Chimp Trainer's Daughter

NIH sets up working group to consider fate of chimps in research

2012-02-28T07:27:00.000-05:00

On February 1, the National Institutes of Health took its next step in deciding what to do with chimpanzees owned or supported by federal research funds. Under the timeline they set out, they are at least 18 months away from establishing the new federal policy, but they are not approving any new research in the meantime. And the Alamogordo chimpanzees remain in limbo.

NIH set up a working group to advise NIH on how to implement the recommendations made by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in their report Chimpanzees in Biomedical and Behavioral Research: Assessing the Necessity. Specifically, the Working Group on the Use of Chimpanzees in NIH-supported Research will

· develop a plan to implement IOM’s guiding principles and criteria;

· analyze active NIH-supported chimpanzee research, advise on which studies do and don't meet the criteria, and develop a process for closing studies that don't comply; and

· advise NIH on the size and placement of active and inactive chimpanzees.

The NIH anticipates that the working group will present its final report in early 2013. After the Council considers the report and recommendations, the NIH will subsequently open a 60-day public comment period.

Who are the men and women on the working group? Sure, NIH appointed people who have used chimps in bioinvasive research, but it appears that not everyone on the working group is invested in continuing current policies. They appointed people representing a range of interests that will have to be considered in moving forward.

Working group membership

Dr. Daniel Geschwind, MD, PhD (co-chair), University of California - Los Angeles

A biomedical researcher who conducts research on chimps to identify gene networks that correlate to specific brain regions. http://geschwindlab.neurology.ucla.edu/index.php/in-the-news/16-news/45-livesciencefoxp2

Dr. K.C. Kent Lloyd, DVM, PhD (co-chair), University of California – Davis

A research physiologist with expertise in targeted mutagenesis of the laboratory mouse. http://ccm.ucdavis.edu/profiles/lloyd.html

Ms. R. Alta Charo, JD, University of Wisconsin Law School

The Warren P. Knowles Professor of Law and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she is on the faculty of the Law School and the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the medical school. http://law.wisc.edu/profiles/racharo@wisc.edu

Dr. Beatrice Hahn, MD, University of Pennsylvania - Perelman School of Medicine

Used non-invasive research with wild chimpanzees to prove the origin of AIDS. http://bhamweekly.com/birmingham/article-619-beatrice-hahn-finding-the-origin-of-aids.html

Dr. Stanley Lemon, MD, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

Co-author of hepatitis research performed in chimpanzees at Texas Biomed's Southwest National Primate Research Center (SNPRC) and funded by the National Institutes of Health. http://www.hivandhepatitis.com/hep_c/news/2011/0708_2011_c.html

Dr. Daniel J. Povinelli, PhD, University of Louisiana, New Iberia Research Center

Comparative psychologist involved in the development of the first National Chimpanzee Observatory, a network of naturalistic observatories to serve as an educational facility and behavioral research center. http://ulceet.com/site98.php

Dr. Charles Rice, PhD, Rockefeller University

Uses bioinvasive techniques on chimps for hepatitis C research. http://www.blogger.com/goog_1233280764

Dr. Stephen Ross, PhD, Lincoln Park Zoo

Assistant Director, Lester Fisher Center for the Study & Conservation of Apes, he is a behavior specialist dedicated to assessing and managing effects of captive environments on ape welfare. http://www.lpzoo.org/conservation-science/resources/staff-bios/stephen-ross-phd

Dr. Patricia Turner, MSc, DVM, DVSc, Ontario Veterinary College, University of Guelph

The president of the Association of Primate Veterinarians, she was the inaugural recipient of the Procter & Gamble/Humane Society of the United States – North American Animal Welfare Award in 2007. http://www.worldvet.org/node/5219

Send a message, not money!

2012-02-21T09:48:00.000-05:00

April 2012 will mark the beginning of the 5th year of congressional consideration of the Great Ape Protection Act ‒ without ever having a vote on any of the bills. This year, I will not be a chump. I will not donate to the campaign of any member of the House or Senate until they actually vote on the bills.

Let’s face it, many legislators find it easy to put their name on a bill without ever having to actually vote for it. S. 810 and H.R. 1513 are both sitting in their respective committees, and animal welfare advocates ‒ like you and me ‒ are supporting the legislators who are sitting on the legislation. They are not holding hearings and they are not casting their vote.

Recently, several progressive celebrities have called for action on the bills. Alec Baldwin, Woody Harrelson, Ellen DeGeneres, and James Franco have all made eloquent and forceful pleas for action. You and I need to support their eloquence with OUR action.

When you get a request for a donation, don’t send money. Send a message! No campaign contributions until there are votes on S. 810 and H.R. 1513.

And, by the way, a message to the presidential campaigns can’t hurt, either.

The anniversary of dad's suicide is a day of contradictions

2012-02-18T07:29:00.001-05:00

Tonight will mark 45 years since dad killed himself. The man who loved animals (but beat them and killed them with nary a thought), who loved his kids (but abused them and left some scars that proved deadly), who was a good chimp trainer for that era (but got fired for overreacting to a chimp who defied him), and who loved the good life (but spent the last couple years of his life unemployed and addicted to amphetamines and, finally, working in a factory) ended his life of contradictions and inner battles.

I loved him and hated him.

Today, I will do my regularly scheduled volunteer shift at the Smithsonian National Zoo in his honor. As he tried to do, in the wonderful and awful Detroit Zoo chimp shows of the mid-20^th century, I will try to help visitors understand the wonders of the great apes.

We all live our lives of contradictions. Some days are more conflicted than others. The point is to concentrate on the good and learn from – and then put aside – the bad. Today, I choose to remember the good.

Dad holds a jar of insects, with his twin sister, Audrey. His mom and his sister Irene stand behind them.

Dad is on the right, joking with his friend. Audrey and another sister, Elsie, are pictured here, with his mom on the left.

Dad enjoyed nice clothes and nice cars. Of course, he went without them, later, when he was unemployed with 5 kids and a wife to support.

Dad was hired by the Detroit Zoo in 1948, and started working with the chimpanzees almost immediately. The chimps meant the world to him, until he was fired in 1964 for throwing one against a wall.

I only have two pictures of me and dad, together. I like this one.

Chimp trainers give sadism a bad name

2012-02-15T04:56:00.001-05:00

Being the daughter of a chimp trainer in the 1950s and ‘60s gave me some special experiences. The best of course, was playing with baby chimpanzees, amd watching dad train them to ride bicycles and ponies. But I got other benefits too.

Who else had a big elephant tooth to show off? Dad brought one home from the zoo, and we put it in a place of honor in our home. (Looking back, I’m not sure why dad got the elephant’s tooth. It looked perfectly fine, no cavities, not even tartar.) Do you want beautiful, almost iridescent, peacock feathers? Just touching them, softly, brought an elegant glamour to a young girl’s dreams. How about snakeskins? Turtle shells? Dad made friends with a lot of people at the Detroit Zoo, and I reaped the rewards.

Best of all, we had THE JAR. Dad kept a huge glass container filled with an assortment of animal fetuses, animal brains, and other sundry animal body parts. The stuff swam in a pool of formaldehyde to keep the tissue from rotting. I took the jar to school for “show and tell” one day (did I have permission? I don’t remember!), and accidently dropped it on the hard floor. I don’t know what was worse… the overpowering stench of chemical, the disgusting sight of tiny animal fetuses sliding along the floor, or the heart-stopping fear of going home and telling dad that I had destroyed his valued collection of animal parts.

Walking home from school that day, fear zoomed to the top of the list. It was a feeling I experienced often. I was going to be on the receiving end of dad’s anger, and I never knew if that meant just being screamed at or actually getting hit. To tell the truth, I do not remember what dad’s reaction was that day. I’ve blocked it out. But, to this day, I remember the fear that lurked in the background of my every day as a kid, waiting for the explosion of violence that would inevitably follow mistakes like my jar demolition.

The chimpanzees who dad trained had that same fear, day in and day out, getting slapped and punched ‒ even beaten ‒ for innocent mistakes. And although respectable zoos haven’t “trained” their chimps like that for decades, men like Steve Martin do. Martin, operating as Working Wildlife, owns the chimpanzees that CareerBuilder uses in their ads. The ads are no laughing matter.

Primates ‒ human or chimp ‒ who live with fear every day carry emotional scars for the rest of their lives. My brother’s scars were etched so deep that he had to blow his own head off to stop the pain. Butch, a chimpanzee rescued from Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey circus, looks over his shoulder often, trying to banish his ghosts of abuse. Dr. Hope Ferdowsian found that chimpanzees in research are traumatized and show symptoms of PTSD, much like humans ‒ and I think she would find the same if she studied entertainment chimpanzees.

Jo Mendi was forced to carry the cane
he was beat with.

We often hear that people witnessed no abuse when chimpanzees perform. (This footage, showing Tarzan's trainer, is an exception.) Not many people saw the abuse that dad meted out to us kids, either. But, like the fear I lived with every day, the fear that chimp trainers instill in their chimpanzees is all too real. Ever since the 1930s, when a trainer made Detroit Zoo chimpanzee Jo Mendi carry the cane he was beat with, chimp trainers enjoy the challenge of subjugating a young animal. They do it with a pervasive pattern of cruel, demeaning, and aggressive behavior. Chimp trainers get their jollies by intimidating, coercing, hurting, and humiliating the chimp. It is the classic definition of sadism.

These last couple of days I hoped that CareerBuilder would respond to the thousands of people who signed my petition asking the company to not use chimpanzees in their ads anymore. I asked for their answer by Valentine’s Day. But CareerBuilder didn’t even have the courtesy to respond.

Well, guess what? We’re not giving up. We will continue to speak up against the corporatism that imbues CareerBuilder management and marketing with the arrogance to scorn animal lovers and support disgusting businesses like Steve Martin’s.

We will keep our petition on change.org alive until CareerBuilder pledges to stop using chimps in their ads. Then, maybe, Steve Martin’s business will dry up, and we can rescue his chimps… and begin to ease the fear caused by the disgusting and deliberate sadism that goes by the name “chimp trainer.”

Petition delivered. Will CareerBuilder show chimps some Valentine love?

2012-02-08T11:48:00.000-05:00

Today I emailed a copy of the signatures from our petition on change.org, to various people at CareerBuilder. The document, with over 2,700 signatures, was 99 pages long. Those 99 pages contain the fervent hopes ‒ and the growing outrage ‒ over the use of live chimpanzees in advertising.

I asked CareerBuilder to respond by February 14. Company spokespeople say they respect chimpanzees. I hope they will prove it by showing their chimp love on Valentine's Day, and declaring that they will stop using live chimpanzees in their ads.

This is the cover letter, to Matthew W. Ferguson, CEO, CareerBuilder, asking for his response by February 14.

Chimp Trainer’s Daughter

chimptrainersdaughter.blogspot.com

chimptrainersdaughter@gmail.com

Dawn Forsythe

February 8, 2012

Matthew W. Ferguson, CEO

CareerBuilder

Dear Mr. Ferguson,

Over 2,700 people came together in the course of a couple of days, to sign a petition that I organized as a private citizen, to ask CareerBuilder to stop using chimpanzees in Super Bowl ads. I have attached their signatures, so you can see the names of real people with real concerns about the action of your company. The petition says it best:

CareerBuilder: Stop using chimpanzees in Super Bowl Ads

CareerBuilder is hurting chimpanzees, both captive and wild, with their irresponsible exploitation of chimps in their marketing campaigns over the years.

Responsible companies are creating innovative marketing campaigns with new computer generated imagery technology instead of real animals, but CareerBuilder continues to exploit live chimpanzees in their outdated ads that harken back to the mindless exploitation of the last century.

In refusing to stop their use of chimpanzees, even though they know of the objections by animal welfare advocates, CareerBuilder commits tremendous harm to the "here and now" of the captive chimpanzees they've used in the past and the chimps they are using now, and the future (if it exists) of chimpanzees in the wild.

I had closed the petition, but reopened it at the request of people who wanted to add their names. You may see their comments at http://www.change.org/petitions/careerbuilder-stop-using-chimpanzees-in-super-bowl-ads.

My hope is to post a final update, by Valentine’s Day, saying that CareerBuilder has agreed to lead a new revolution in advertising, where there are no apes in ads, and where companies like CareerBuilder will innovate with digital technology — whether it is performance capture, computer generated imagery, or animatronics.

Thank you in advance for your consideration of the hopes of thousands who cared enough about chimpanzees to put their name on the line. I look forward to seeing your public statement by February 14.

Dawn Forsythe

Chimp Trainer’s Daughter

Was CareerBuilder's chimp ad worth it?

2012-02-06T20:36:00.000-05:00

So, how did CareerBuilder’s ad do? Was it worth the $3.5 million for 30 seconds? More to the point (since I couldn’t care less how CareerBuilder wastes its money), was it worth their continuing patronage of an abusive chimp training industry? Was it worth hurting chimpanzees and interfering with conservation education?

If CareerBuilder has any sense (which is questionable), they would be crying in their old, stale beer, left over from last night's advertising debacle. Their chimpanzee ad is getting panned by the critics who count.

The New York Times advertising columnist, Stuart Elliott, gave it a thumbs down. "CareerBuilder brought back its chimpanzees dressed as humans, meant to personify nitwit co-workers. But the only nitwits were the creators of the commercial, who ignored a growing belief on Madison Avenue that it is wrong to use live apes in ads," Elliot wrote in Super Bowl commercials, from charming to smarmy.

My FOXdc reports that “once again the job search website brought in chimpanzee coworkers for its ad, despite pleas to stop from animal rights activists,” as they named the ad as one of the five worst in Super Bowl Commercials: Best and Worst.

AdRant’s Brand Bowl 2012 named the CareerBuilder ad one of the five least effective. In an analysis of tweets, they found that the ad got a dreadful combination of low volume of chatter and low positive commentary.

I was trying to follow a couple of live blogs during the game, and I only saw one semi-positive comment, by a guy who said he laughed – and then apologized for it! (When your supporters apologize, you know you’re in trouble.)

So, I ask again, was it worth it to CareerBuilder? If I were sitting on the board of the Tribune Company, or Gannett (USA Today), or the one of the other owners of CareerBuilder, I’d have to seriously question the company’s leadership. Even more, if I were a client of CareerBuilder, I’d start looking – NOW – at monster.com. I sure wouldn’t want a promotional partnership with a company that is very successful at one thing: making itself a subject of ridicule on Madison Avenue and Main Street.

I obviously haven't seen all of the commentary on the ad. If you've got a review to share, leave a comment below or send me an email at chimptrainersdaughter@gmail.com. I'll post others as I find them.

Update: Even Global Animal, who gave a "paws up" to the widely opposed Skecher's ad, gave a decidedly "paws down" to CareerBuilder: "The one animal commercial that stuck a thorn in viewers sides (particularly PETA’s), was CareerBuilder’s return of the immature chimpanzees dressed as humans. Using live apes in ads has been frowned upon by Madison Avenue lately, yet CareerBuilder opted not to re-brand. PETA’s comment on the “immature chimpanzee” campaign put it best: “Yes, the chimpanzees are immature—that’s because they’re babies who should be with their mothers, not being forced to perform tricks for an ass-backwards company’s cruel and unimaginative Super Bowl ad.”

Use of chimps in Super Bowl ads is no laughing matter

2012-02-05T10:59:00.002-05:00

Watching Super Bowl ads is a lot of fun. Sometimes it is even more fun than watching the game.

Dad with the zoo chimps, circa 1950s

Unfortunately, CareerBuilder’s use of live chimpanzees for a cheap laugh is no laughing matter. In fact, the company is hurting chimpanzees, both captive and wild, with its irresponsible exploitation of chimps in marketing campaigns over the years.

We love to see cute animals doing funny things. Advertisers have known for a long time that anthropomorphic chimpanzees — chimps in human clothes and in human situations — sell. During the Great Depression, a trained zoo chimp in a business suit and eyeglasses helped persuade Detroiters to donate to the Community Fund. As the daughter of a Detroit Zoo chimp trainer in the 1950s and ’60s, I watched my dad train chimps to ride ponies and play banjos for shows enjoyed by millions.

