Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest

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Keeping up with Burrito

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I followed the chimps up the hill this morning as they made their way to the wooded area. Burrito followed Jody closely as they made their way through the gully and up along the fence line.

Foxie was not far behind.

Missy, of course, had made it to the top before anyone even noticed she was gone.

When we arrived at the top, Burrito appeared determined. He may not be ready to climb a tree just yet, but he was going to do something adventurous. He climbed past Missy and went to the roof of Carlene’s Tower.

From there, he took in the view of the Yakima River and the distant town of Cle Elum.

But then he was off to do other things, like climbing the log pile with Jamie.

The group returned to the greenhouse. Jody brought with her a piece of pine bark with scars form the Taylor Bridge Fire and what look like holes from a woodpecker.

Throughout the morning, the group (minus Negra, of course, who remained in her cozy nest) would continue to make trips up to the pines. Annie is still wearing her waist band, as you can see.

After lunch, Jamie brought her sweet potatoes for a picnic and took some time to inspect the insect and chainsaw markings on the logs.

On their fourth trip up, it was clear that Burrito was not slowing down. Missy chased him across the log bridges and nearly captured his toes.

Next time, Missy.

They stopped to rest together.

In the original side of the building, there’s a small interior room called Front Room 4 that has a view into the kitchen and foyer, where we work throughout the afternoon. Burrito has learned that if he tries hard enough to get our attention, the humans can’t concentrate and must abandon their attempts to write the blog.

And so long as you’re not doing anything, you might as well take a walk with Burrito, right? Great! He’ll meet you outside then.

He waits for you to arrive, and then he’s off to the top of the hill once more.

Impressions

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It’s officially mud season, and boy do we have a lot of it this year. Construction on Young’s Hill and The Bray finished too late last year to replant grass in the disturbed areas, so what was dust last fall when the chimps went back outside is now a squishy, slippery mess. One benefit of the mud, however, is finding the chimps’ hand and footprints all over the hill.

Unlike a lot of the animal tracks we find around the sanctuary, the chimps’ fore and hind limb prints are very distinctive from one another, due to the fact that chimps use the middle phalanges (not the knuckle itself but the area between the first and second knuckles) of their hands for walking while, like us, they use the soles of their feet.

Here are some hand prints:

Footprints show the entire sole of the foot with the big toe extending almost 90 degrees from the other toes.

There was a time when most of the Cle Elum Seven, who previously knew nothing but the concrete and bars of their laboratory cages, wouldn’t dream of stepping in mud. Times certainly have changed. It’s not as if they enjoy being dirty, however. When they return from an adventure outside, they promptly clean themselves up by wiping their hands and feet on walls, caging, cardboard boxes, or anything else within reach. And then leave it for their cleaning staff to take care of 🙂

Mave and Dora

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Sometimes dinner is so exciting that you just need a hug.

On the other side of the building, Jamie and her gang spent some time out on the hill today. We have been under clouds and fog for so long now that we’re wondering if Cle Elum will ever be known again its sunny winters. This morning, Anna came back from outside and exclaimed, “The fog is getting brighter!” We all celebrated the change from gray to light gray. The chimps celebrated, too, by heading out to the hill.

Jamie took along her favorite book:

Burrito followed:

Foxie of course took her doll along to fetch some snow:

Perhaps tomorrow will be an even brighter shade of gray. If not, I might need one of those hugs. Or just a cozy nest:

Terry update: He’s feeling much better and is as playful as ever!

Stuff

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As many of you know (especially if you watched the recent Christmas videos), the CSNW chimps have a lot of stuff. Most of the chimps are not attached to these things – they use them and enjoy them and then go on about their business. But some chimps are quite materialistic and borderline obsessive about it, too.

This morning, Sofia and I were cleaning the playroom when I heard Jamie emit a “low moan” from the front rooms. This is a vocalization that often indicates satisfaction. I imagined that she had saved her primate chow from breakfast, as she often does, and was digging into it in private while the others chimps groomed in the greenhouse. But when I peeked around the corner I found that she didn’t have any chow and was simply making a nest. With her, however, was her favorite book, I’m Lucy.

