Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest

Hope. Love. Home. Sanctuary

primate awareness network

So Many Friends

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It’s been quite the busy weekend! Central Washington University held a Legacy in Every Gesture: Celebrating CWU’s Primate Program, which included a day of events. including the dedication of a memorial honoring Washoe, Tatu, Moja, Dar, and Loulis, the chimpanzees who lived on campus and began CWU’s primate program.

Many of the staff here began our careers in the primate program, and the weekend’s events were significant to us. We are grateful for CWU President Jim Wohlpart and First Lady Sasha Wohlpart for truly honoring Washoe and her family and for bringing together people who had connections to the program over a thirty year span together this weekend.

Roger and Debbie Fouts, the founders of the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute who advocated for chimpanzees well before others in their field did, attended the events and were honored throughout the day. It was wonderful to see them again. Crickette Sanz gave a moving speech that told her story of working for Washoe, starting as a CWU undergraduate student, and how that led her to establishing the Goualougo Triangle Ape Project in northern Republic of Congo, where, among other things, they use noninvasive technology to monitor the chimpanzees, resulting in new discoveries about their ecology and behavior and illustrating how important it is to support the protection of the dwindling populations of chimpanzees in the wild.

Ron Dotzauer, former trustee, told the story of how the innovative building for the chimpanzees came to fruition, thanks to some political savvy and people in high positions who cared about animals. The chimpanzees, of course, no longer live on campus. Tatu and Loulis are at the Fauna Foundation in Quebec, and the site where their home was is now dorms. Dorms that now have a memorial in front that remembers the chimpanzees who once lived there.

We were glad to be able to host some of the attendees, including friends we hadn’t seen in decades, for a visit to the sanctuary the next day. Then it was off to Dru Bru for a successful and fun pint night fundraiser that the Primate Awareness Network organized!

The chimpanzees were very interested in the visitors. Terry spent the most time outside quietly observing everyone, and Jamie demanded to see everyone’s footwear.

 

These photos are not from this weekend, but I feel they fit in with the uplifting feeling that the weekend’s events and connecting with old and new friends manifested.

Negra at the top of Young’s Hill:

Burrito on Carlene’s Tower under the trees:

Gordo enjoying some corn:

Terry observing:

Jamie exploring:

Adaptability and Resilience

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I don’t think it’s possible to work with chimpanzees and not think about their remarkable adaptability and resilience. Tragically, their ability to adapt is why some chimpanzees have been able to survive in some of the worse conditions imaginable, for years on end.

Sanctuaries are often the first opportunity for some chimpanzees, depending on their past circumstances, to do dozens, if not hundreds (perhaps thousands?) of new things. Walking on grass, climbing, brachiating, foraging for wild plants, or even living in a group, can be new experiences.

It can take time to break beyond the life that they have adapted to – that they’ve been forced to live.

Chimp Crazy has made me think about this too. I wrote last week about the HBO documentary series and my questions about the general public’s perception regarding chimpanzees. I appreciate everyone who commented so thoughtfully (and also all who donated during Giving Day for Apes!)

Chimp Crazy has caused me to ruminate on so many issues. I talked a little about this in a recent interview on KOMO TV in Seattle, along with local photographer who we’ve partnered with – Alex Bogaard.

The main human subject of Chimp Crazy, Tonia Haddix, and other chimpanzee owners interviewed on the documentary, have only seen chimpanzees in the context of being pets or entertainers. People who own primates as pets have witnessed these primates adapt, to the extent that they can, to living in a their homes and performing tricks.

What they don’t see are the hundreds of things missing from that primate’s life. They don’t see or perhaps don’t care that they have forced their pet primate, a wild animal, to fit into an entirely different culture and environment from the environment and culture they evolved to experience in order to have a full life.

A couple of days ago, the Primate Awareness Network at Central Washington University hosted a talk by Dr. Andrew Halloran about his work with both captive and wild populations of chimpanzees. The topic of his talk was resilience. He shared stories of the incredible resilience of chimpanzees he has studied as part of the Tonkolili Chimpanzee Project in Sierra Leone who have adapted to live in fragmented forests after their original expansive habitats were destroyed in order to create large areas of farmland for crop exportation to other countries. And he spoke about the resilience of chimpanzees in captivity who he has worked for in zoo and sanctuary settings.

I was thinking today about the difference between adaptability and resilience and how they interact. It’s not always a good thing to be able to adapt to a bad situation. I’m sure everyone can think of examples from their own lives where you found that you had adapted to circumstances that did not serve you well. If you’ve become accustomed to one way of living, even if that way of living is detrimental to your physical or psychological well being, it can be incredibly difficult to take a leap when presented with new and better choices. We’re not so different than other primates in this way. We can experience resistance and fear of the unknown. And that’s where resilience comes into play.

Adaptability is what enabled Willy B to live in a laboratory for the first five years of his life. Resilience is what allowed him to climb the crow’s nests in his two acre enclosure last week for the first time. Sometimes primates need a nudge to discover their own resilience, like a plum in a location you’ve never climbed before.

A PAN-tastic Group of Humans

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It’s now been well over a year since we began the “new normal” style of sanctuary operations.