Advertisers and Hollywood paid attention to the oohs and aahs of the crowds, and soon baby boomers became accustomed to chimps on TV, selling products and entertaining the child in all of us.

Back then, the public was innocent about the harm being done to the animals. We didn’t know that the open mouth chimpanzee “grin” we laughed with/at is most often a grimace of fear.

It’s different today. Thanks to decades of research, and by using our own increased awareness, we can no longer claim innocence.

Unfortunately, CareerBuilder is still trying to claim last century’s naivete. The animals “were not harmed during the production of the ad,” their marketing department claims. Well, of course not. That happens before the cameras start to roll.

I saw how trainers turn a traumatized baby chimpanzee into a malleable entertainer. Baby chimpanzees destined for the stage are taken from the arms of their mothers, and the trainers put them into social isolation. The youngsters are forced to rely on their human handlers rather than develop normally with their own kind. And training a smart chimp isn’t like training a dog. My father beat the zoo chimps, and that “training method” is still used by commercial trainers today, although not for more than 35 years (thank goodness) by accredited zoos.

Mowgli was a performer for the first
CareerBuilder chimp ad in 2005. He was 5 years old
when his trainer left the business and
gave his chimps to the Center for Great Apes.
CareerBuilder contributes nothing towards his care.

After the chimpanzees spend two, three, maybe five years in show biz, they become too strong to handle and are relegated to the trash heap known as retirement. No one pays for their care for the 40 or 50 years that remain in their lives. They are put into research programs or, if they are very lucky, they may be rescued by increasingly overstressed and underfunded sanctuaries. In a magnificent turn-around since my dad’s day, zoos are also rescuing entertainment chimps.

But the concern about the CareerBuilder ads goes beyond the welfare of these individual chimps. Using chimps in advertising actually hurts conservation education efforts. In a study published last summer, chimpanzee expert Steve Ross followed up on 2008 survey data showing that “the public is less likely to think that chimpanzees are endangered compared to other great apes, and that this is likely the result of media mis-portrayals in movies, television and advertisements.”

Dr. Ross’ new research found that people “seeing images in which chimpanzees are shown in typically human settings (such as an office space as shown in the CareerBuilder ads) were more likely to perceive wild populations as being stable and healthy compared to those seeing chimpanzees in other contexts.”

Wild populations are not stable, nor are they healthy. In fact, the United States has classified wild chimpanzees as an endangered species since 1996.

For many years, chimpanzee advocates have begged CareerBuilder to stop using live chimpanzees in its ads. We are trying again this year, and the company’s refusal is stunning.

CareerBuilder is not relying on chimp ads for their success as a company. Job seekers don’t think, “I need to use that chimp company to find a job!” CareerBuilder’s continuing intransigence isn’t even due to ignorance, because experts have been explaining this to the company over the years. No, it is exploiting chimpanzees for its own enjoyment, but it’s not funny. It is sad.

---

This is a reprint of an op-ed I wrote for McClatchy-Tribune News Service. It was carried by Arizona Daily Star, Bellingham Herald, Bend Bulletin, Charlotte Observer, Coastal Senior, Guelph Mercury, Lagos (Nigeria) Television, Lima News, McClatchy DC, nola.com, Sacramento Bee, Savannah Morning News, Stockton Record, Waterloo Record, Victoria Times Colonist, and ZAPlurk (South Africa).

Add your voice. Sign the change.org petition asking CareerBuilder to stop using live chimps in its SuperBowl ads.

The brutality that CareerBuilder doesn't want you to know about

2012-02-03T20:43:00.004-05:00

I don’t know if CareerBuilder is deliberately misrepresenting the situation with the chimpanzees they used in their Super Bowl ad, or if their social media manager just doesn’t understand.

On CareerBuilder's Facebook page today, somebody posted the brilliant statement from Wayne Pacelle, Humane Society president, that tore into CareerBuilder’s use of chimpanzees in advertising. As this screengrab from the FB timeline shows, the CB social media manager replied that “the Humane Society was present on set.”

Uh, no they weren’t. And you, Mr. or Ms. Social Media Manager, should know that. The organization that was “on set” was the American Humane Association, the much smaller group that gives companies the seal of approval that says “no animals were harmed during the filming…” yadda, yadda, yadda. Which is beside the point anyway when you talk about the years of training – and brutality – a chimpanzee has to endure before the filming starts.

I know the kind of training they receive. I know the terror chimps feel. My dad was a violent man, punching mom and whipping us kids and, as a chimp trainer, he was no less brutal. Ah, you say, but that was in the 1950s and 1960s, and the chimp training profession is so much more humane these days.

Wrong.

Just as CareerBuilder has not progressed beyond the slapstick ridicule of chimpanzees that was so popular during the last century, chimpanzee training reeks today like it stunk 60 years ago.

But don’t take my word for it. Read testimony delivered by Sarah Baeckler in October 2003, after she spent more than a year as a volunteer at Amazing Animal Actors, a chimpanzee training compound that provides performers for film and television. I warn you, it isn’t easy reading.

“The events I witnessed horrified me,” Sarah testified. “I am not exaggerating when I tell you that I saw sickening acts of emotional, psychological, and physical abuse every single day on the job.”

“The trainers physically abuse the chimpanzees for various reasons, but often for no reason at all. If the chimpanzees try to run away from a trainer, they are beaten. If they bite someone, they are beaten. If they don’t pay attention, they are beaten. Sometimes they are beaten without any provocation or for things that are completely out of their control.”

Sarah goes on to relate the brutality that she saw. It is so difficult to stomach the violence. I don’t know why, but my heart especially broke when she talked about Sable.

“Sable is another of the younger chimpanzees. She is very inquisitive and is always watching what you are doing, taking it all in. I was warned that she would not hesitate to bite me if she thought she could get away with it, and that I should feel free to ‘clock’ her if she did. I played with Sable fairly easily inside the cage and didn’t have any major problems with her, but when I took her out to change her diaper, I had very little control over her.”

“One day in August 2002, a female trainer who was watching me said, ‘don’t be afraid to just hit her.’ I hesitated, so the trainer demonstrated for me: she made a fist and punched Sable in the head with her right hand, just above her left eye. Sable screamed and jumped tighter into my arms, no longer squirming. The trainer had to wave her hand like this to shake off the pain – she had hit Sable that hard.”

And it gets worse.

“Because Sable has such a curious nature, she continued to test her limits, and she continued to suffer for it. Over several months between September 2002 and June 2003, I witnessed trainers punching her in the back, kicking her in the head, and throwing objects at her including a rock, a mallet, and a sawed-off broom handle.”

I’m sure that when Sable got to her job, on the set, she was a good little performer. When the American Humane Association watched, they could attest that her trainers didn’t beat her on the set. Just as they did for the chimpanzees in the CareerBuilder ad.

But AHA won't speak of the brutality the chimpanzees go through when they are not on the set. And CareerBuilder doesn't want you to know that.

Who are the real CareerBuilder clowns?

2012-02-02T05:54:00.000-05:00

On Super Bowl Sunday, CareerBuilder will air another one of its ads that use live chimpanzees, despite the continuing (and growing) outrage from chimpanzee advocates and animal lovers everywhere.

CareerBuilder spokespeople say they treat the chimpanzees “with respect” ‒ and yet they turn them into clowns for the world to laugh at.

I’d like to point out that mocking sentient beings is hardly a sign of respect. And I say this with all due respect.

Please sign our change.org petition to tell CareerBuilder to stop using chimpanzees in their Super Bowl ads.

Cartoon by Herman the Chimp (with a tiny assist from Dawn Forsythe)

Inquiring chimps want to know about CareerBuilder

2012-01-30T20:53:00.006-05:00

Look at the zany CareerBuilder execs!! They are so silly, so funny! (None were beaten in the making of this cartoon.)

What is good for the goose is good for the gander; or, what's good for the primate is good for the, er..., primate.

Sign our petition:

http://www.change.org/petitions/careerbuilder-stop-using-chimpanzees-in-super-bowl-ads

Cartoon presented by Dawn Forsythe and her friend "Herman the Chimp"

Hey kids, do you want to know who the real CareerBuilder clowns are? Check out Herman's next installment!

Add your name to the record of people protesting CareerBuilder ad

2012-01-29T09:45:00.002-05:00

On February 5, CareerBuilder plans to air another one of its annual Super Bowl ads that exploit and ridicule chimpanzees. They are hurting chimpanzees, both captive and wild, with their irresponsible use of chimps in their marketing campaigns over the years. There is a petition, supported by hundreds of people around the world, calling on CareerBuilder to stop using live chimpanzees in their ads. I hope you will go to the petition at change.org and sign it. And please share it, quickly, so we can present more than a thousand signatures to CareerBuilder before their ad runs.

The Super Bowl ads are a sad testament to corporate insentience about our sentient cousins. "No chimps were beaten during the filming of this ad," proclaims their company public relations person. No, of course not. That happens before ads are taped, and after the lights are turned off.

While CareerBuilder scorns the expert opinions of primatologists and the concerns of animal advocates everywhere, responsible companies are listening. Pfizer created an innovative ad campaign for Robitussin, using a computer generated image of an orangutan. Which company - Pfizer or CareerBuilder - is smart and forward looking, and which one is mired in the yuck-yucks of the 1950s and '60s when people thought it was funny to make apes do stupid tricks?

CareerBuilder marketers think this
image from their ad is funny.

As Alicia Koberstein told CareerBuilder, in her posting on the petition site, “your current ads are sophomoric and reflect a dark ages mentality.” Alicia is right. Although I hate to give them more play, you really have to see this ad to believe the level of ridicule and contempt they have for chimpanzees. See the Good Morning America report, Activists Protesting CareerBuilder Ads, that shows some clips from the ad.

By using live chimpanzees for advertising, CareerBuilder supports an industry that hurts the chimps from the beginning of their lives when they are forcibly taken away from their mothers, through their youthful isolation and often abusive training, to their final 40 or 50 years when they are discarded into sanctuaries without financial support. In fact, the young chimpanzees used in CareerBuilder's first commercial (yes, they've been doing this for years) are now at the Center for Great Apes, a sanctuary in Florida - with no support from CareerBuilder.

Beyond the hurt done to these specific chimps, a public who laughs at zany and unnatural antics of costumed chimps is less likely to understand that chimpanzees are an endangered species that need protection. This has been explained to CareerBuilder, to no effect, and Lincoln Park Zoo's Kevin Ball explains yet again from the LPZ website.

(And BTW, have I mentioned that I am now Anjelica Huston's biggest fan, after Anjelica wrote this letter?)

In refusing to stop their use of chimpanzees, CareerBuilder is inflicting tremendous harm on the captive chimpanzees they've used in the past and the chimps they are using now. And they are deliberately and knowingly interfering with the conservation education that must take place if we are to save the remaining chimpanzees in the wild.

Please help in efforts to stop CareerBuilder – and other companies who may be considering the use of chimps in their ads – by signing and sharing our petition at change.org/petitions/careerbuilder-stop-using-chimpanzees-in-super-bowl-ads.

Did dad’s suicide anniversary and the disgusting CareerBuilder ads both have to happen in February? I hate next month.

2012-01-27T18:50:00.002-05:00

Next month marks the 45^th year since my dad killed himself. I think it’s going to be a tough month for me, for a couple of reasons.

First, in the year since I started this blog, I’ve discovered police and autopsy records that turned my previous understanding about his death on its head. I thought I had been living with a nightmare, witnessing his suicide and feeling the guilt. That guilt lies heavier, today, knowing what I now know.

I, alone, watched my father prepare for his suicide. I watched him throw all of his papers into the fireplace, and I saw him throw his fist into the mantel clock. I saw him rip his shirt off to wrap his hand, bleeding from the broken glass. I got mom from their bedroom, and together we watched him inject himself with cyanide. Mom ran for the phone, but dad shoved her against the wall and screamed at her to let him die in peace. I sat there and did nothing. Then mom sent me out of the house. Later, she told me he drank the cyanide, crumpled to the floor and died. It only took minutes. Much later, when I was going through a very rough patch in life, blaming myself for my inaction, a psychiatrist explained that I was likely in shock. But I learned this year that it was really so much worse. Dad didn’t die right after I left the house. He suffered for at least an hour, while mom went back to her room. She came out to see him die, and then she called the police.

When I learned how long dad’s veins and guts were burning from the cyanide, from the injection and then from drinking it, I was enraged. How could mom go back to her room and do nothing? And then… it dawned on me. I was out of the house, away from his rage and his fists, and I could have called an ambulance. I was 15 years old, old enough to know to dial “0” for the operator – and for dad’s life.

Dad had tried many times to commit suicide. There were too many disappointments, too much pain, in his life. He had been violent with us, had caused so much pain. Maybe letting him die was the best thing. But, today, I don’t think that. I believe I failed him.

Failure is also the second reason that February isn’t looking good. I started this blog to write about my young life as a daughter of a Detroit Zoo chimp trainer, thinking that once people understood how chimpanzees are so much like us then we could effect a change in our treatment of them now. I wanted to help people understand how very wrong we were back in the 1930s, ‘40s, ‘50s,‘60s, and ‘70s, when hunters took traumatized baby chimpanzees from their dead mother’s arms, and then trainers subjected them to the physical and mental abuse that is intrinsic in training a chimpanzee for entertainment. I wanted people to know about the violence that I knew took place, and I wanted to explain how much damage that violence did to young lives – both human and ape. But when I started the blog, I didn’t really grasp the extent of the wrong… that our nightmares can grow even worse after life with a chimp trainer is over. My nightmare was guilt, but much worse awaited the chimpanzees…The zoos dumped them into research or breeding programs after their oh so brief show biz careers, and left them to fates that I can hardly fathom.

The zoo chimps from the 1950s,
like Jo Mendi II (pictured here), set the
standard still pursued by the tired ad
campaigns of CareerBuilder.

But it is clear to me that this year of writing has been for naught. Nothing has changed for chimpanzees. In fact, on February 5 we will be right back in the 1950s, thanks to CareerBuilder’s Super Bowl ads, showing chimpanzees in business clothes, acting like zany humans. The costumes are the same, the antics are the same, and the training methods are the same as when my dad was a trainer. Just as crowds did back then, people will yuck it up at the stupid animals, thinking they are so funny. Just as zoos did back then, the CareerBuilder chimps’ trainers will once again dump their chimps when they get too old and too hard to control. (Read what happens to CareerBuilders's chimps.) And just as zoos did back then, the trainers will find new baby chimps, and the cycle continues on and on and on and on.

Zoos are much more enlightened now and, in fact, Lincoln Park Zoo is leading the public dialogue about how antiquated and disappointing the CareerBuilder ads are. I love LPZ for it.

I’m trying to organize a petition, demanding that CareerBuilder stop using live chimpanzees in their ads. (Please sign it, and share it.) I hope we can open their executives’ eyes to the suffering they are causing, but I am not optimistic. For years, they have openly scorned the requests of animal lovers, and people like that don’t change, do they?

As I think about February, I think about dad’s last words, as he convulsed with cramps. Mom told the cops, and I read them this year in the police report. “Why is this taking so long?”

Indeed.

Transplanting a chimpanzee heart into a human

2012-01-23T09:34:00.003-05:00

On this day in 1964, Dr. James Hardy transplanted a chimpanzee heart into a human. The patient, Boyd Rush, died within two hours.

Hardy had kept two chimps in a lab, waiting for the opportunity. In announcing the transplant attempt, the hospital spokesman omitted the fact that it had been a chimpanzee's heart. The hospital was forced to admit it several days later, to quell rumors that they had taken a heart from a living human. Instead, they had taken it from a living chimpanzee.

