt to isolate chimps during or after a conflict – we just give them room and allow them to work things out. Fighting and making up is an important part of living cohesively in a group of chimpanzees.

So, all we could do was watch and wait for the fight to end. Most squabbles last just a minute or two, but this fight went on for at least 15 minutes. One of Negra’s seemingly self-appointed jobs is to let out a loud pant hoot towards the end of the fight. We’ve come to describe this as Negra attempting to end the conflict. With this conflict, Negra let out her “ending pant hoot” at least four times. She seemed ready for the fight to be over and to get on with the rest of dinner; but this fight was intense, and the other chimps just kept going. During the fight, I remarked to Elizabeth how much smarter Burrito has become about conflicts. He used to throw himself in the middle, get all of the girls mad at him, and end up getting beat up. He’s still involved in conflicts, but stays more on the periphery and concentrates on getting reassurance from Foxie, who seems to give reassurance to anyone and everyone who wants it – that’s why we think of her as the mediator of the group. Even though we’re accustomed to the chimps fighting, it’s not a time that we think to break out the cameras, so we don’t have many photos or videos of fights, except for these photos of the end of a squabble that I took a few years ago.

Once the fight finally ended, we looked everyone over for injuries. Jamie’s behind was bleeding, but it didn’t look too worrisome. Jody was the worst off – she had a cut above one of her eyes, a few cuts on her arms, and a very bloody toe. We realized a little while later that one of her toes was severed completely. This probably sounds horrific, but it’s all part of what happens when chimps fight. We’re actually lucky that we don’t see more injuries. During conflicts like this, chimps go for ears, toes, fingers, scrotum – basically parts that stick out that can be bitten.

Jody was taking some time to rest while the other chimps were inspecting their own and each others’ wounds. You might imagine that having a toe bitten off would cause excruciating pain, but chimpanzees’ experience of pain seems to be quite different than that of most modern-day humans. The best example of this among the Cle Elum Seven was a fight pretty early on when Missy’s top lip was split open to the degree that you could see her teeth in between the new two halves of her top lip. Within minutes after the injury, she was pulling on it and biting the rough edges off, and not long afterwards, she eagerly ate several pieces of grapefruit with no signs of pain whatsoever. With no intervention from us, aside from medication (luckily we had seen this type of injury before and knew it could heal on its own), her lip “zipped” back up in a matter of a week or two, and within a month there was barely a trace of the injury.

We have Jody on pain reliever, just in case, as well as antibiotics, and we’re monitoring her toe very closely. We’re sending photos to our veterinarians and keeping them updated several times a day. We’re hoping that Jody’s foot will be able to heal on it’s own. If there are signs of an infection despite the antibiotics, it could be due to bone fragments left in the toe, and we’d most likely have to perform surgery to amputate the rest of the toe – a fairly minor procedure, but it would be the first surgery in CSNW’s history. Let’s hope we won’t have to go that route!

Here’s a photo of Jody from yesterday, the morning after the fight. She wasn’t even favoring her injured foot as she walked all over Young’s Hill:

jody drooped lip face young's hill

 

Filed Under: Chimpanzee Behavior, Fights, Jody, Sanctuary Tagged With: chimp, conflict, csnw, injury, northwest, nw, Sanctuary

Negra’s Condo?

October 12, 2012 by Diana

We have been calling the structure that J.B. is building on Young’s Hill “Negra’s Cabin,” but volunteer Denice decided the more appropriate name is “Negra’s Condo.” Take a look at the photos and tell us what you think.

 

J.B. has been working on the cabin/condo for a few days straight now. Today, volunteer Seana was serving as J.B.’s construction apprentice.

 

These two photos scream condo, don’t they?

jb seana construct negra's condo

jb seana construct negra's cabin

 

Do the addition of the logs make it more cabin-like?

negra's cabin under construction

 

Negra's cabin under construction, greenhouse in background

 

Negra checking on the construction progress:

negra watching cabin construction

Negra close up watching cabin construction

negra arms crossed after watching cabin construction

Not much longer, Negra!

Thanks to everyone who contributed to our 4th Anniversary Fundraising drive, which made Negra’s cabin/condo possible!

 

Filed Under: Construction, Negra, Sanctuary, Volunteers, Young's Hill Tagged With: cabin, chimp, chimpanzee, condo, Construction, csnw, Negra, northwest, nw, Sanctuary, young's hill

Look who’s settling in on the hill

October 6, 2012 by Diana

As we’ve mentioned in other posts, Negra has been the most hesitant to fully embrace Young’s Hill, but today she was the first one out of the raceway and sat for quite a long time on the log bridge enjoying the breakfast lettuce forage.

Negra with lettuce on log bridge

Filed Under: Food, Negra, Young's Hill Tagged With: chimp, chimpanzee, csnw, Negra, northwest, nw, refuge, rescue, Sanctuary, young's hill

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