Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest

Hope. Love. Home. Sanctuary

Sanctuary

Take Action Tuesday: How orangutans are affected by the food and personal care products we buy

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Last week we discussed issues that face free-living chimpanzees (and also the other two African apes, gorillas and bonobos). Today I want to take action on a hot topic: palm oil. Free-living orangutan populations are only found on the small islands of Borneo and Sumatra. Since that climate is also really great for palm plantations, which produce palm oil, much of the orangutan habitat has been ripped apart for these plantations. Palm oil is found in almost everything these days—a lot of our food is full of it as well as bath and body products. If the average American opened their cupboards I would guess the majority of the products they have contain palm oil. Watch this great episode of NBC’s Rock Center that discusses the issue in depth.

What can we do? It’s pretty hard to avoid palm oil, but read the labels and choose products that don’t have palm oil over others that do. As the Rock Center article and video mention, the one section of forest known as Tripa has had one company’s permit revoked after an investigation began about the illegal slash and burn agriculture. However, there are still other companies operating in Tripa. Sign this petition to put pressure on the Indonesian government to Save Tripa and the orangutans that live there!

And, since we all really love our vegan butter (which usually contains palm oil), Diana and JB looked up some alternate butter recipes so we could start reducing the amount of palm oil we buy. After doing a small taste test, this is the one that staff decided we liked the best, however we used guar gum instead of xantham powder, and added extra salt.

photo courtesy of The Orangutan Project’s Facebook page

The Lone Ranger

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It seems like just yesterday that Young’s Hill was only weeks old and many of the chimpanzees were still finding their own comfort level with the wide open spaces. Missy and Jamie took to the hill right away, but everyone else took their time getting adjusted. In the beginning, Annie would sit in the greenhouse and anxiously bounce her feet while waiting for her best friend Missy to return from her adventures outside. After awhile, Annie would venture out with Missy (and only with Missy) but wouldn’t leave Missy’s side. I remember one day early on when Annie and Missy had walked about a third of the way up the hill and were foraging in a patch of grass near a climbing structure. After awhile Missy started to head down the hill toward the greenhouse, but Annie was so immersed in her foraging that she didn’t notice. When she finally looked up and realized she had been left behind, she hightailed it down the hill toward the building, running faster than I had ever seen her move.

But it seems all she needed was a little time, because these days we spot Annie spending a considerable amount of solo time on the hill. In fact, she looks like she belongs out there.

Foxie and Choices

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We’ve written a lot about how one of the most important characteristics of a true sanctuary is giving chimpanzees the opportunity to make their own choices (You’ll find a search box on the right hand side of the blog – just scroll down a bit. Type in “choices” and several blog posts will appear).

J.B.’s post yesterday about all of the different things that the chimpanzees were doing in the morning is an illustration of how the Cle Elum Seven chimpanzees have really embraced the freedom to make their own decisions about what to do.

Another hallmark of a true sanctuary is getting to know the chimpanzees as unique individuals and learning what they like, what they don’t like, and how to make their lives better on an individual basis. That’s really a lot of what our blog is all about, now that I think about it – we’re just inviting you to see this process.

Recently, I took a cue from Jackie and presented Foxie with the opportunity to choose among a bunch of her favorite things by bringing out the bin of trolls and other dolls and letting her indicate which ones she wanted. She seemed to really enjoy watching me pick the dolls out of the bin and set them up in front of her:

Foxie and her many dolls

 

We did this together for quite a while and she ended up choosing about 11 of the dolls (at one point attempting, unsuccessfully, to carry all of them at once).

Here’s the first doll she decided she needed to have:

foxie choosing dora

 

She started to nest with a few of her dolls and put her back up against the fencing to be groomed. One of the Dora dolls obliged, which made Foxie quite happy:

dora grooms foxie

 

Another very important mission of our sanctuary is to allow the seven chimpanzees in our care to serve as examples of the hundreds of chimpanzees who are still languishing in laboratories or in other terrible conditions. We want you to fall in love with Foxie, as we caregivers have, and to use that love to advocate for other chimpanzees in need.

Speaking of advocacy, please continue to share the petition to the NIH insisting on the release 110 chimpanzees to a true sanctuary. As I write this, we have 1,750 signatures to go before we reach our goal of 5,000.

You may have heard that an NIH spokesperson told NBC that the NIH had changed their tune and were now saying that all 110 chimpanzees would be going to Chimp Haven. This, however, was news to Chimp Haven, as you can read in their statement released yesterday. It’s now more important than ever that we keep the pressure on the NIH to permanently retire these chimpanzees from biomedical research and send them to Chimp Haven or another true sanctuary.

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.

 

 

 

“Oh no!” Laundry basket keep away

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Normally we don’t give the chimps laundry baskets, not because they are unsafe (because they aren’t) but because we need them to do all the laundry, to dry all the washed toys, and to have a spot for the day’s enrichment. So, we reserve them for human use only, and the chimps understand that. If they ever get their hands on something they “aren’t supposed to have,” they think it’s pretty funny. Especially Foxie:

 

Take Action Tuesday: Chimpanzee populations in crisis

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Up until recently, our advocacy efforts have focused on apes in entertainment and biomedical research. However as part of Eyes on Apes, we want to help advocate for the plight of free-living apes, too. (And we’ll be featuring some guest blogs from free-living researchers in the coming months, too!) I read an article the other day about chimpanzees attacking humans after they encroached on the chimpanzees’ home. Some people were fearing that the chimpanzees were seeking revenge. I don’t necessarily think that is true (though I can never know for sure since I can’t read minds) but I do think that chimpanzees do not belong in a human world. And when humans involve themselves into a chimpanzees’ world, it is a sad story all around. Chimpanzees do not belong in captivity, they belong in Africa. But what has become of their home? Humans have torn down forests to log expensive woods. We have hunted chimpanzees and sold their meat on the black market, and baby chimpanzees have become orphaned. We have slashed and burned forest to make room for farming. We have mined for coltan in the deep rainforest, causing habitat destruction and allowing access for hunters just like the logging industry. Free-living populations are decreasing from all of these issues.

And what can we do? We can be conscious consumers. Don’t buy wood that comes from Africa—in the U.S. that is mostly teak and mahogany. Recycle old cell phones and laptops and anything with an LCD screen (which contains coltan). But what else can we do? Today, you can write a letter to congress asking them to make these issues that you care about a priority.

One day, I hope there will no longer be chimpanzees in captivity. I hope I will be out of a job because that would mean there would be no need for sanctuaries. Sadly, I don’t know that will happen in our lifetimes but I do think someday, people will stop exploiting chimpanzees for a cheap laugh or invasive research. And, I hope that at that same time, there will be thriving populations in Africa where they belong, and that humans will have reduced our impact so much so that chimpanzees can simply be chimpanzees—no humans involved.