I should point out that most of the medical world was appalled at what Hardy had done. As told in Knife to the Heart, "moral and professional indignation were [Hardy's] only rewards." However, that did not stop others, as late as 1977: Tom Starzl (3 chimpanzee livers transplanted into humans), Raffaello Cortesini (organs and numbers unknown), and Christiaan Barnard (two chimpanzee hearts into humans). Preceding them all, in 1963, was Keith Reemtsma, at the Tulane University School of Medicine, who tried on five separate occasions to transplant chimpanzee kidneys into humans.

All transplantation attempts were unsuccessful.

I don’t know where Hardy got the adult chimpanzees that he used. In 1964, North American zoos transferred at least 18 chimps into identified research programs or into unidentified private hands. We know the names of some of the chimps that were dumped by the zoos: Ricky, Albert, Sammy, Bobby, Chico (see Zoo to Lab for more info on Sammy, Bobby, and Chico), George, Vicky Jean, Marty, Gina, Chuck II, Clyde, Fritz, Kiki, and Candy.

Today, let’s remember the early chimpanzee victims, as well as the thousand chimps still in research labs.

New video - Lincoln Park Zoo experts explain why the U.S. government needs to change policies on chimpanzees

2012-01-21T13:25:00.001-05:00

It is not easy to summarize all the emotional and biological aspects of the chimpanzee, and to then bring that discussion cogently to the debate over the Great Ape Protection Act and the U.S. reconsideration of endangered species status. This video does an excellent job, in only 8 minutes, of explaining it all without the technical jargon that often clouds the public understanding.

I would just mention two slight corrections to the content of the video.

First, the narrator suggests that Congress is looking at changing the endangered species status ‒ but that change is actually under consideration by the Obama Administration’s Fish & Wildlife Service. FWS does not need congressional approval to correct its past error in not giving endangered species protection to chimps in captivity (even though they rightly give endangered species protection to chimpanzees in the wild).

Second, the narrator speaks of places that are suitable for chimpanzees (in the wild and in zoos, and NOT in the pet trade or entertainment), but forgot to mention the North American chimpanzee sanctuaries. They are rescuing hundreds of chimps, with very few accolades and even less financial support, and they should be front and center in the public's mind.

Those are minor items. Considering the big picture, this video is better than most I’ve seen in explaining why we need to respect chimpanzees for who they are, and not for what they give to humans.

Mormons excommunicated me for racial views - but I have no problems with Romney's Mormonism

2012-01-12T20:56:00.000-05:00

Mormonism should not be a disqualifier for presidential candidates. I would never vote for Mitt Romney in a million years, but only uninformed voters would vote against him because of his religion. I say this as an excommunicated Mormon who is now a solid atheist.

Tonight, I am writing about something a ~~little~~ lot different: religion and politics. I knew the attacks against either Mitt Romney or Jon Huntsman, on the basis of religion, were just a matter of time. Although I am not privy to the whispering campaigns among Republicans, I am very sorry to see that MSNBC’s The Ed Show started it on the left tonight, as Ed and his guest questioned whether Romney had some sort of residual racism.

Despite my rocky attempts to adjust to the church’s teachings, and my even rockier departure from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints ‒ the Mormons ‒ I admire the tenets of Mormon life. I found that those tenets of service to others, humanitarian aid, good citizenship, and a strong family life were strong guideposts for the private and community lives of most of the people I knew while I was living among them. A Mormon who tries to live up to those tenets has a strong plus in his or her favor, in my opinion.

I’ve briefly written about my time as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. (See After My Attempted Suicides…) I wrote about meeting the missionaries when I was 18 years old, and how one of those missionaries was by my side to help – to save my life? ‒ a couple years later, after I attempted my first drug overdose.

In the earlier posting, I was kind of flippant about why I converted, but my decision to join the church wasn’t frivolous. I prayed long and hard about it. Looking back now, I think that after a childhood with a violent and alcoholic father, and after listening to a lifetime of fighting between my parents – as they each constantly accused the other of being insane – I was primed for the lifestyle offered by the Mormons, where strong family support is a preeminent tenet of the religion. I fell in love with the idea of the family we didn’t have.

The problem I eventually found with the LDS Church in the 1970s was with one of their beliefs. Their racial belief.

After a couple of months as a new Mormon in Detroit in 1971, I got engaged to a young man who was on the two-year mission required of all young men who want to progress in the church. I moved to Salt Lake City to wait for him to finish his mission. I tried, I really tried, to fit in to the Mormon way of life. I was attending University of Utah, and I met a wonderful professor, Dr. J.D. Williams, who took me under his wing and helped me adjust to the Mormon customs.

Despite J.D.’s heroic efforts in my assimilation attempt, I was soon in a political tussle with the Mormons. It was very simple. I was appalled to discover that they did not allow blacks to hold the priesthood. That’s not priest as most people know the clergy. In the LDS Church, every “worthy” male is encouraged to enter a sort of civilian priesthood, so that he can conduct the religious rituals of his family, the community, and the church. Most of the Mormon white men walking the streets of Salt Lake City are priests, as is Mitt Romney. For 130 years, however, the Mormons didn’t consider “men of African descent” as worthy to hold the priesthood. See, there was a pre-earth war in heaven between God’s angels, with Satan on one side, and Jesus on the other. According to what church teachers told me, African-Americans were born with a dark skin to show the rest of us that they sat on the fence during that war and didn’t come to Jesus’ side. (They changed that belief in 1978, after God gave new priesthood criteria to the Church prophet. I was just five years ahead of the revelation.)

I argued with local church leaders. Surely they didn’t think that? (Um, did I really think they were going to listen to 21-year-old me, rather than take guidance from their prophet of God? Ah, it was wonderful to be young and omniscient!) They wouldn’t budge, so I asked for excommunication. That’s a major step, the worst punishment, and the leaders in my particular congregation (called a “stake”) told me there was no way they would do that. They wanted to counsel me instead. I didn’t want counseling that sanctioned discrimination, so I wrote a letter (filled with the passion of the young) to the editor of the University of Utah’s student newspaper.

January 26, 1973

Editor,

Of all the communities in this country that I have visited, I’ve never heard as much rhetoric about freedom (alias “free agency”) as I have in this valley.

I was baptized a Mormon two years ago. During that time, I have attended church activities, institute classes and other functions of the church. Also, I have come to the realization that their racist and blasphemous teachings are outrageously false. Yet despite my petitions and supplications, the church refuses to excommunicate me. I have requested a Bishop’s court (the legal procedure for excommunication) but I was told I must rape 40 men and hold up a bank before my request would be considered. And this church passes itself off as being Christian!

I hope this letter is printed so I can declare to the leaders of the LDS Church that I know this is not the church of Christ. I would warn those people investigating the church to remember that as soon as you are dunked in the water (baptized?) you are proclaiming your racist and bigoted attitudes to the world and to God.

Dawn A. Brown

Well. That sure did the trick. I soon received my summons for a Bishop’s court. Two days after my trial, I received the good news. They excommunicated me for apostasy. (Apostasy is defined by the church's General Handbook of Instructions as teaching or following incorrect doctrines or “repeatedly act[ing] in clear, open and deliberate public opposition to the church or its leaders.”) Oh, and also for fornication, a charge they tossed in at the last minute. (I confess, I was guilty on that count, too.)

I’ve had Mormon friends since my excommunication, but I don’t tell them about this. So why should I write about it now? Because, even as an excommunicated Mormon, and even as an atheist, it deeply troubles me when I hear derogatory whispers or ill-informed aspersions about Romney or Huntsman, especially when those comments are coated with toxic "questions" of racism. I totally disagree with most of their political views. I deeply suspect their economic allegiances, and especially Romney’s view of capitalism. I don’t believe in their religious beliefs. But the Mormons changed their old racial discrimination, just as many other social institutions have. I still admire the Mormon tenets that attracted me to the church in the first place: service to others, humanitarian aid, good citizenship, and a strong family life.

I will leave it to Republican voters to determine how much Romney or Huntsman live up to the values espoused by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. But the fact that they are Mormons should not be a disqualifier in anyone’s mind.

Harry's Law looks at the laws governing great apes

2012-01-12T19:19:00.001-05:00

If you doubt that the tide has turned in favor of protection and repect for chimpanzees and other great apes, check out NBC's Harry's Law... Give Kathy Bates another award!

A photo is more than a picture. It's a connection.

2012-01-07T19:39:00.003-05:00

I know this is going to seem silly to a lot of people, but I am thrilled. I just found another link to my father’s time as a chimp trainer at the Detroit Zoo. It is another link to the show chimps who were brought in from Africa, trained and used for the zoo’s chimp show, and then sold to private dealers ‒ most often to spend isolated lives in research.

I found a snapshot from 1948. That’s it, you say? You’re excited about a 3” by 3” black and white photograph? Yep. Because this is a snapshot of a chimpanzee I had not seen before. It is a snapshot of “Billie.” And it is a connection to my dad and his life.

Billie was a young chimpanzee who spent two years at the Detroit Zoo. Record keeping was very haphazard back then, so he could have been a one- or two-year-old, or younger, when the zoo bought him in September 1946 from “unknown” (which was almost always an animal trader getting his baby chimps from the wilds of Africa). It was right after the war, and the animal trade that had ground to a halt because of shipping risks during World War II was starting to gear up to previously unknown heights. So Billie arrived the year after the famous Jo Mendi II, and appears to have been Jo’s only companion chimp until Jimmy and Oscar got there in 1947.

But Billie ‒ spelled “Billy” in zoo records ‒ didn’t last long. In fact, the zoo's commemorative history book says that there were three chimpanzees on stage in 1948, and those would seem to be Jo, Jimmy and Oscar. By October 1948, Detroit Zoo sold Billy to “private,” and his records end there. Why did the zoo get rid of him so quickly?

Maybe he didn't work out. Maybe he just didn't like show business. But then why, a month before his departure, did the zoo name another chimpanzee Billy? Billy II, who also came to the zoo as a youngster, died within a year of his arrival in Detroit. And then another Billy, in 1952, died within three weeks of his arrival. Another ‒ final? ‒ Billy lasted two years, from 1959 to 1961, when the zoo dumped him to “private” right before the chimp show was about to open for the summer.

I suspect there was something special about this first Billy, because dad kept his picture, and identified it with his unique handwriting and special ink. And why would the existence of this photo suggest that Billy was special, you ask?

Because the night that dad killed himself, he destroyed all of his papers and most of the photographs from his life before he injected himself with, and then drank, cyanide.

That night, February 18, 1967, mom and dad started arguing. Yelling was totally normal for them, so I just continued watching television ‒ at first. My kid brother Arthur was in his room, in the basement, probably engrossed with the horned toads he kept as pets. My younger sister was babysitting for a family around the block. My baby sister, just three years old, was in bed. After arguing for a while, mom went into their bedroom. Dad sent my other kid brother to bed. So it was just dad and me in the front rooms.

Dad began to go through his papers, and soon he was in a rage. He built a roaring fire in the living room fireplace and consigned all his failures to the flames. I watched him throw all of his important papers, and most pictures, into the fire. He destroyed… what? Images of things he cared about? Or maybe they were symbols of events and people who he felt hadn’t treated him fairly during his 42 years. Dad destroyed his marriage certificate, school records, employment and unemployment papers, military records, photographs, and who knows what else.

But he didn’t burn his photos of the chimpanzees. They were not to be counted among his life's failures. They were, I believe, what he loved most about his life.

He left snapshots of his chimp training sessions, and a terrific one showing him in the middle of a bunch of chimpanzees. But I only have four where he identified the chimpanzees. Two are great photos of Jo Mendi II in 1950, one is of Tommy and Mary (zoo chimps who visited our home for Christmas 1953) and now this one of Billie/Billy. Those four photos are exactly double the number of photos that exist of dad and me.

So, why did dad have this photo of Billie? It must be because Billie was the first chimp he ever trained. Dad had been a boiler operator before he got the job at the zoo. He had no previous experience with chimpanzees or, indeed, with any animals. He didn't finish high school, so he brought no animal education to the job. Both Billie and dad were new to the zoo scene, although Billie was on his way out the door when dad was on his way in. Of course this chimpanzee meant something to him.

My more insistent question: why did the Detroit Zoo “chimp men” give four chimpanzees the name of Billy between 1946 and 1961? Were they special chimps? Or were they named after a special person? It's funny, but I remember dad talking fondly about a "Billie." I always thought he was talking about a lady friend, but he must have been talking about the chimp(s)!

Hollywood animal trainer speaking out on cruelty?

2012-01-06T22:22:00.001-05:00

Time Magazine has an interesting article, Why Wild Animals and Hollywood Don’t Mix. Even more interesting are comments by whistleman, who says he was an animal trainer for the movies.

Here are his comments at the Time Magazine article:

This is an interesting article but not entirely true. In fact, not many people know the truth. The reason being is the animal industry within Hollywood and most busy production areas is very quiet about what they do and how they achieve certain results. Most animal training companies know one another and work alongside each other on movie sets. There is a kind of honor amongst them ‒ that they do not talk and tell anyone what goes on behind closed doors.

How do I know this you ask? Because I was one of them. It is time the lid was lifted off of this inhumane world, and believe me that day is coming very soon.

The animal film industry all took notice when the last Planet of the Apes film was released, to see how the new technology was going to be received by the general public, and now they all know their time is running out.

I have unfortunately witnessed acts of cruelty on many occasions, and that is why I am no longer in the business. I will say that not all companies out there are like this. There are one or two that really do care about their animals and the care they give them. As for the AHA [American Humane Association], they are a bit of a joke really. They are paid by the animal companies in most cases and they are only there when the cameras are rolling. They don't witness the beatings or the abuse which happens before or after the camera stops filming. The abuse mostly happens around the back of the set or well away from the rest of the film crew. Most of the animal’s food rations are cut way back before the film day so they are very hungry the day of the filming; that way they should do as they are told. Most of the K9 stars live most of their film life in a transportation crate, the sort you buy in most pet stores. That way, they don't know any bad habits and don't get too over excited.

The transportation of these animals is an entirely different subject, but I could go on. I think it is important that the public should know that some of the most famous animals of the last few years have all suffered.

As for the theme parks like Sea World, well they have already been caught out on several occasions ‒ just ask ex dolphin trainer Richard O'Barry. He has seen both sides, just like I have.

I know a lot of animal trainers will read this article just to see if anything about them is in it. Well, let me tell you, there is a book currently undergoing editing that tells ALL. It will even put names to some people and companies involved in these atrocities. The whistle has been blown and these lazy, cruel, greedy people will be stopped.

(Original source: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2103595,00.html#ixzz1iluKXyb1)

I asked whistleman to come to this blog, so we could hear directly from him. I have no way of knowing if he is who he says he is, but if he is truly an ex-employee of an animal trainers, his whistleblowing will accomplish much good in this world.

Whistleman, if you stop by, please send me an email at chimptrainersdaughter@gmail.com. I hope you can write a guest post for this blog.

We do it for individual chimpanzees who need help

2012-01-03T20:00:00.003-05:00

I’m not a big fan of New Year’s Eve. I only remember one celebration when I was a child, in 1960. My aunt and uncle came over and we had a selection of deli meats to make sandwiches. The highlight of the evening was doing The Twist with my dad. When I got older, I tried going out a couple of times, but I had a bad run of awful blind dates or nights when I drank too much to make it to midnight. So I gave up the celebrations over the past couple of decades.

Instead, I like to spend quiet time by myself to reflect on the year past. This year I doubled up on the reflections. In addition to thinking about what was going on in my life (all good), I thought about what was happening to the chimpanzees who need our help. A lot of people deserve a lot of thanks for taking care of the chimpanzees who are society’s discards. I’m not talking about “chimpanzees” as a species, although that is important – I’m talking about individuals, who each have their special needs and their unique challenges.

Clyde, a Midwestern pet rescued in
November, is on his long road
to recovery.

Rescued by the Center for Great Apes in November, Clyde is on the road to recovery. Captured in Africa as an infant over 40 years ago, Clyde has lived his entire life in a tiny indoor garage cage in the Midwest. Without sunshine or space to exercise, Clyde arrived at CFGA atrophied and extremely thin and pale. In just one month, with new space at the sanctuary where he can walk, and climb, and eat nutritious meals, Clyde is beginning to move with more ease and is putting on some weight.