The objective of these changes has been to mitigate the risk of transmitting COVID-19 to the chimpanzees. Of course, the nuclear staff cannot stop interacting with the chimps entirely, so we’ve found other ways to meet their daily needs while maintaining a bubble of safety around them. To facilitate this social “quarantine,” we had to sadly cancel many on-site initiatives powered by our extended community of volunteers, interns, and local supporters.

The need for social distancing hasn’t stopped these people from contributing to the organization on a Major-League level, though.

In a recent blog post, Diana described the remarkable work that our volunteer corps is continuing to do during the pandemic. We know that many of the volunteers and interns would be helping at to take care of the chimps if public health conditions allowed for it, but they’ve found ways to help the sanctuary regardless. Take that, SARS-CoV-2!

Today’s blog is dedicated to the members of Central Washington University’s Primate Awareness Network (PAN), who have provided crucial support this year by planning creative and fun events for the sanctuary. This year, they arranged an art contest and exhibition at Gallery One in Ellensburg and a smash fundraiser at Dru Bru’s new taproom in Cle Elum. They did all this while hosting a virtual primatology conference, collecting enrichment materials for the chimps from locations around town, helping CSNW staff to enter welfare data into the sanctuary’s new database, and continuing their mission of advocating for primate conservation and welfare via social media outreach. Given all they’ve done for us, the least we can do is to thank this year’s PAN cohort of Ashton, Calvin, Carson, Courtney A., Courtney G., Danna, Jenna, Kelsie, Malcolm, Margaux, Riley and Sydney for all their dedication and enthusiasm.

(To learn more about the Primate Awareness Network, check them out on Facebook or @cwu_primate on Instagram and Twitter. You can see flyers and photos from a couple of their recent events below!)

In addition to heartfelt appreciation, we owe some of them cheerful congratulations as well. They’ve all been advancing their respective research projects outside the sanctuary despite the turmoil of the past year, and all of them are embarking on new adventures, including (but not limited to):

Ashton recently co-authored a paper about COVID-19’s effect on wildlife in the journal Mammal Review and began working at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado.
(Fun Fact: CSNW board member Dr. Lori Sheeran is Ashton’s advisor and also co-authored the paper!)

Carson has been accepted into the Applied Anthropology doctoral program at Texas State University where she will study the microbial ecology of free-ranging chimpanzees in Africa.

Jenna has just accepted a full-time caregiver position at fellow NAPSA member sanctuary Center for Great Apes in Florida and will be starting in June.

Riley, after he defends his graduate thesis, will be getting married this summer!
(Jenna suggested I link to his registry but we don’t want to mix it up with our own Wish List, causing Riley and his partner to receive enrichment puzzles and cleaning supplies while the chimps get new bed linens and cookware.)

It’s sad to watch this cohort of students move on without a proper farewell at the sanctuary, but we’re excited to see the places they will go, the things they will do, and the people they will become. Hopefully, local conditions keep trending in the right direction so that we can gradually incorporate volunteers, interns and visitors back into our routine without increasing the risk to the chimps and staff. For now, we’re just happy to express our gratitude for these people and the time they’ve donated to the sanctuary!

A Special Visit and Some Special Ordinary Moments

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There are so many little moments in any given day that we caregivers find endearing or funny or amazing or otherwise noteworthy.

Early this morning, for example, I saw Burrito sampling the grass for the first time this spring. I was overjoyed because I know what’s to come in the next couple of months – the chimpanzees sitting outside and stuffing their mouths with handfuls of grass. It’s one of my favorite times of year. I didn’t get a photo this morning, but you can bet there will be many to come.

At lunch, the chimpanzees had a very exciting visitor: Dr. Birute Galdikas, the famous anthropologist who is for orangutans what Dian Fossy was for gorillas and Jane Goodall is for chimpanzees. These three remarkable women were initially supported in their observational research of great apes by Louis Leakey and they each changed the collective view of our closest living relatives. Dr. Galdikas, nearly fifty years after starting her field research in Borneo, still spends more than half of each year in Indonesia running the field site and directly working to protect orangutans in their native habitat. Much of the rest of her time is spent raising awareness about the perilous situation facing orangutans in the wild and raising funds for Orangutan Foundation International.

Dr. Galdikas spoke last night to students and community members at nearby Central Washington University, thanks to one of the most unique primatology programs in the world. We were so honored that she chose to visit the sanctuary during her brief stay. I think she made a connection with Burrito, which was very sweet.

I neglected to get my own photos of her visit, maybe because I was flustered to be in her presence, but luckily others had their phones at the ready. So, below is a photo from Katelyn of Jake Funkhouser, Dr. Galdikas, and Ruth Linsky. Ruth and Jake are the students who arranged for Dr. Galdikas’ visit to CWU through the Primate Awareness Network.

Later in the afternoon, Anna and I donned some new favorite boots of Jamie’s and took off on a walk around the hill. Missy and Annie came out too and proceeded to twirl and slap and wrestle their way across the hill. Guess what? I didn’t have a camera in hand for those moments either. But, please do take a second to picture it – they were having a great time.

You may be wondering at this point whether I visually captured any part of the day at all to share with you. I did!

Jody was on a mission all day to snack on some of the spruce trees on the hill. I saw her at least three times going back and forth to the “Christmas tree lot” with pieces of tree in her mouth. She looked very satisfied by her foraging