Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest

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reconciliation

Reconciliation

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The Cle Elum Seven fight a lot. You probably don’t get that sense from reading this blog. It’s not a conscious decision of ours to downplay their aggressiveness, but I do worry sometimes that our inclination to share mostly cute, funny, and uplifting stories leads us to unintentionally misrepresent the nature of chimpanzees.

Foxie:

Don’t get me wrong – relative to all the other things they do, like eating, resting, playing, and so on, fighting occurs infrequently. Chimpanzees are by and large peaceful and cooperative. But for most groups, all that peace and cooperation is punctuated on a fairly regular basis by terrifying bouts of screaming, hitting, clawing, and biting.

This morning, Jamie got upset when she missed an opportunity to steal food at breakfast. Jamie has a hair trigger temper – if she thinks she wasn’t given the deference she deserves, she reacts by screaming bloody murder. Her screaming gets the whole group upset and before long Burrito begins to display. With Jamie screaming and Burrito flying around like a Tasmanian devil, it’s only a matter of time before contact is made and a fight begins – sometimes between two chimps that had nothing to do with the cause of the disorder in the first place.

Most fights end without injury. In fact, this fight at breakfast ended quickly without incident, and the chimps returned to their meal. But Jamie held a grudge. She was probably stewing inside all morning. In fact, I know she was, because she took it out on me.

Captive chimps love to redirect their aggression (one of the many unflattering traits we share). Why pick a fight with another chimp, who could bite you back, when you could direct your aggression toward a human? Caregivers are at times the chimps’ unwitting therapists, allowing them to release pent-up frustrations in a safe space. Hence the high-velocity feces that grazed my head as I let the chimps onto Young’s Hill this morning. That was just Jamie’s way of coping, as were the threat barks directed at us by Negra, Missy, and even Annie (!) throughout the morning.

But hurling feces wasn’t enough for Jamie. As we were cleaning the playroom, we saw her walk into the greenhouse with a full closed grin (a misleading term for a facial expression that includes baring both the top and bottom teeth in fear or aggression) to round up other chimps. When her backup arrived, she ran into the front rooms to confront Burrito. Burrito suddenly found himself trapped on a bench where he had been resting, surrounded by five of his family members all lunging and swinging at him. Burrito had to decide….should he fight back and risk escalating the situation while greatly outnumbered, or try to escape? He chose the latter and managed to get away with only a small bite to his foot. Jamie had made her point. He was chastened.

Fights are unsettling to the whole group because social instability is a threat to everyone. Following a fight, the chimps groom intensely to repair and restore relationships.

Burrito’s go-to grooming buddy is Foxie. Even when she is his antagonist in the fight, he still goes to her for comfort. This afternoon, they groomed on the greenhouse deck for at least 30 minutes.

Foxie & Burrito:

This kind of grooming has nothing to do with hygiene. It’s all about closeness and physical connection.

Foxie:

Eventually, Missy approached and Burrito turned to groom her as well.

But Foxie wasn’t done with Burrito, and she cajoled him into returning with a smile, a poke, some head nods, and a series of breathy pants.

Some scientists think that captive chimpanzees have a greater propensity to reconcile after fights than their wild counterparts do because of the nature of captivity – in captivity, you can’t run away from your problems. If someone beats you up, you are probably going to have to sit with them at lunch an hour later. So your best bet is to take out some of your frustration in whichever way floats your boat – charging through the playroom, smashing a toy into a million pieces, spitting on your caregivers, or initiating a CODE BROWN on an innocent and unsuspecting Co-Director – and with that out of the way, get to work making up with your family.

Foxie:

 

Conflict and Reconciliation

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Last week, a squabble broke out during dinner. Since we’re always talking about how we never capture conflicts on video, I decided to sit quietly and record the whole thing on my phone.

I’m always amazed at how much is going on during a fight. Alliances are being forged, tested, and sometimes broken. Old grudges are being dug up and rehashed. Some subordinate chimps are engaged in proxy fights on behalf their superiors, others are playing mediator and trying not to harm the alliances they’ve worked so hard to build, and some, like Burrito, are doing all they can just to stay out of the way. And that’s just the fight – as soon as it’s over, it’s on to reconciliation phase.

It’s easy to miss all of these things amidst all the screaming, so what follows is my attempt at a play-by-play.

Mornings

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Mornings are my favorite time at CSNW. The chimps have had their breakfast and they are all geared up to go out and explore Young’s Hill. Unfortunately it is also the time when we clean the enclosures, so we don’t have much of a chance to sit around and watch them. But it’s amazing how much you can witness in just those first few minutes.

This morning, Foxie took a suitcase full of trolls out to the hill.

She later decided to put the trolls on her back as she walked down the hill, the way a chimp mother would carry her infant. As far as I know, three trolls was a personal record for her.

Missy likes to start the day with some athletic activity, especially this time of year. It’s no secret that January in Cle Elum is not perfect chimp weather, but interestingly enough, the Cle Elum Seven seem to prefer spring and fall to the hot summer months and we are actually seeing them go outdoors more now that the temperatures are in the 60’s.

Today, Missy used the handrail on the shaky bridge as a tightrope. This has become one of her new favorite moves. She’s holding a chow bag in these photos. We still supplement the chimps diet of fresh produce, nuts, seeds, and browse with a small amount of a commercially prepared diet. The manufacturer of the chow that we use recently decided to shrink the bicuits to a quarter of their original size, and now it is too cumbersome to serve them directly to the chimps. So we put them in bags. The chimps actually enjoy this, because they can take their chow out to picnic on the hill more easily. Or walk a tightrope with them.

There was a skirmish in the playroom this morning before breakfast. This is fairly typical, because that is the time of day when Burrito tends to display, and he inevitably gets everyone else so worked up that someone ends up mad a someone else. I didn’t see the conflict between Jody and Missy, but it was clear from their behavior later in the morning that they needed to reconcile.

Jody was coming back down the hill with her leftover lemon from breakfast when she saw Missy on the shaky bridge. (Yes, chimps love raw lemons. Raw onions too. We like to serve the lemons after the onions to freshen up the breath.) Jody immediately became pilo erect (hair standing on end) and approached Missy for reassurance.

The two then touched briefly and then Jody went on her way.

Negra came outside this morning but after a few minutes she decided she’d rather be in the greenhouse under a huge pile of blankets. Negra is not a morning person. She’s not really an afternoon or evening person, either. Really, she would prefer to stay in bed all day if she could. If only the staff would bring her meals to her in bed.

Burrito continues to explore more and more of the hill. He is really getting more comfortable out there. Today he climbed up a structure by himself and sat for a while on the end of a beam, taking it all in.

Here he is sitting on the log bridge, showing off some new scars on his wrist. Chimpanzees, especially male chimpanzees, use the back of their wrists to bang on things when they display, and sometimes to bang on other chimps. This is what primatologists refer to as a “backhand thump.” So many male chimps have thick callouses on the backs of their wrists and often some scabs and scars too.

I didn’t intend for this to be a post about each and every one of the chimps, but now I feel bad leaving Annie and Jamie out. Annie just followed Missy around all morning, as she always does, probably wishing that Missy would just sit still for a minute. But Missy is incapable of sitting still.

And Jamie was kind of a loner this morning. It used to be that Burrito would follow her around the hill. I think she enjoyed that. Not the company so much as getting to be the leader. Now Burrito will follow Jody or even venture off on his own as he did this morning. That left Jamie walking around by herself. But she had fun too. Everyone loves the shaky bridge. Maybe we’ll build some more next summer.