Save the Chimps completed their Great Chimp Migration in December, bringing the last of 266 chimpanzees rescued from the former Coulston Research Facility to sanctuary islands built especially for them. The “migration” from New Mexico to Florida, in a rig especially outfitted to transport the chimpanzees as trauma-free as possible, began in 2006. Taz, Sarah, Bart, Bradley, Marisha, Alari, Guilder, Howard, Torian and Roady arrived safely at their new home.

At Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest, the “Cle Elum Seven” ‒ Foxie, Negra, Burrito, Annie, Jody, Missy and Jamie ‒ got a beautiful new outdoor habitat where they can explore and play and, well, be chimps. Four years ago, they were living in a dark and dirty basement at the Buckshire Corporation.

In October, Chimp Haven took in five HIV-infected chimpanzees who spent 30 years in biomedical research. Now, instead of languishing in a bankrupt facility in Texas, JoJo, Doc, Pierre, Murphy and Flick have joined 120 other chimps – most of them elderly and chronically ill – living in a spacious forest habitat in Louisiana.

We can make 2012 a year of profound change for the chimpanzees who still need our help. Yes, we can help the species as a whole, but we also have the challenge to rescue individual chimpanzees, with their distinct needs and hurts and cares. Hundreds of the chimps are caught up in corporate research projects, while entertainment chimps wear chained collars ‒ just like dangerous dogs ‒ as they are moved to their latest gig. Not to mention the "beloved" pets in basements and garages…

If we act, we can make 2012 the Year of the Chimpanzee. We need to:

get Congress to pass the Great Ape Protection Act, S. 810 and H.R. 1513
convince the Fish and Wildlife Service to end double standard of endangered species designation and list all chimps (captive and wild) as endangered
stop NIH’s flow of federal money to biomedical research projects on chimpanzees
move research chimpanzees into accredited sanctuaries, and find a funding source
shine the light on entertainers and marketers who exploit chimps for product promotions and profit
pass state laws, if necessary, to stop the sale of chimpanzees as pets.

We aren’t doing these things to save the planet. We are saving individuals like Clyde and Howard and Annie and Doc. We are doing it so that next New Year’s Eve, we can reflect on the year past and name the individuals who were given the chance to be chimps again. Or maybe, be a chimp for the first time in their life.

Help us. Help them.

Like YEAR OF THE CHIMPANZEE on Facebook.

Chimpanzee Smiles, Take Two

2011-12-28T22:53:00.002-05:00

A couple of months ago, I did my first YouTube video, Chimpanzee Smiles. I wanted to update it, expand the issue of chimpanzee exploitation in product promotion, and generally tweak it. Voila! Here is Chimpanzee Smiles, Take Two. I’m not an expert in this, as you will see. I prefer to think of my video production ability as more heart than polish.

As the issues of chimpanzee exploitation come to the public’s attention, and as we get rightfully impatient to see change in U.S. policy, more people have visited this blog. Others have joined our effort on Facebook, Year of the Chimpanzee, in the last couple of days. So I’d like to take a moment to explain why I’m doing this.

I will never ask for a dime from my readers. No donations, no contributions, no nothing. I just want you to put your heart into changing chimpanzee policies in the U.S. I’m late to the fight, I know. So many good people have spent years dedicating everything they have to stopping research, getting chimpanzees out of show business, starting sanctuaries, improving chimpanzee care, and educating people. I’m proud, now, to join their fight.

My dad was a chimp trainer at the Detroit Zoo from 1948 to 1964. Most of the photos in the beginning of this video are Detroit Zoo chimpanzees, and dad is in several of them. He was a violent man, to both the chimpanzees and to his family. He killed himself in 1968. As I try to understand the “why” of everything, I’ve come to discover how much he loved his chimps, even if he and the other trainers used brutal training methods. And that’s the enigma, isn’t it? We love chimps so much that we’re willing to subject them to all kinds of exploitation, abuse, and horror for our benefit.

The images towards the end of the video are primarily of chimpanzees from the Center for Great Apes, a wonderful sanctuary in Wauchula, Florida. The last photo is one I took this summer, of a chimpanzee at the Detroit Zoo. I'm sorry I don't know his name. His proud stature is a magnificent contrast to the "zany" costumed chimps who came before him.

It’s time to let chimpanzees be who they were meant to be, as much as possible for animals in captivity. It’s time to help chimpanzees smile.

2012 - Year of the Chimpanzee

2011-12-26T08:52:00.002-05:00

If we are ever going to get U.S. captive chimpanzees out of laboratories, basements, and filming studios ‒ and give them sanctuary, with the respect and care they deserve ‒ the year 2012 will be pivotal. In fact, I believe that 2012 will be the Year of the Chimpanzee. So I’ve started a new Facebook page, facebook.com/yearofthechimp, to bring together news of all the organizations, events, and people who are fighting for new U.S. policies on chimpanzees.

Consider…

2012 is the year to stop
chimp research

The National Institutes of Health is on the brink of stopping the flow of federal dollars for unnecessary chimpanzee research, although we still have fights ahead on what exactly is “unnecessary.” (I believe that all invasive research is unnecessary and wasteful, not to mention cruel.)

The Fish and Wildlife Service has asked for comments on whether to consider designating ALL chimpanzees, captive and free, as endangered. If history is any indication, the designation process will be long and hard. The research industry will bring everything into this fight.

April 2012 will mark the five-year anniversary of Congressional consideration of the Great Ape Protection Act ‒ without ever having a vote on any of the bills. This year, I will not be a chump. I will not donate to the campaign of any member of the House or Senate until they co-sponsor AND VOTE on the bills.

These policy considerations are underway just as the public is experiencing the Year of the Chimpanzee in popular entertainment.

Consider…

Project Nim, a wonderful film about a chimpanzee who was the subject of language research in the 1970s, is on everyone’s short list for a Best Documentary nomination in the Academy Awards.

Andy Serkis, the world’s leading performance capture artist, brilliantly portrayed the leading revolutionary chimpanzee in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and should be nominated for an Oscar if there is any justice in this world.

For Earth Day 2012, Disney is releasing Chimpanzee, a true story about a family of wild chimps in Africa.

2011 was a great year for books, and will be hard to top in 2012. Unsaid, a touching novel written by Neil Abramson, says so much about the agony of chimpanzees (and their caregivers) in research. Andrew Westoll’s book, The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary, was a heart-wrenching true story about the rescue and rehabilitation of chimpanzees from the infamous research programs at LEMSIP.

And, on the cutting edge, Lincoln Park Zoo and Project ChimpCARE released a free iPad book for children, Chimps Should be Chimps.

With Disney, Andy Serkis, Nim, FWS, NIH, and Congress all in the news in 2012, and armed with the fantastic books from 2011, we have an historic opportunity for public education. Let's make it count for something!

2012 will be the Year of the Chimpanzee, I have no doubt. Start the year with us on Facebook.

Facebook.com/yearofthechimp

Do Bill Maher and Jon Stewart get free passes to exploit the use of chimps in advertising?

2011-12-17T09:16:00.006-05:00

Maybe guys like Bill and Jon simply don’t know that using chimps in gratuitous efforts to promote their products actually hurts conservation education efforts. Maybe they don’t know how hard ‒ and how passionately ‒ animal welfare advocates are working to get marketers and filmmakers to stop exploiting chimps for crass commercialism. Or maybe they just don’t care.

Maybe Jon and Bill think that just because they didn’t personally interact with the apes, using the images of chimps is okay. It’s not.

According to a study conducted by Steve Ross, images putting chimps into human settings is not okay. Steve followed up on 2008 survey data showing that “the public is less likely to think that chimpanzees are endangered compared to other great apes, and that this is likely the result of media misportrayals in movies, television and advertisements.” Steve’s new research found that people “seeing images in which chimpanzees are shown in typically human settings (such as an office space) were more likely to perceive wild populations as being stable and healthy compared to those seeing chimpanzees in other contexts.”

In other words, ads like those used by Maher and Stewart hurt our ability to convince the public that chimps are endangered and need our protection.

Bill Maher recently resurrected his old ad showing three chimps wearing Santa hats and religious necklaces, to promote his movie about religion. Yeah, we get the joke, Bill. But I hear you are a board member of PETA (although PETA is less than transparent about their board members!) and, if you are, you have no excuse for not taking the PETA Great Ape Humane Pledge. Didn't anyone explain this to you when you first came out with this ad? The pledge, taken by responsible advertising and marketing firms, is very simple. It says that they will not use live great apes for advertising, entertainment, or any other purpose.

Jon Stewart, your use of a chimp in an office setting is even more enduring than Maher’s ad. For the cover of your book, Earth (The Book), you chose an image of yourself and Ricky, a circus chimp, sitting at a desk. Of course, by the time chimpanzee advocates saw the book, it was too late to do anything about it, at least for the edition that had already been printed. So hundreds of people asked you to at least have a guest who could talk about the problem of using chimps as promotional gimmicks. As far as I know, no one was asked to appear on the Daily Show.

I’ve heard from a friend who questions my objections. “I regard eliminating the exploitation of chimpanzees as a real uphill battle. I wholeheartedly support you as a courageous defender of these primates,” he writes. However, he goes on, “I fear that you may be dismissed by those whom you would like to influence if you insist that even representations of chimps in human settings never be used commercially.”

I appreciate the concern, and understand his perspective. But all of these images, coming at people for years and years, are a large part of the reason this is such an uphill fight! We’ve accepted the use of zany chimps for our entertainment, and thus we perpetuate the practices that bring these animals into our lives. The chimps in these images are trained by owners who use the same subjugation and social isolation techniques ‒ not to mention beatings and other physical abuse ‒ used by my dad and other trainers over the decades. Even if Maher and Stewart’s graphic designers used digital techniques to add the religious necklaces or put the chimps at Jon’s desk, trainers got hard cash for the use of their chimps. Directly or indirectly, by using these images, Maher and Stewart are supporting the ape exploitation industry. Just as importantly, they are setting a horrible example for all entertainers.

I love Maher and Stewart, and watch their shows whenever I can. I thought Maher’s movie, Religulous, was great. I have to admit, I found Stewart’s book less than intriguing and I wouldn’t recommend it. But regardless of whether we like these guys, or even whether we like their products, we need to let them know that their use of chimpanzees for product promotion is wrong. We expect better from them.

Bill, take down your Facebook promotion using the chimps, and take the image out of your profile album.

Jon, we’re still waiting for a guest appearance by someone (Steve Ross?) who can speak intelligently about the misportrayals of apes in advertising.

Fellow animal welfare advocates, if you want to let these men know that you disapprove of their use of chimps for product promotion, I suggest going to their Facebook pages and letting them know.

Hmm, I wonder what would be a good hashtag on Twitter… #noapesinads? #keepchimpsinthewildandoutofyourmarketingcampaign? What do you think?

Today U.S. lab chimps get a life sentence, while freed chimps experience grass

2011-12-15T14:47:00.010-05:00

December 15, 2011, is a momentous day for chimpanzees subjected to traumatic research.

At 8 am, caregivers at Save the Chimps sanctuary in Florida were making final preparations for introducing ten recently rescued lab chimpanzees to grass. After ten years of moving nearly 300 chimpanzees from a biomedical lab in New Mexico to a beautiful sanctuary home in Florida, Save the Chimps gave the last group of ten former lab chimps a gift that is an intrinsic right of chimpanzee-hood: the ability to walk out into the sunshine for a final release to an island that is all theirs.

At the same time, bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., were making final preparations for introducing the public to the next sorry chapter in federally supported research on nearly a thousand chimpanzees in steel cages. After 60 years of federally funded traumatic research on thousands and thousands of chimps (see Kathleen Conlee’s excellent history on chimpanzee research), the Committee on the Use of Chimpanzees in Biomedical and Behavioral Research gave the 937 federally owned or supported chimpanzees a life sentence in the research program. Little hope of parole, with nothing but a federally funded necropsy at the end of their lives.

Committee members Warner Greene, Jeffrey Kahn, and Sharon Terry brief the public on the report "Chimpanzees in Biomedical and Behavioral Research: Assessing the Necessity"

To be sure, the Committee's recommendations made some nice sounding statements. The National Institutes of Health should limit the use of chimpanzees to studies that meet certain criteria. (See Barbara King’s NPR blog for a discussion on those criteria.) But listen closely to what the committee members only hinted at during the briefing. All the current facilities are fine. They could not cite research that did not meet the criteria. The feds have to keep chimps for the future, for some unseen and unexpected potential need. NOTHING CHANGES for the chimps in the research programs. (Oh, okay, NIH concedes a temporary moratorium, while the furor dies down.)

Many animal welfare advocacy groups, who have spent five years promoting a bill - the Great Ape Protection Act - that has never been put up for a vote, and doesn’t appear to be on the congressional agenda in the future, will present this report as a positive step forward. They have to do that to keep their supporters hopeful and involved. But I don’t see it that way. Surprising enough, I agree with one of the leaders of the pro-research industry. As James Gorman, NY Times, reports:

But Dr. Thomas Rowell, director of the New Iberia Research Center in New Iberia, La. — which houses 471 chimpanzees, more than any other center in the country — also said he was “quite pleased” with the report. He said, “It just confirms what we’ve been saying all along in regard to the chimpanzee model for advancing public health research.”

Save the Chimps founder Carole Noon had a dream of a new life for the chimpanzees who were living their nightmares in solitary confinement at the Coulston Foundation compound. Her dream is now reality.

I desperately hope I'm wrong, but it appears to me that the 937 chimpanzees owned or supported by the federal government have only a tiny chance for daydreams. Their nightmares are their reality. Perhaps forever.

P.S. As I listened to the committee briefing, I was especially intrigued by one of their "general conclusions." The report states that: "application of the committee's criteria would provide a framework to assess scientific necessity to guide the future use of chimpanzees in biomedical, comparative genomics, and behavioral research." The future use. So I asked a question about it. This is a transcript of the exchange:

Dawn – “I’d like to have some clarity, please, on what you consider future research. As you know, while you were considering this, the NIH in September approved a $19 million grant to put the Alamogordo chimps back into Southwestern’s program. As I understand, $471 thousand was supposed to cover FY11, and the additional funds are for the next four years, including a public relations campaign, education campaign, and advertisements for the use of chimps for research. Would you consider that $19 million grant future research or current research not under the purview of the recommendations?”

Jeffrey Kahn – “The nice thing for us is that we don’t need to answer that question the way that you asked it. We have crafted recommendations that can be applied to ongoing research as well as any future research that may be proposed. So we would encourage the NIH, when they make their announcement about the recommendations and what they choose to implement, to apply the criteria to the question that you asked. It was outside of our purview to answer the question about whether any particular project would be (unintelligible).”

Dawn – “Oh, I just thought that since you did do case studies about particular projects that you might look at the project that was the impetus for the entire exercise.”

Jeffrey Kahn – “We looked at areas of research but we did not look at any particular project. Thanks for your question.”

- End of exchange -

Please note, the committee’s PowerPoint slides reported on nine case studies: on Monocolonal Antibodies, development of mAbs; Monocolonal Antibodies, safety testing of mAbs; Therepeutic HCV Vaccine; Prophylactic HCV Vaccine; Comparative Genomics (FOXP2); Joint Attention Cognition; Respiratory Syncytial Virus; HCV Antiviral Drugs; and Altruism.

After the briefing, the NIH director evidently told the New York Times that, for now, the Alamogordo chimpanzees will remain where they are.

UPDATE, 12/21/2011: Am I being too cynical about this? Should I trust NIH more than I do? I like the Jane Goodall Institute's approach, and I hope they are right. They are certainly right in calling for transparency.

Feds pay for chimp research industry’s PR campaign

2011-12-07T20:18:00.005-05:00

How much longer will the National Institutes of Health get away with it? Will Congress, or the White House, ever rein in this out-of-control agency?