An attachment to things wouldn’t work very well for a species that ranges across a vast territory and rarely sleeps in the same place twice. While Jamie was not fortunate enough to know the life of her wild counterparts, there’s some comfort in knowing that she gets to experience the same pleasure we do when settling down with a good book on a snowy winter morning.

 

On a separate note, I just wanted to express our thanks to the rest of the staff (and their spouses) who dealt with some challenging conditions while Diana and I were gone on a longer than expected trip. Kelsi mentioned that the well froze up, but she may not have mentioned that the cattle water also froze up just as we left, the radiant heat in the original chimp building stopped working the next morning (we have backup heaters on standby), and the tractor refused to run, requiring them to find someone to come plow the sanctuary’s long and steep driveway on short notice and make multiple trips to the well house with a heat gun using snowshoes. All of this on top of having to take turns staying overnight at the sanctuary through the holidays. Some might say that Diana and I were the real heroes last week, as we valiantly struggled to enjoy all the cookies, cocktails, and Christmas presents with my family while burdened with the knowledge that the rest of the staff were facing one catastrophe after another. But I’d say our coworkers did a pretty good job, too.

Eagle Eyes

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When I stop by the chimp house, I am occasionally greeted by chimps excitedly waiting to play, groom, or go on walks, but the majority of the time, the overall vibe is one of indifference. I can pop into the foyer, grab a package or some receipts, and head back to the office without garnering much attention. The other day, however, as I stood in the foyer, I could hear Jamie stomping on the floor in the playroom. She often does this when she can see something she wants in the kitchen from her limited vantage point in the playroom loft.

I was pretty sure she wasn’t trying to get my attention. I never stepped foot in the kitchen, had no food on me, and was wearing the same old black rain boots that I always wear around the farm this time of year. Still, she kept stomping. As I walked into the chimp area to see if I could figure out what she wanted, she let out a low moan and raced down to the floor where I stood. She extended her fingers through the cage towards my boots. Then I remembered…I was actually wearing a different pair of black rain boots – ones that are, to my mind, very similar and virtually indistinguishable from a distance to most people. But Jamie is not most people.

There’s a lot going on here. First, there’s the fact that she can discern the subtle differences between plain black boots from a distance of 70 feet. Second, it’s clear that she has a pretty good memory of the boots she has seen me wear for these to be viewed as so novel and interesting. And finally, there’s the unanswerable question: Why does she care about boots so much?

As someone who owns two pairs of nearly identical boots, I’m not sure I’m in any position to question or criticize anyone else’s interest in footwear.

jamie chimpanzee in nest with boot

 

What is it like to be a chimpanzee?

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Can we ever know what it’s like to experience the world the way a chimpanzee does? A good starting point would be to assume that their subjective experience is much like our own. After all, our two species diverged a mere 7 million years ago – the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. It’s certainly a better place to begin than the pre-Darwinian view that nonhuman animals (a phrase which itself would have been redundant at best prior to Darwin) are devoid of conscious experience altogether. And yet it likely fails to do justice to the unique sensory and cognitive world that chimpanzees inhabit.

In the early 20th century, a German biologist by the name of Jacob von Uexküll coined the term umwelt  – “self-world” – to describe the subjective world in which each species exists. An animal’s umwelt is the combination of their unique sensory experience, their morphology, their natural environment, and the things that are biologically important to them. It is reality as they perceive it. A tick, he explains, lacks eyes and ears but finds its way through the world sensing light through its skin and the butyric acid secreted by potential mammalian hosts. Bats “see” the world around them using ultrasonic echoes and ultraviolet vision. We may exist alongside ticks and bats but we inhabit different umwelten because each of our species evolved its own set of tools to make sense of the world around them in ways that are biologically relevant. Because we are each different, the world is different to each of us.

As far as we know, chimpanzees don’t employ active echolocation like bats or sense the sweaty chemical signature of other mammals with a specialized sensory organ like ticks. Their sensory perception, unsurprisingly, appears to be tuned quite similarly to our own. And yet they possess a variety of unique physiological, cognitive, and social faculties that must undoubtedly lead to a subjective experience that is uniquely theirs.