The latest outrage can be seen in a funding proposal from Texas Biomedical Research Institute, aka Southwest National Primate Research Center, approved by the NIH. (See this editorial, NIH Intent on Cruel, Worthless Chimp Tests, by the Albuquerque Journal.) Not only did NIH agree to pay SNPRC $19 million to bring old and tired chimpanzees back into research, despite telling the public that they would not do that until they considered recommendations (not yet issued) from an advisory committee, but they are also paying for the chimp research industry’s public relations campaign!

Text from Southwestern's grant application lays out a PR program funded by taxpayers' dollars. NIH approved the proposal.

As Marc Bekoff points out in a great blog post, Chimps in Research: Lies, lies, and more lies, deception at NIH is a regular occurrence. But as government budgets are being slashed, and worthwhile federal programs are being eliminated, it never occurred to me that NIH could be this cavalier with taxpayer funds.

How long will it go on? Misleading the public - lying - is unacceptable. Using scarce federal dollars for useless research, and destroying the final years of old chimpanzees in the process, is repulsive. Paying a bioinvasive research facility to conduct a PR campaign ‒ to try to slow the public’s growing disapproval of chimpanzee research ‒ is an outrageous abuse of NIH’s authority.

Since the Obama Administration is not reining in their agency, congressional leaders need to step in and stop:

· NIH nonfeasance, particularly in the case of illegal breeding of federal chimps at New Iberia

· NIH misfeasance, particularly in the case of using taxpayer money for the chimpanzee research industry’s PR campaign

· NIH malfeasance, particularly in the case of misleading the public on their intentions to re-commit old chimpanzees to traumatic research

Anyone who respects science, and who thinks that the federal government’s scientific agencies should at least be held to a minimum standard of conduct, should consider these steps:

First, Congressional appropriators need to insert language into the omnibus appropriations bill to withhold funds that are supposed to go to the Texas Biomedical Research Institute in FY2012.

Second, Representative Darrell Issa needs to use his Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to investigate the rampant public contempt demonstrated by managers of the NIH chimpanzee research program.

Yes, legislators need to co-sponsor the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act (HR 1513 and SB 810), but that’s an easy face-saver. How many years are we going to wait for a hearing on this bill?

Yes, the Fish and Wildlife Service needs to fix the double standard of protection for chimpanzees, but do we really think NIH will respect an endangered species designation for captive chimpanzees?

The real threat to the health and wellbeing of chimpanzees is the National Institutes of Health, and its cozy relationship with the chimpanzee research centers. The relationship is cozy because of the research industry’s many decades of sucking at the federal teat.

But don’t worry; we’ll soon get ads telling children that cutting up chimpanzees is just lovely. Thanks to your taxpayer dollars.

Feds to send old chimps back into research, despite public disapproval?

2011-12-03T11:06:00.015-05:00

The new DVD for the movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes is coming out at an opportune moment. Caesar, I feel your anger and I know, now, why the apes followed your revolution. Humans, and most especially the scientists and caregivers charged with your welfare, betrayed you.

We may be witnessing that betrayal, now, in real life, by the scientists at the National Institutes of Health and the Texas Biomedical Research Institute.

As documented by Brandon Keim in his article in Wired (NIH Accused of Dishonesty over Chimp Research Plans), NIH approved a grant to Texas Biomedical that would fund the re-introduction of tired, old, retired chimpanzees to active research. They did this even while they were assuring a gullible public (like me) that they would seriously listen to days of testimony, read reams of comments, and consider the recommendations of a special panel set up by the Institute of Medicine. (A panel, by the way, that was explicitedly directed to ignore the matter of ethics -- reflecting a continual failing at NIH, perhaps?)

This photo by Borderzine shows Juan, one of the chimps going back into research, hiding from people at his current Alamogordo facility.

The IOM panel is due to issue its recommendations this month, but NIH approved Texas Biomedical's $19 million proposal in September. Did NIH always plan to ignore the panel's recommendation? Or did they know ahead of time what the recommendations would be? Or is it another stupid blunder by this error-prone agency?

This cynical move by a tone-deaf NIH has serious implications for the chimpanzees, but also for the federal government and, most especially, for the public's growing mistrust of federal science. Thinking people know that Climategate is a fraud. Solyndra was a mistake. But this deliberate betrayal of the public confidence, if the allegations are true, is an outrage. If the facts stand, I believe the people at NIH are helping to dig the ever-deeper grave for publicly funded science.

I have asked for a meeting with my congressional representative, Rep. Chris Van Hollen, who was an early co-sponsor of the Great Ape Protection Act. I have asked for help from Sen. Barbara Mikulski, Sen. Daniel Inouye, and Rep. George Miller, all strong advocates for federal science. Congress, and the Obama White House, need to step in to cutoff this overreach by a federal agency running amok.

If reason, ethics, and a strong scientific consensus on stopping chimpanzee research don't sway these legislators, I will send each of them a Rise of the Planet of the Apes DVD. If I can't convince them, maybe Caesar can.

UPDATE, DEC 4: Marc Bekoff wrote Chimpanzees in Research: Lies, Lies, and More Lies, in his Psychology Today blog. (You won't be surprised to discover that I added my two cents worth in the comments section.)

Background
My blog on Aug 11, 2011, public meeting of federal panel considering the use of chimps in research
My blog on Aug 12, 2011, public meeting of federal panel considering the use of chimps in research

UPDATE, DEC 11: The federal advisory committee will release their recommendations on using chimpanzees in research on December 15. They will have a public briefing from 11am to noon. Given NIH's confident preparations to transfer the federally-owned chimps to Texas, I am not optimistic about these recommendations.

My efforts to convince legislators to stop the transfer? Sen. Mikulski's scheduler told me that a staff member would meet with me to discuss the issue, but that hasn't happened. Recognizing that staffers are very busy now, I sent him my idea on how we can stop the chimp transfer for 2012. We'll see. I got a form letter email from Rep. Van Hollen, telling me he is a co-sponsor of the Great Ape Protection Act. (Great, but that wasn't what I was asking and, besides, he sent that exact email to me earlier, when I did ask him to co-sponsor the bill.) Silence from Senator Inouye but, to be fair, he is chair of the Appropriations Committee and has a couple trillion issues on his plate right now. (NOTE TO SELF: Start lobbying now on fiscal year 2013 appropriations withholdings.)

UPDATE, Dec 13: I had the opportunity to discuss the federal chimpanzee research program with Senator Mikulski's staff today. I was very impressed with staff awareness of the issues, insightful questions, and thoughtful listening. I am confident that Senator Mikulski will receive a comprehensive and objective briefing, and I'm sure they will continue to follow NIH's actions affecting the fate of the Alamogordo chimpanzees.

UPDATE, Dec 15: Following the release of the Institute of Medicine Report that Assessess the Necessity of chimpanzees in research, the New York Times is reporting: "Dr. Collins confirmed that for now, the Alamogordo chimps would stay where they are."

(Amusing note: During the Q&A session at today's public briefing, I asked the committee chairman whether the Alamogordo chimp grant was covered by the report's reference to "new or renewed grants," and the chair responded that "we don't need to answer your question in the way that you asked." Well, harumph to you, too, sir.)

Tell FWS to protect U.S. captive chimpanzees!

2011-11-29T19:51:00.006-05:00

On August 31, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that they were initiating a status review to determine whether they should reclassify all captive chimpanzees from threatened to endangered, under the Endangered Species Act. Giving captive chimpanzees the same status as their wild cousins will get them out of research laboratories and into sanctuaries.

Hundreds of people submitted comments, but I didn’t. I am not an expert on chimpanzees, after all. I am only a chimp trainer’s daughter. But I changed my mind. I have the same right as anyone to state my views on the issue. Tonight I submitted my comments: It is time for a consistent endangered species designation for chimpanzees. [Note, I have linked to an updated document that adds a clarification on the 1950s chimpanzee facility and replaces a photo on page 17.]

My father with the Detroit Zoo chimpanzees

My connections with the chimpanzees at the Detroit Zoo, from my birth in 1952 to 1964 (when the zoo fired dad for throwing a chimpanzee against the wall), were a source of awe and wonder. My father, Arthur H. Brown, Jr., killed himself in 1967, but I believe that if he were alive today he would be writing these words:

Chimpanzees, whether captive or wild, deserve our respect and protection. Their habitat – forest, exhibit, laboratory, Hollywood compound, or sanctuary – does not alter the fact that all chimpanzees are endangered.

The comments I submitted tonight are a look back at the Detroit Zoo chimpanzee program, with all of its implications. Some may ask why we need to rehash the past when deciding the way forward. I think it is important to know the context for the some of the public’s attitudes about chimpanzees, and I hope some history can help inform today’s decision makers ‒ many of whom never experienced the chimp shows of an earlier era.

Even before the FWS started their review, the National Institutes of Health asked the Institute of Medicine to conduct an “in-depth analysis to reassess the scientific need for the continued use of chimpanzees to accelerate biomedical discoveries.” We expect IOM’s analysis shortly, but, given NIH’s long record of promoting the use of primates in research, I am not optimistic that they will recommend an immediate end to research with chimpanzees.

Given the Department of Interior’s long record of protecting endangered species, however, I am very hopeful that the Fish and Wildlife Service will finally correct what was a horrid mistake in the past designation of chimpanzee status. The agency can eliminate the double standard and grant captive chimpanzees the same status and protections that we give chimpanzees in the wild.

FWS is the best hope for giving chimpanzees the respect and protection they deserve. FWS can help the country overcome its legacy of zoo chimp shows and other mistakes.

Join me, and the hundreds of others who are making their views known. Tell FWS to protect U.S. captive chimpanzees! To submit comments on FWS-R9-ES-2010-0086, go to this comment form.
***
My original post on the FWS rule is "Obama Administration asks: Should we continue double standards giving U.S. captive chimps less protection."

Here is the original document I submitted on the Fish and Wildlife Service chimpanzee status rule.

Family, friends, and fellow ape advocates are reasons to be thankful

2011-11-23T07:03:00.002-05:00

I am thankful whenever I see beauty, experience grace, observe justice, taste goodness, or hear love. But even more than all of that, I am thankful…

...that Patti Ragan's soft spoken determination and compassion led her to use her own money to build the Center for Great Apes -- a home for chimpanzees and orangutans, and an inspiration to thousands of people

…for Richard Zimmerman’s resolute determination to rescue orangutans and educate Americans with his sensational Orangutan Outreach

...that I knew the Detroit Zoo chimps, and that all U.S. zoo chimp shows are closed forever

…that Shawn Thompson wrote his blog, Intimate Ape, and gave me the motivation to tell my story as Chimp Trainer’s Daughter

…that Liliana Bachelder is the kind of loyal friend who gives her unwavering support for my decisions, helped me through divorce court, and is always available for a Johnny Depp movie

…for the reappearance in my life of old Sing Out Detroit / Up With People classmates and friends: for Jeff Peterson’s droll and insightful wit; for Jennifer Kundak’s dedication to libraries, fair trade, and Ringo; for Susie Bognaski’s gentle compassion for people and animals; for Carla Wagner Campbell’s friendship that picked up right where we left off in 1970; for Freddy Dillard’s smart and fun Sunday news; and for De O’Brien’s understanding

…that Alexis Johnson shares her unique and delightful observations of life’s inanities

…that Nancy DeGrazia LoCascio is a beautiful living reminder that a daughter can inherit the goodness embodied by a father’s life

…for Dan DeGrazia’s lifelong affinity for altruistic adventure

…for Melanie Bond’s insightful questions and inspirational dedication to great apes

…that Cheryl Kaikkonen is such a kind and loving cousin that she takes the rap for spilling the beans about Santa Claus, and that Diane O’Leary is calmly determined to maintain and strengthen family connections

...that Jen Feuerstein is absolutely correct in all of her observations about politics, chimpanzees, and life in general

...that Miriam linked early to my blog from her blog, Der Hund der Philosophin, introducing me to bloggers' etiquette even though we write in different languages

…that Laura Bonar (Animal Protection of New Mexico) and Jennifer Ball (Humane Society of the U.S.) turn their love for animals into action by advocating for those who can’t speak for themselves

…that Bobby is back in my life

…for David Kennedy’s nonjudgmental approach to life that lets him maintain friendships with both my first ex-husband and me (how amazing is that?!)

…that Tina Gilbert-Schenck inspires me every day with her strength and spirit

…that Tom Heitz uses his strong moral compass in taking care of Yerkes’ chimpanzees

...that Anne Sundermann is just about the nicest rescuer of dogs, rivers, and badly written technical reports you'll ever want to meet

...for Paul Murphy, and The Bartlett Society, for keeping zoo history alive and accessible

…for fellow ape lovers (including Diane Robertson Beatty, Colleen Tyler Reed, Fran Boland, Gary Simpson, Beth Levine, and Theresa Williams), who never fail to lift my spirits with their FB observations on (human and ape) life

…that Holly Draluck recognized her own life experiences when she looked into the eyes of an orphaned orangutan, and created Missing Orangutan Mothers (M.O.M.), observed by more zoos every year

…that Liz Ardito is the kind of friend (even though she liked Paul and I liked John) who will give me her honest opinion about everything from Summer Blonde hair color in 1964 to PTSD today

…for ape caregivers like Terri Hunnicutt, who use practical skills and expertise to transform tragedy into promise for so many apes

…for Max Block’s unbelievable knowledge about every gorilla in U.S. zoos, for the entrepreneurship and determination of young blogger Brandon Wood (Make a Chimp Smile), and for the hope for the future that they are

…that Michelle Desilets evidently has a highly tuned bullshit detector, and that she won't give up on Fiver Fridays for the Orangutan Land Trust

…that Steve Ross gives me his plain-spoken and expert perspective on any chimpanzee care issue that I ask him about, and directs ChimpCARE as an honest broker for chimp welfare

…that Judith Green understands that Caesar is home

…that Philip and Roberta Herman use their talent to produce delightful ape art to benefit sanctuaries

…for a good job working with dedicated colleagues, and for the honor of being a federal employee

…for the cats in my life who don’t let me forget that their ancestors were once worshipped as gods

…for 11 years with a terrible terrier who fills every day with excitement and unconditional love

...for the luck to be living in this time, and this place

... and that more than 10,000 visits to this blog have given me an incredible opportunity to share my memories and my opinions, for which I am and will remain forever thankful.

The horrors of keeping a chimp as a pet

2011-11-13T14:24:00.000-05:00

I just read a neat little book, No He's Not a Monkey, He's An Ape and He's My Son, by Hester Mundis. It’s the true story of Hester’s whimsical purchase of a baby chimpanzee, who lived with her and her husband in a small Manhattan apartment for almost two years in the mid-1960s. Wacky, wonderful times, huh? Uh, not exactly. Experienced ape caregivers in zoos and sanctuaries will attest to the nightmare awaiting the home of a young chimp who is discovering his powers.

Hester eventually gave Boris to the Chester Zoo, where he now reigns as their oldest chimpanzee.

This is an interesting book for anyone who thinks they might like a chimpanzee ‒ or any ape or monkey ‒ for a pet. I find that, in writing this, Hester pushed a bit too much in trying to be humorous, but that is easily overlooked in favor of her insight into the horrors of keeping a primate as a pet.

These pitiful zoo shows are why chimpanzees had to die???

2011-11-09T07:22:00.006-05:00

It finally happened. Another chimp trainer’s daughter found my blog and sent me an email last week. Her father trained chimpanzees at the Detroit Zoo starting in the mid-1960s, after my dad was fired (so I don’t think they knew each other). But she and I share similar memories about our times at the chimp show.

The Detroit Zoo chimp show often
featured chimps riding ponies.

“I recall going back stage, at probably age 5 or 6 years of age holding one (baby) chimp, in fact to this day, 40 years later, remembering his name being ‘Sparky.’ I will never forget his leathery little palms, as you mentioned,” she writes. “Dad was also in the show, interacting with the chimpanzees on ponies, going round and round this stage. He would race around the stage, in motorized go-carts, racing with the chimps. The chimps were dressed up, cowboy hat, pants, and shirt.”

That was almost exactly as I remember it, more than 50 years ago. It was wonderful, magical.

Except that it wasn’t.

I recently found carotiger’s YouTube montage of video clips from the Detroit Zoo chimp show over the years.

I watch it, and my stomach turns. Did we really think a chimp spinning head over heels, over and over and over again, was magical? The only thing magical was that the poor animal didn’t regurgitate all over himself and the others. Did we really think it was wonderful to see a baby chimpanzee scamper in panic when he fails to make the proper leap from horseback? Watching that video, and for days afterward, I am heartsick when I remember my young joy at the show.

These shows are the reason that the Detroit Zoo, and several other zoos, took baby chimpanzees from the wild?? This exploitation is the reason that chimpanzee hunters killed mother chimps, and the males chimps who were protecting them?? This is the reason why the Detroit Zoo, from 1934 to 1983, churned through almost a hundred chimpanzees, dumping them god knows where for the remaining 40 years of their lives (if they lived out their full lives) after the zoo used them for the 4 or 6 or maybe 8 years that they were malleable enough to obey chimptrainers like my dad?????

Damn it.

There is a big difference in today’s chimp entertainment, of course. Nowadays, most people see their “show chimpanzees” in television commercials. We don’t see the brutal training sessions. The wonder of video allows producers to cut out the rebellious real-life chimp behavior or fear grimaces, and only shows 30 seconds of zany “monkeys” capering in business suits and endorsing a product of a multinational corporation. (No, I won’t link to the pathetic careerbuilder.com Super Bowl ads that continue to exploit chimpanzees.)

Fortunately, though, tomorrow’s chimp entertainer has just arrived. Instead of watching chimps being forced to act like humans, we have a fantastically talented man acting like a chimp who begins to act like a human!

Andy Serkis uses CGI to become Caesar, the lab chimpanzee
who leads a revolution.

If you haven’t yet seen the 2011 movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes, or even if you have, you are in for a treat. On December 13, the movie makes its North American debut on Blu-ray, DVD, and digital download. Using computer generated imagery (CGI), actor Andy Serkis and colleagues are apes. Audio experts gathered the sound of chimpanzees from Chimp Haven, a sanctuary providing lifetime care for chimpanzees who have been retired from medical research. (Which seems almost karma-like, doesn’t it? Real retired lab chimps provide the sound for a fictional lab chimp who leads a revolt against his lab. Y) The combination of technology and talent has created such a convincing “chimp” that people ended up on my blog post How real is Rise of the Planet of the Apes? after searching the term “is the chimp in Rise of the Planet of the Apes real?”

Aside from enjoying the story ‒ how can a chimp lover not root for Caesar? ‒ I revel in the concept of CGI. Humans as chimps (with the help of computers) is so much more entertaining than chimps as humans.

Tomorrow’s CGI chimpanzee is a fantastic entertainer. And yet, we can't forget what is happening today. We still must worry about the tomorrows of the 22 U.S. chimpanzees who are subjected to yesterday’s obsolete marketing mindsets.

Chimps have helped us smile

2011-11-03T06:07:00.005-04:00

Chimps have helped us smile through the years. It's time for us to return the favor, don't you think?

(Note: I chose the song "Smile," as recorded by Il Volo, for the video.
The young Italian tenors of Il Volo are terrific.)

Why did Terry Thompson do it?

2011-10-19T19:07:00.012-04:00

This is a time to mourn the dozens of animals killed in the panic at Zanesville, Ohio, after animal farm owner Terry Thompson released all of his animals and then killed himself. The death of so many animals is beyond horrible… The staggering carnage borders on unspeakable.

I trust the animal welfare community and, indeed, all of the good citizens of Ohio, to rise to the occasion and demand reasonable laws and, until new laws are enacted, enforcement of their supremely insufficient regulations. I wish I could say that I trusted Governor John Kasich to act responsibly, but I am pessimistic. I hope he proves that my pessimism is misplaced.

My heart goes out to the law enforcement officers who had to shoot the animals.

But regular readers of my blog will know where my thoughts are directed… What was in Terry Thompson’s mind when he freed his animals before shooting himself? Was he filled with hatred for the community, and took his revenge by setting his animals free to terrorize people he knew? Or did he irrationally, bizarrely, want his animals to feel the freedom that he, as an ex-prisoner, had lost?

It is being reported that Thompson was tens of thousands of dollars in debt, which may help explain his final reason for suicide. But that doesn't even begin to explain why he released his animals. And if I’ve learned anything this year, searching for the reasons for the suicides in my family, it’s that there is usually more than meets the eye.

I always thought that dad killed himself because he was a little crazy but, over the past couple of months, I’ve discovered a more complicated man. I thought my brother shot himself because he saw his life going into a dead-end situation like dad’s, but I’ve discovered a much more troubled life. I didn’t know the reason for a young cousin’s suicide with a gun, and I was shocked to find out that two of my great grandparents killed themselves. It is so hard to understand the wasted lives, the painful results of suicide.

Will this suicide, this man, this awful situation, help us understand the mindsets of people who would collect dangerous animals as if they were toys? Or will we shake our heads and walk away, confused, with no answers to another inexplicable - and particularly vile - suicide?

Please click here to help ban private ownership of exotic animals in Ohio. There is no reason to allow private ownership, unless you want to protect the rights of suicidal ex-cons to terrorize their neighbors.

Update 10/21/11: So many people are angry because the animals were shot instead of tranquilized, and I understand that anger. But this morning a woman with many years of experience with captive animals explained to me why they had to make the tough decision:

"Darting animals is an art, even when it's an experienced zoo vet darting a caged animal. Many people don't understand that animals don't drop in their tracks when darted, even if the drug is fully injected. It can take 20 minutes or more for the drug to take full effect. Sometimes the dart doesn't even go off. Sometimes the animal is so full of adrenaline that the drug will not take effect. Drugs are calculated based on weight - too much is fatal, not enough is useless. How do you get a good weight on an unknown animal hiding in the bushes? The sheriff deputies had no choice. What's sad is that these animals were not recognized as a public safety hazard from the day they arrived in that compound."

Update 10/22/11: I happened to be driving from Maryland to Illinois the weekend after the massacre, and Zanesville was on the way. I pulled off the road, just to silently pay my respects to the 50 animals who died because of one man's desperation. And because of inadequate laws to protect the animals who are forced to rely on sometimes unstable people.

Update 12/10/11: This article by Sue Manning at Associated Press, Economy has wildlife rescue on endangered species list, wonders whether the financial challenges facing sanctuaries may have driven Thompson over the edge.

Update 1/10/12: A Tighter Leash on Exotic Pets, by Sarah Maslin Nir at the New York Times, is a good summary of how governments and animal welfare groups are working for stronger laws to protect people and the animals. Maybe some good will come out of this tragic event, after all.

On January 18, the Zanesville Time-Recorder reported on the final police investigation report. Witnesses suggest that Thompson was distraught about his upcoming house arrest, and was overwhelmed with the care of the animals. The paper suggests that the release may have been pre-mediated.

Update 2/5/12: Ohio State Senator Troy Balderson introduced legislation to ban new ownership of exotic pets in Ohio.

Where do research and corporate greed intersect?

2011-10-15T20:56:00.005-04:00

I believe in science. I rely on good science to explain the intricacies of life and the wonders of this world and the universe beyond. But believing in science, and giving free rein to researchers, are two different things. Just because a person dons the mantle of science, it doesn’t mean that his opinion is necessarily objective. For too long, I think, the research industry that uses chimpanzees and other primates has considered itself beyond the reach of public accountability.

A couple of days ago I asked a question: should Yerkes Primate Center retire Wenka, a 57-year-old chimpanzee who has been in research her entire life? Should Yerkes send her to a sanctuary so “she may really finally have a chance to be a chimpanzee before she leaves this earth,” as Roberta Herman said in her comments to the blog.

In another incisive comment, Julie Robertson pointed out that in 2007, “Yerkes received a $10 million grant from the National Institute of Aging for a five year study comparing 400 human women, 25 chimpanzees, and other primates. Yerkes has acknowledged that chimpanzees do not get Alzheimer’s disease or MCI (mild cognitive impairment),” she says, “so why use chimpanzees in this study at all?”

“Perhaps a $10 million grant is the incentive,” Julie suggested.

Before people reject Julie’s suggestion out of hand, we need to consider the influence of money on research.

The National Primate Research Centers have more than 26,000 animals representing more than 20 species of nonhuman primates. They have almost a thousand chimpanzees. I can’t even imagine how much money is involved here, money from companies desperate for the research results that will get their product through regulatory reviews, and money from federal agencies that have a long (and erroneous) history of promoting chimpanzees for research for whatever ails you.

Last March I wrote a blog about chimps “curing the common cold and bringing human fetuses to term.” I was, and remain, enthralled by a 1967 book written by a primatologist, Vernon Reynolds. Please excuse me for repeating a quote from his book:

“There may well be as many apes in research laboratories in America, England, and Russia as there are in captivity in zoos. It is of course inevitable that this should be so. Most of the laboratory apes are chimpanzees… I list a few of the diseases in which research is being helped by apes: malaria, poliomyelitis, diphtheria, common cold, syphilis, whooping cough, heart disease, and cancer. In addition, one of the newest and potentially greatest uses of ape subjects is in the field of organ transplantation. Already chimpanzee kidneys have been used to replace a diseased human kidney, though as yet this technique is in its infancy and has not had any long-term successes. This is a rapidly expanding medical field, however, and it is reasonable prophecy that, by the end of this century, there will be many people alive only by virtue of the chimpanzee kidneys and hearts within their bodies; or people who have regained their sight by the grafting of chimpanzee corneas into their eyes. Chimpanzees may even be used to bring to term an implanted human fetus.”

Just substitute today’s diseases, and you will have the stated justification for using chimpanzees in research today.

The federal Committee on the Use of Chimpanzees in Biomedical and Behavioral Research will issue a public report by the end of the calendar year, stating their recommendations about the use of chimpanzees in research. There is stalled legislation in Congress that would stop funding of research on chimpanzees. We haven’t heard much from the primate research industry, and from the companies that pay them for the use of their animals. That silence is striking.

Corporate greed in advertising and research

2011-10-13T07:33:00.002-04:00

Scientific American has an excellent article this week, “Chimpanzees should not be used in TV or movies.” Science NOW writes that "cute TV chimps may harm their wild brethren." Reading these articles, I couldn’t help but wonder why marketers still use chimps, even when they have been told that their exploitation hurts chimpanzee welfare and conservation.

I’ve also been wondering why researchers still use chimpanzees, when they know the chimps suffer.

I think I may have discovered a link. Could it be that corporate profits and greed ‒ in the entertainment industry, the advertising industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and the research industry ‒ are more important than the lives of these animals?

I know, it’s a stupid question. After all, we have so much evidence showing the compassionate side of corporations lately.

Ex-Yerkes employees tell me about Wenka

2011-10-09T16:13:00.002-04:00

Within hours of writing today’s blog about Wenka, I heard from three people who are actively involved in chimpanzee care and who have worked at Yerkes National Primate Research Center. All three people have personal experience with Wenka, and all expressed their attachment to her, “a lovely chimpanzee.”

Their emails reinforce my original contention, that deciding what is best for Wenka ‒ keep her at Yerkes or move her to a sanctuary ‒ is not easily decided. But the weight of their combined opinions may come down to a different conclusion than I had. I’ll let you be the judge, so I want to share what they told me. (All asked to be kept anonymous, so I will refer to them as Person A, Person B, and Person C.)

Person A confirmed what I understood about the nature of research for the aging study.

“The vast majority of the ‘aging study’ that she and other chimps are on is non-invasive in nature. I am pretty confident that this is still the case for Wenka,” A explained. “In other words, she may get behavioral observations or non-invasive samples taken and, ultimately, they are very interested in scanning her brain when she passes. I just don't think anyone should get the false impression of daily liver punches or anesthesia events.” [Knocking the chimpanzee out, and taking samples of the chimp’s liver tissue, are “normal” practices for invasive research. This is not happening to Wenka.]

Distressingly, Person A disabused me of my notion about Wenka’s comfort at Yerkes. A’s understanding of conditions there, if still true, really bothers me. “You suggested she should get more nesting materials. The chimps at the main center basically get NO nesting materials... It's been that way for a long time.” No nesting materials ‒ no straw, no sheets or blankets, not even a lousy discarded t-shirt to cuddle with ‒ reminds me of the sterile conditions for the Detroit Zoo’s entertainment chimpanzees back in the 1950s and 60s. I thought we had progressed since then!

“I applaud your rational assessment of the situation,” A continues writing, unaware of how my blood is now boiling past the point of earlier rationality. “I wish more people would think like this and not simply react to what seems to be an unfair situation. There are, as you mention, practical considerations to layer upon the ethical ones.”

“I also want to point out that PETA and GARP are just two groups that have pushed for these retirements; more mainstream groups like HSUS have done so as well.”

Person A thinks, as I do, that we need to give more thought to what happens if Yerkes did decide to relinquish Wenka and other elderly chimps.

“Who pays for their transport and who pays for their lifetime care? It's easy to say that Yerkes should, but history shows that this is somewhat unlikely to happen, given that we are talking about disbursement of public funds,” according to Person A. “Also, we should consider how right it is to transport a 57-year old chimp, as that comes with its own health risks.”

Now the next email… The New England Anti-Vivisection Society posted Person B’s moving account of time spent with Wenka.

“I believe Wenka should be retired to Chimp Haven [a sanctuary in Louisiana] and housed near or with other chimps she knew,” Person B writes, explaining “all of the Yerkes' retirees are there.”

“And I believe National Institutes of Health should generously fund it,” Person B writes.

“I do not believe in the necessity of this aging project she and others like her have been involved with,” Person B says. “How is it okay to perpetuate violence and suffering in the world, no matter the species? But here we have a species sacrificing another endangered species to continue to perpetuate their own myth that they can somehow eradicate their own suffering and death. Instead we make more misery.”

Person C, on the other hand, is more willing to cut Yerkes some slack.

“Think about it this way: Wenka is 57 years old and lived a hell of a life and she’s still kicking, so they have to be doing something right.”

Person C thinks that a lot has changed at Yerkes over the past couple of years, and that things aren’t as bad as they once were. Still, Person C sees problems. “In my opinion, for the most part they do what they can, but they suffer from the same problems that zoos do. Limited space and money…”

So, what’s the verdict from these people who have known Wenka, and who know about chimpanzee care?

Person A: “I, too, am not firmly in one camp or the other on this, but I simply wish a better end of life for Wenka. She doesn't have much longer now and I've seen some great things happen to some old chimps at places like Chimp Haven.”

Person B: “I believe Wenka would be happy at Chimp Haven if she could be near others she knew.”

Person C: “I just want the best for the chimps and, honestly, I can't tell you what that is...”

UPDATE, Dec 15 2011: J.B. Mulcahy, at Chimp Sanctuary Northwest, wrote an eye opening blog post on so-called behavioral research at Yerkes. His post, A Necessary Evil?, explains how chimps in behavioral research undergo traumatic medical procedures, something I didn't know. Now I do know this: we have to end all chimpanzee research and get those chimps under the care of people with compassion. Now.

Who is right about Wenka? PETA or Yerkes?

2011-10-09T09:06:00.002-04:00

Life is complicated. And I’m not finding that it gets any easier as I get older. (What happened to that “wiser” stuff, by the way? When does that come in?) As I edge ever closer to 60 years old, I find that gray is more prominent in my life – in my hair (45 years of hair dye is enough, thanks), and in-between the black and white answers I’ve wanted to believe in. I’ve recently been struggling with an issue that would appear to have a clear answer, but may not.