Merkwelt –  The Perceptual Sphere

Take working memory, for example. Researchers in Japan tested chimpanzees’ ability to recall the position of nine Arabic numerals after they were flashed on a screen and then masked with solid squares. To perform the test correctly, the chimpanzees would have to recall the position of each number and then touch the masked squares in ascending order. With exposure of only a fifth of a second, the chimps had an 80 percent accuracy rate. Adult humans only managed to reach 40 percent. With training, humans’ performance improved but only in tests with up to five numbers.

It is theorized that the chimps possess a greater capacity for eidetic imagery. Similar to what we call photographic memory, it is when an image persists in the mind’s eye after a brief exposure. For how long can chimps recall these images? Take a look at what happens when a chimpanzee is distracted in the middle of a session.

Why would chimpanzees possess such an ability? Perhaps it confers an advantage when living in large, dynamic social groups. Or maybe it aids in foraging or hunting. Perhaps it’s common to many other animals, including our own recent ancestors, and humans merely lost it in an evolutionary tradeoff.

But more importantly, how does it influence the way chimpanzees experience the world? Does their perceptual world somehow linger in a way ours does not? Might the near past feel less “past” to them in some way?

Wirkwelt – The Motor Sphere

Our physiology affects the way we experience the world in ways that go beyond sensory perception. For example, a chimpanzee’s world is far more vertically-oriented than our own. Long, slender fingers with tiny thumbs make it easier to grasp when climbing while powerful arm and leg muscles made up of proportionally greater amounts of “fast twitch” fibers make even the most harrowing acrobatic feats possible with a graceful nonchalance.

They are still just as bound by the laws of gravity, and, unlike birds, their opportunities to move vertically are limited to the available objects that they can use to climb, such as trees, vines, and the like. But watch them play or fight and you will realize that they are nowhere near as earth-bound as we are. What does it feel like for not just your perception of the world to be three-dimensional but also your unfettered ability to move through it?

Sozialwelt?

Some propose that the concept of umwelt should be broadened to include an animal’s social sphere and that assumptions about what chimpanzees perceive as right or wrong may hinder our ability to understand them:

[W]e wanted to explore morality in non-human primates. In our set-up, that implied presenting “good” and “bad” experimenters to chimpanzees and let them choose among them. Interestingly, we had no homogeneous general results, however young males consistently chose the bad experimenter. Revisiting the underlying social meaning of the actions we have presented, we realized that we had defined “bad experimenter” as someone entering in a room and hitting a third individual whereas “good experimenter” was someone interrupting the fight and consoling the victim. Mostly all humans would have agreed with these actions being bad and good, respectively. However, would not it be possible that young males could have perceived the bad experimenter as good because during adolescence juveniles show preference for potential allies in future fights (a strong individual that hits others)?

While this interpretation is debatable, anyone that has spent time around male teenage chimpanzees and lived to tell about it should at least acknowledge its plausibility. What is right and what is wrong are no doubt influenced by both the needs and the structure of the social group, and thus the species. One of the hardest parts about being a caregiver to animals like chimpanzees is trying to avoid substituting our own morality for theirs.

The philosopher Thomas Nagel famously approached the problem of consciousness by asking “What is it like to be a bat?” Similar to von Uexküll, his thesis was that consciousness is the subjective experience of an animal which cannot be captured by descriptions of physiology and behavior. I can imagine what it would be like to hang upside-down with my eyes closed, but then I am only imagining what it would be like for me to do bat-like things. The actual subjective experience of a bat is inaccessible to me.

The point of all this is not that we shouldn’t try to understand what it is like to be a chimpanzee. On the contrary, it is our responsibility to try, for that is the only way we can attempt to meet their needs. But a little humility is warranted. As with the tests of working memory, it is all too easy to slip into comparisons about performance – to pity other animals’ deficiencies or marvel at their “superhuman” abilities. Instead, we should strive to view these examples as windows into other strange, rich, and wonderful worlds, equally suited but in ways all their own. “All animals, from the simplest to the most complex,” von Uexküll wrote, “are fitted into their unique worlds with equal completeness.” Only when we acknowledge this fact can we attempt to see the world through their eyes.