Wenka is 57-year-old chimpanzee at Emory University’s Yerkes National Primate Research Center. She was born at Yerkes and, except for a brief stint as someone’s pet, Wenka has always been at Yerkes. Although the behavioral research programs there don’t involve the nasty life-sapping procedures of bioinvasive medical research, life hasn’t been easy for her. She was used as a breeder, and all of her babies were pulled from her, which is devastating to a chimpanzee, much as it is for a human. I won’t go into all of her troubles, although they are substantial, as Project R&R (Release & Restitution for Chimpanzees in U.S. Laboratories) explains in Wenka’s Story.

Recently, a group called Georgia Animal Rights and Protection has been protesting in front of Emory’s Yerkes Center, as reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitutional’s article No Retirement in Sight for Aging Research Chimpanzee, trying to convince Yerkes to send Wenka to a sanctuary. PETA also posted a Plea to Release the Oldest Lab Chimpanzee.

I polled my friends on what they thought should happen, and every single one of them said that Yerkes should send Wenka to a sanctuary. I’m not so sure I agree. I am 1000 percent for sanctuaries, and it should be easy to say yes, get her out of that research facility, but…

I hate the thought of Wenka living behind bars. I wish all chimpanzees, all great apes, all primates, all animals could live in their natural habitats, or at least in situations that come closer to mimicking their habitats. But, given that sanctuaries are under such financial pressures (donations decrease during economic downturns), I wonder if we should start thinking less about where behavioral research chimps live and more about how they live.

I am not (yet) convinced that a sanctuary is the only option for Wenka, but I don’t think that the situation should remain unchanged. I think Yerkes needs to do three things:

Ensure that Wenka’s involvement in research is up to her, and that she enjoys it. A Yerkes spokesperson says she is still a subject in an “aging” study. It seems to me that a chimpanzee who has had all of her babies taken away and has been subject to who knows how many research projects and prodding is not a real good model for studying human aging problems, but maybe they are looking at how to care for an aging chimp who lived in a research facility her whole life. Regardless, researchers can design cognitive activities to enrich Wenka’s days, and they should.
Pamper the older chimpanzees. I understand that the chimpanzees at Yerkes have unlimited access to the outdoors, 24/7, unless the weather is bad, and that’s a good thing. But we older folks need more pampering. Chimpanzees who have given their lives to research deserve it. Give Wenka fewer biscuits (known as “monkey chow”) and more fresh produce. Give her more nesting materials. (The care technicians will just have to spend a little more time cleaning. Big deal.) Find those little ways to make her daily life better.
Break new ground. Yerkes National Primate Research Center has 96 chimpanzees. Those chimps, and the other 900 living in research facilities across the U.S., will need a lot more care as they age. Frankly, given the lack of transparency at these facilities, the public doesn’t trust them to provide the special care and attention needed by elderly chimpanzees. Work with the primate advocacy community and with sanctuary experts to set up a voluntary ‒ and transparent! ‒ system to verify that compassionate care is Yerkes’ top priority for elderly chimpanzees.

Wenka has a special place in America’s history with research chimpanzees. Her name is a play on the combination of the names of her parents, Web and Banka, who were among the first 100 chimpanzees of the first experimental breeding colony in the United States. She now lives with two other old ladies. All three chimpanzee ladies deserve our gratitude. On behalf of old broads everywhere, human and chimp, I call on Yerkes to let us know how they will repay Wenka and the others for their service.

Trusting Yerkes to improve their care for elderly chimpanzees is not a perfect solution. I admit, it’s kind of a gray response to an issue that is not strictly black or white (as I consider bioinvasive research to be). But I’m afraid it’s the best we can do until we get laws changed in this country, and end government funding for chimpanzee research. Until that day comes, our focus needs to be on making Wenka’s last years her best years.

One final thought: If Yerkes won’t consider the changes I’ve suggested, or propose their own solutions, then it appears that PETA and Georgia Animal Rights and Protection may have the right idea after all. If there's one thing I've learned in my six decades, it is not to trust institutions that don't listen to reason.

Update, 4:15 pm 10/9/11: It didn't take long for me to hear from Yerkes ex-employees. Read their responses here.

In memory of a great chimpanzee, and with love for a great lady

2011-10-06T18:58:00.004-04:00

Patti Ragan and Grub on his 20th birthday

It is always bad to hear about death of loved ones. The death of an elderly parent or geriatric animal is immeasurably sad – but it is, after all, expected sooner or later. When unexpected death comes to those at the height of their lives, it seems to me that the sorrow carves just a bit deeper. I realize that people who have never truly connected to an animal may not understand when I say this: I believe that when you lose a loved one, it doesn’t matter that the loved one doesn’t walk upright or speak in vocalized words. Love is love, loss is loss, and pain is pain.

This afternoon I learned that a wonderful chimpanzee ‒ who had been healthy and vibrant ‒ lost his life as he laid in the arms of a woman who cared for him for almost every day of his 20 years. I am so sad for Grub, a kind, sensitive, funny, and loving chimpanzee. I am even sadder for Patti Ragan, my friend who loved him.

When you read her words, you will learn a lot. You will learn about Grub and you will understand his role in inspiring the establishment of her sanctuary. You will sense the connection between two beings who are different species but who share a common spirit. Above all, I believe, you will feel the deep and abiding love of a woman who has dedicated her life to caring for great apes like Grub.

Memorial for Grub

A guest contribution from Patti Ragan

Founder and director, Center for Great Apes

Wauchula, Florida

Losing one of our great ape residents is the hardest and saddest part of our work in providing sanctuary care for them. This week, our hearts are breaking with the loss of our first chimpanzee resident at the Center for Great Apes – our precious Grub.

Grub was the most wonderful chimpanzee and had many fans and friends, both chimp and human. He passed Tuesday in my arms after a sudden illness that was advanced and terminal. He was 20 years old.

While I know that Grub is not suffering and is out of pain now, my grief comes from a sense of great loss in not having him physically in our lives anymore. But I realize that all the wonderful qualities and intelligence expressed by Grub… along with the joy and sweetness he brought to others… are always in our thoughts and memories and did not pass away with Grub.

Today, still in the blur of tears and sadness, I want to remember the happiest part of Grub’s life and the things that made Grub such a special and dear fellow.

Grub has been in my care since he was 12 weeks old when he arrived at a Miami tourist attraction in 1991 where I was already volunteering to care for infant orangutan Pongo. As I helped to take care of several infant apes there, I became more aware of issues around the retirement of hand-raised apes used in entertainment and also as pets. It was Pongo and Grub (and concern for their future) who provided the impetus to start a sanctuary for orangutans and chimpanzees coming out of these situations.

It is because of Grub that over 30 chimpanzees have had a home at our sanctuary over the past 18 years.

Grub grew up with Kenya (now 18), Noelle (17), and Toddy (39). Two years ago, former Hollywood performer Mowgli (12) joined this group and became Grub’s best male friend. Grub has lived and played with other chimpanzees here too – Brooks, Angel, Kodua, and just recently, Chipper. But Noelle and Grub had a special bond, and they spent many hours in play and grooming sessions.

Grub gives Knuckles a kind caress

His most amazing relationship was with our young handicapped chimpanzee, Knuckles, who arrived at the Center nearly 10 years ago when he was 2 years old. Knuckles had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy and had difficulty walking. Grub, Kenya, and Noelle all accepted Knuckles into their group for limited playtimes. Grub was the most gentle with him and seemed to be fully aware of his limitations and specialness. However, when Mowgli joined the group, he was not so gentle with Knuckles and would playfully try to poke him or pull Knuckles’ hair through the wire mesh when Knuckles visited Grub’s group. But Grub would keep an eye on Mowgli, and if he saw that Mowgli was getting too rambunctious with Knuckles, Grub would either gently put his hand on Mowgli’s arm to stop him… or give him a stern eye to warn Mowgli not to touch Knuckles.

Grub’s gentle nature was also evident in his love of dogs. As a youngster, Grub grew up around several dogs that lived at the tourist attraction. He giggled in games of chase with the dogs and would be ‘over the moon’ when they licked his face! As he grew in strength, we had to limit his direct contact for the safety of the dogs. But Grub still had a golden retriever friend in Wauchula (Joe) who was the happy recipient of monkey chow biscuits that Grub would toss to him… and then play “chase” as Joe ran around the outside of Grub’s habitat.

Grub was a master mask-maker

While Grub was a well-known chimpanzee artist (once featured on the NBC Today Show) and loved to paint, the most striking activity that most people will remember Grub for was his penchant for mask-making. He learned to make masks when a volunteer made one for him from a paper plate when he was only 3 years old in Miami. But he didn’t want to wear it… he wanted her to put it on. From that one time watching the volunteer tear out eyeholes, he began to experiment with paper bags, cereal boxes, wrapping paper… and when he couldn’t find paper in his habitat, he would pick up fallen leaves and make tiny masks from those. His joy seemed to be in presenting these “Grub-masks” to visitors at the Center and watching them wear them. In fact, he made a beautiful mask from a red cereal box for Jane Goodall when she visited him in 2005. I will miss those special gifts from Grubby.

In mourning the loss of Grub, we also must celebrate his life and continue to provide a home with quality care for the 43 other chimpanzees and orangutans who are here now… in large part because of Grub.

I am grateful to all the caregivers, staff, board members, and volunteers who have helped provide Grub and his chimpanzee family with a happy life at the Center for Great Apes in Wauchula.

And, I am also very thankful for all our members and supporters who help make this all possible each year for EVERY great ape at the sanctuary.

With love and in memory of our dearest Grub,

Patti

NOTE from Dawn: If you would like to make a gesture in Grub’s memory, please consider giving a donation to the Center for Great Apes. I think if we “adopt Grub,” Patti will know we do it with love -- for her, for Grub, and for all of the apes at this wonderful sanctuary.

Chimps Should be Chimps -- free iPad book teaches kids about entertainment chimps

2011-09-27T20:41:00.004-04:00

I love it when I hear good news! Rolling through the new (ugh) Facebook feed tonight, I came across some truly excellent news about ChimpCARE’s new project. Steve Ross announced that they are working on an interactive children's book that will teach parents and kids about the issues surrounding apes in entertainment. I love the project! I love the art! Above all, I love that a zoo is the moving force behind Chimps Should be Chimps, an iPad book which should be available for free download via the Apple App Store in November.

An illustration from the Chimps Should be Chimps iPad book

ChimpCARE, Lincoln Park Zoo and Manning Productions are working together to design the book. Wow.

When I think how far zoos have come…

At one point in the 1950s, the Detroit Zoo had four 30-minute chimpanzee shows daily, five shows on Sunday. One of the Detroit newspapers ran a big picture of dad (pictured on right) and another trainer with the chimps. “School Days at the Zoo ― The Chimps Go to Class So That They’ll Have New Stunts for Next Season,” the headline read. As much as those shows tickled me when I was a child, I grew up to the realization that the chimp shows -- and the trips to biomedical research facilities that inexorably followed -- were a horrid fate for captive chimpanzees.

Of course, zoos aren't the only one with captive apes. The Detroit Zoo stopped its chimp show in 1983, but we still have plenty of opportunities to snicker at chimpanzees today, compliments of greeting card companies, advertising agencies, movies, and some of the more stupid roadside “safari shows.” In this country, despite our professed care for animal welfare, we still allow chimpanzees to be bred and trained for use in entertainment, despite the proven harm done to the chimps.

But now! ChimpCARE, Lincoln Park Zoo and Manning Productions are turning the whole thing topsy-turvy. Instead of using chimps for entertainment, they are using entertainment for chimpanzees. Bravo to you all.

I can’t wait to see the book – and, as it turns out, I don’t have to wait. They’ve actually got a blog that will take us through the art process. Now that’s entertainment!

After my attempted suicides, I can confirm: life gets better

2011-09-23T18:55:00.002-04:00

Death has been on my mind this week. As we all waited on Wednesday to see if Georgia inmate Troy Davis would be executed, the country had a national dialogue of sorts about capital punishment. Three days before Davis’ execution, however, there was another death. There weren’t as many candles lit for 14-year-old Jamey Rodemeyer, a young man who killed himself last Sunday after being bullied.

Jamey’s suicide was especially poignant, because he posted a YouTube video with a message for other gay kids: “It gets better.” Except it didn’t for Jamey. It got worse. I’m not talking about LGBT issues. I’m talking about anything that would make someone feel they would be better off dead. Sometimes it doesn’t get better right away. As they say, I know whereof I speak…

In 1970, when I was 18 years old, I was living in a Detroit commune. Mom invited me home for Thanksgiving dinner. Since I am an awful cook, and hadn’t had a good meal in months, I wasn’t about to pass that up. When I got there, I found mom had also invited two young men. They were very attractive Mormon missionaries. I was impressed, but guarded at the beginning. My wariness disappeared right after the meal.

In my anti-war, peace & love commune, where we were all supposed to share chores regardless of gender, the guys failed to wash a single plate for an entire week in August, while a friend and I hitchhiked to New York to join Betty Friedan’s “Women’s Strike for Equality.” Now, in stark contrast to my hippie roommates, here were two clean-cut young men, rolling up the sleeves of their white shirts after the meal, without even being asked, and proceeding to wash the dishes! Hallelujah, sisters, I’ve found the Promised Land.

Within a couple of months, I was baptized as a Mormon and I moved to Salt Lake City. After some serious Mormon education, their talk of celestial kingdoms was causing me to reflect seriously on dad’s suicide. Ever since he injected himself with cyanide in front of me, my darkest fear was that I was the reason dad killed himself. After all, I thought, he hated me so much that one of his last actions, aside from yelling at me as I walked out the door, was to cross my name off of his life insurance policy.

But now the guilt started to take over my life, big time. In a notebook I kept then, I had copied a poem by Christina Rosetti:

God, harden me against myself,

This coward with pathetic voice

Who craves for ease, and rest and joy.

Myself, arch traitor to myself,

My hollowest friend, my deadliest foe,

My clog whatever road to go.

Now You alone can curb myself,

Can roll the strangling load from me,

Break off the yoke and set me free.

Except that God didn’t set me free. Instead, I downed a handful of pills, trying to achieve my own final freedom.

As it happened, one of the missionaries – now back in Salt Lake, returned from his mission – stopped by my apartment minutes after I took the pills. I didn’t tell him what I had just done, and instead, accepted his invitation to join his family for dinner. (Did I want to be rescued? Or did I want to hurt someone like I was hurting? But wanting someone to watch you die is vile, as I knew from experience. I prefer to think I was hoping for a rescue.) While I was at the table, I fell face first into my dinner plate.

When I next opened my eyes (that I remember), I thought I had achieved my goal and had made it to heaven. Everything was white. My physical surroundings were white, the people around me were dressed in white; surely, I was in God’s presence… But no. I was in the psychiatric ward of LDS Hospital, the hospital owned and run by the Mormons.

Thirty days of hospitalization didn’t help me much. They gave me the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and it showed I had paranoid tendencies, or some such thing. Ummm, I was in a locked mental ward, without my permission, believing that my father killed himself because he hated me. Damn right I was paranoid.

My second suicide attempt was even more pathetic. I left the Mormons (another story for another time) so there was no good reason to stay in Utah and every good reason to leave. I moved to southern California and, after drifting for a while, found a job as a switchboard operator. I had no friends, no family to talk to… but I was able to get pills. One night I swallowed all the pills I had. I lay down to die. Except I didn’t. I don’t know how long I was out, but when I came to, I thought long and hard about my life. I realized I needed to do something positive. In February 1973, I joined the U.S. Army, and it was the best decision I ever made.

Life got better, but my issues with dad’s death weren’t resolved. Even after surviving two suicide attempts, after serving in the military, after going to college and starting a great career, the pain didn’t stop. I tried for 15 years to forgive myself for being the kind of daughter that a father would hate. I would spend nights sobbing, praying that my dead father would forgive me. Finally, one night it hit me. I had it backwards. I had to forgive him, for everything he did, and for the way he left me thinking that his suicide was MY fault.

I forgave my father and, maybe not so coincidentally, I’ve since had 30 good years of life.

So what’s the moral of this story? Speaking purely from personal experience, I want young people to know that “it gets better” is a true statement, but that it may not happen easily. There may be days or months or even years of pain, but please, please, please don’t give up. Find someone to trust, to help you through the dark days. I promise that, one day, you will be able to leave the pain behind. You will even be able to forgive the person or people who hurt you. And then, when you are an old person like me, you will share your story in turn. Hopefully our stories will help someone step away from the darkness we have shared.

Hard times for people and apes

2011-09-13T18:51:00.000-04:00

Last week, I wrote a letter to the editor of the Washington Post, objecting to their use of an exploitative photo of a costumed monkey riding a racing dog. It didn’t surprise me to see a comment complaining about my objection. I was expecting someone to attack me for taking away the glorious fun of laughing at the inhumane treatment of primates ‒ but I didn’t expect this comment:

“I wonder if all these commenters are as concerned and involved with helping the human race as they are for lower primates? I'm thinking they have all got jobs and couldn't care less.”

Yes, I have a job. But the commenter was wrong about whether that means that I don’t care for humans. I’ve had my (sometimes extended) bouts of joblessness, even at one point staying in a disgusting flophouse, but I especially remember the awful time after dad lost his job at the Detroit Zoo.

In 1964, the zoo had enough of Art Brown. His drinking was getting worse, and they finally fired him after he was seen throwing a chimpanzee against the wall in fit of rage. I cannot imagine the despair he must have felt. He had so many strikes against him during his young life, but he had finally found redemption as a chimp trainer. He loved the work, and he loved the chimps. His self-inflicted failure must have been devastating. I’m so conflicted about much about dad, but still my heart aches, now, to think of his pain.

In addition to the crushing blow to his ego, dad had to deal with the practical reality. He had a wife and five children who depended on him for support. The arguments with mom grew increasingly violent. His drug use increased. He spent days (and nights) out of the house, only to come home and sleep for two or three days at a time, a sign of his growing amphetamine addiction.

After the zoo fired dad, money was tight. We soon went on welfare, and we made do with government food, which was pretty gagging stuff to a kid. One day I walked into the living room and saw mom crying. She was in front of the television set, watching President Johnson. He was announcing a new program that would provide more help for welfare families. It was August 31, 1964, and Johnson had just signed the Food Stamp Act, establishing the federal food stamp program to help poor families. I think mom was crying with a sense of relief, but maybe the relief was mixed – or overcome – with misery.

Many charitable organizations helped us through those terrible times, and I try to repay that help now with financial contributions, every year. Kids still need help.

But animals need our help as well. There are no food stamps, no school lunch programs, no Medicaid or Medicare, no government safety nets at all for chimpanzees who are in most sanctuaries. WE are their safety nets and, with this tattered economy, those safety nets – never overly strong to begin with – are growing more frayed with every drop of the stock market, with every dip in housing prices, with every passing week of high unemployment.

If ever there was a time to think about how much your donation could help a sanctuary, that time is now.

Anyone who has had a rough childhood
can identify with 37-year-old Toddy,
a survivor after my own heart.

My support goes to the Center for Great Apes. I know the people, and I’ve seen the care and respect they give their animals. It would be wonderful if the Center could install state-of-the-art technologies, or set up new living quarters for more apes, or buy iPads for each of the animals, but that’s all something to consider in the future. Right now, there are electric bills to pay, and salaries to meet, and medical supplies to purchase. We are talking real, practical, basic needs.

Patti Ragan started the Center for Great Apes with her own money, 20 years ago. The center now cares for 13 orangutans and 31 chimpanzees, for about $1.1 million a year. (With only $170,000 for administrative expenses, the 20 employees definitely work for love, because they are obviously not looking to get rich.) Like just about every other animal charity these days, the Center for Great Apes’ expenses are now higher than their revenues. Grant programs, which used to come to the aid of animal welfare organizations, are being slashed. Big donors are increasingly hard to find. According to Giving USA 2010, environment and animal organizations received only 2% of all the contributions in the U.S. They are at the bottom of the pile, and times ahead are not looking brighter.

We can turn it around, though. We can come to the aid of the people who are dedicating their lives, their personal assets, and their careers to providing shelter, food, medical care, and an abiding love and respect to animals that no one else can take care of.

I’ve found that most ape lovers had a “chimpanzee moment” or an “orangutan eon” (the red apes can teach you the secrets of life, I swear!) when you looked into those dark brown eyes and recognized the intelligence and empathy looking back at you. I sure remember my chimp moment when I was a kid, and my orangutan eon when I met Lucy at National Zoo. My mom remembered her moments, too. When she was in her last year, she didn’t have much money. But remembering the chimpanzees who brought her children so much joy, she donated a fleece blanket from JC Penney’s, so the chimpanzees at the Center for Great Apes wouldn’t get cold. I think if dad had lived, he would have tried to do everything in his power to protect the chimps.

Now, it’s my turn. It’s our turn.

Please join me. If you ever had a chimpanzee moment or an orangutan eon, please honor it by donating today to the Center for Great Apes. We can help our primate cousins even as we come to the aid of human children as well.

My chimpanzee photos inadvertently hurt the chimpanzee cause

2011-09-08T22:08:00.007-04:00

Regular readers may notice a different look for my blog, starting September 9.

I desperately want to get captive chimpanzees out of research laboratories, off of Hollywood movie lots, and out of chains and cages in people’s basements. Hundreds of thousands of people want the same things. But there’s a problem, and it’s not a problem caused by the evildoers. While we all fight to give chimpanzees, and their primate cousins, secure and healthy lives in sanctuaries, some good people may be inadvertantly standing in the way of changing policies that are now hurting chimpanzees.

Many good people who love animals enjoy seeing the antics of trained chimpanzees, orangutans, and monkeys. People aren’t trying to denigrate the creatures they adore. They just want to enjoy a moment of cuteness, or share innocent laughter, perhaps after a stressful day of fighting traffic or fending off stupid ideas at work. Consumers of primate images are not normally considered to be the enemies of primates.

It is difficult to explain why showing photos of chimpanzees or monkeys in human-oriented costumes, and performing unnatural tricks – riding horses or bicycles or (gasp!) even sitting atop racing dogs – are not good ideas.

Steve Ross, assistant director of the Lester Fisher Center for the Study & Conservation of Apes, found something startling when he and his colleagues studied people who looked at pictures of chimpanzees. If the pictures showed chimpanzees with humans, or in anthropomorphic settings (i.e., presented as human caricatures), people are much less likely to think that chimpanzees are endangered and imperiled. (They are.) When people see chimpanzees and humans pictured together, people tend to think that chimpanzees are terrific pets. (They are not.)

Steve’s study, Specific Image Characteristics Influence Attitudes about Chimpanzee Conservation and Use as Pets, provides “good scientific evidence, from a large cross-section of the country, that the welfare of chimpanzees in the wild and in captivity are put in jeopardy by inappropriate and inaccurate portrayals,” he says.

And this is where it gets dicey, even for educational and advocacy efforts...

“In many cases, these outcomes are unintentional,” Steve explains. “In fact, professional conservation organizations, as well as mainstream media, should be aware of the potentially harmful effects of how they portray wildlife to the public.”

In other words, even some of the most well known animal protection groups, who certainly have the best interests of the animals at heart, may inadvertently hurt their own cause when they show pictures of their people working closely with infant or juvenile chimpanzees. These photos have unintended results. Looking at them, many people don’t recognize chimpanzees as powerful, independent animals, but mistakenly think they are easily malleable and manageable, sort of like a feisty puppy. These misperceptions undermine the important research and conservation messages that the groups are trying so hard to convey.

The U.S. policy stars may be aligning now for more protections for chimpanzees. The National Institutes of Health is considering retiring chimpanzees from federal research programs. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering reclassifying captive chimpanzees from their present status as a threatened species to an endangered species, which is the status of chimpanzees who are not in U.S. cages. Legislation now in Congress ‒ the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act, HR 1513 ‒ would stop the use of chimpanzees in bioinvasive research. Maybe people are finally realizing that chimpanzees deserve our respect and protection. Maybe people are learning that we need to stop our current policies of exploitation.

Now, at this pivotal juncture for educating the public, we all have to pay attention to the scientific research that shows that inaccurate portrayals result in inaccurate public perceptions. Animal lovers, we have to give up our anthropomorphic images. And, yes, it means me too. So, I redesigned this blog. Except for when an old photo of a zoo chimpanzee in costume is essential to the issue I am trying to explain, I took down photos of chimpanzees during the zoo shows. Those pictures are a part of my history, and I love them. But I love chimpanzees more.

Obama Administration asks: Should we continue double standards giving U.S. captive chimps less protection than wild chimps?

2011-08-31T18:45:00.011-04:00

UPDATE 11/1/2011:

Scientists and governments have known for years that chimpanzees are endangered. In 1996, they officially put chimpanzees on the IUCN endangered species list. The U.S. government agrees, chimpanzees are endangered. Normally, when U.S. residents hear that an animal is endangered, according to the Endangered Species Act, they expect the government to actually protect that species. With chimpanzees, however, people’s expectations would be in vain. The U.S. government officially set up a double standard to protect the “rights” of research and entertainment industries (and private individuals and anyone else) to exploit U.S. captive chimpanzees.

Earlier this year, several animal welfare organizations asked the Obama Administration to end the double standard, to give endangered captive chimpanzees the same protections they give to their wild cousins. The Fish and Wildlife Service asked for public comments on the request. On October 31, the Fish and Wildlife Service closed their 90-day comment period, after more than 9600 comments were filed with the agency. On November 1, FWS re-opened the comments for an additional 90 days. FWS says it is "making the petition and the large volume of supporting documents submitted with the petition available to the public."

This should give everyone a chance to see the submissions from the members of the research and entertainment industries. Personally, I can’t wait to explore the comments. I really want to see how these industries justify their desire to keep the double standard, to continue with chimp exploitation business as usual.

Resources:
The November 1, 2011 Federal Register announcement from FWS
Comments and supporting documents for Docket No. FWS-R9-ES-2010-0086
-----

From August 31, 2011:
I usually don't print press releases verbatim, but this one is important. The U.S. government wants to hear from you about chimpanzees in captivity! For excellent background on the debate, see the AAAS Science Journal. The Humane Society has set up an easy way for you to urge the government to protect captive chimpanzees.

(P.S. Note that the American zoo group is a major supporter of this effort to reclassify captive chimpanzees as endangered. I truly believe that the "chimp men" of the old zoos would be immensely proud of today's professionals in the AZA Chimpanzee Species Survival Program. BRAVO, AZA!)

- Dawn

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Initiates Review of the Chimpanzee’s Status

August 31, 2011

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) will initiate a status review to determine whether reclassifying all captive chimpanzees from threatened to endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) is warranted.

Currently, wild chimpanzees are listed as endangered, and captive chimpanzees are listed as threatened. Captive chimpanzees within the United States are covered by a special rule allowing activities otherwise prohibited by the ESA.

Following an initial review of a petition from The Humane Society of the United States, the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums, the Jane Goodall Institute, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Pan African Sanctuary Alliance, the Fund for Animals, Humane Society International, and the New England Anti-Vivisection Society requesting all chimpanzees, whether found in the wild or in captivity, be listed as endangered, the Service will undertake a more thorough review to determine if the requested action is warranted.

The petition finding does not mean that the Service has decided it is appropriate to list all chimpanzees as endangered under the ESA. Rather, this finding is the first step in a process that triggers a more thorough review of all the biological information available. The finding will publish in the Federal Register on September 1, 2011.

To ensure this status review is comprehensive, the Service is soliciting information from all interested parties regarding the status of this species in the wild and in captivity, including threats to the species and its habitat, information on management programs for chimpanzees, and information relevant to whether any populations of this species may qualify as distinct population segments.

Written comments and information concerning this proposal can be submitted by one of the following methods:

Federal eRulemaking Portal: http://www.regulations.gov/. Follow the instructions for submitting comments to Docket No. [FWS–R9–ES–2010–0086]; or

U.S. mail or hand-delivery: Public Comments Processing, Attn: [FWS–R9–ES–2010–0086]; Division of Policy and Directives Management; U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; 4401 N. Fairfax Drive, MS 2042–PDM; Arlington, VA 22203.

Comments must be received within 60 days, on or before October 31, 2011. The Service will post all comments on http://www.regulations.gov/. This generally means the agency will post any personal information provided through the process. The Service is not able to accept email or faxes.

Following an analysis of the comments and any new information that may become available during the comment period, the Service will move forward as appropriate with the development of and publication of the status review of this species.

The ESA provides a critical safety net for fish, wildlife and plants and to date has prevented the extinction of hundreds of imperiled species, as well as promoting the recovery of many others. The Service is actively engaged with conservation partners and the public in the search for improved and innovative ways to conserve and recover imperiled species. To learn more about the Endangered Species program’s Branch of Foreign Species, visit: http://www.fws.gov/endangered/what-we-do/international-activities.html

How do you (try to) stop a suicide?

2011-08-25T18:56:00.000-04:00

Today I have to write about suicide, or, more to the point, suicide prevention. Too many people have heart-stopping reminders that even beautiful, seemingly self-assured and well-adjusted loved ones can pick a very bad way to “just stop the pain.” Many times, family and friends don’t even know the loved one is experiencing such dark and desperate anguish.

I am not a good person to give advice on what to do when you think someone is contemplating suicide or has already made an attempt. My first reaction to suicide is anger, which is completely wrong. For so many years, I was angry with my father for his suicide, although I cloaked it in a heavy guilt that grew into an unmanageable (I thought) burden. After my brother shot himself, the anger was more immediate and intense, since he knew (I thought) how his death would affect his family. This week, that anger again reared its ugly head, but now it is more a reaction to the utter helplessness I feel in not recognizing an approaching suicide attempt.

How do you stop a suicide? The last thing you (I) should do is argue with a suicidal person… and I find that so terribly difficult. But it is their feelings that need expression, not yours (mine). We need to listen, not argue. We cannot judge.

We need to be aware of risk factors. I don’t know why – genes? chemistry? culture? – but a family history of suicide is a common risk factor. So is a history of trauma or abuse. If someone in hundreds of thousands of families like mine combines these two factors with a stressful life event, red flags should start waving.

Warning signs can include withdrawal from friends and family, the desire to be left alone. It’s so easy for family to agree to that, because we don’t want to intrude or force our way into his or her life if we feel we aren’t wanted. But we should not obey a wish about that aloneness, as difficult as that is. We need to constantly offer support, even if we are pushed away. We need to try our best to surround a suicidal loved one with a net of support. Most important, if a suicide attempt may be imminent, we cannot let that person be alone.

There are often debates on health issues, but I don’t find any disagreement between mental health experts on suicide prevention…

From Helpguide.org: “Most people who commit suicide don't want to die—they just want to stop hurting.” We hear this all the time, don’t we? I didn’t try to kill myself, our loved one explains after waking up in ICU from an overdose. I just wanted to stop the pain. And we mistakenly think they won’t repeat the attempt to “stop hurting.”

Eastern Michigan University has a good list of what you should or should not do to help someone who is suicidal. Besides the guidance on how to listen and what to say, EMU offers a piece of advice that family and friends need to take more seriously: “Be sensitive to your own needs and limits. Dealing with a depressed or suicidal person can be difficult and draining; don't exhaust yourself by trying to take responsibility for the person and to solve his/her problem by yourself. Recognize your own emotional reactions and take care of yourself.”

World Suicide Prevention Day is on September 10. I don’t usually put much stock in the multitude of “days” that are observed by great causes, but maybe we can take a moment to read this short article from the Mayo Clinic.

I hope you never need to use this link to crisis centers around the world, but please bookmark it for the day that hopefully never comes. And don't be afraid to say "I love you, and I'm worried."

Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary honors Tom and challenges us

2011-08-22T18:41:00.003-04:00

Tom died on December 10, 2009. I never knew him, but he was made of the stuff that we all hope we’ll find in our genes when we face life’s challenges. This month, thanks to Andrew Westoll’s book, The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary: A True Story of Resilience and Recovery, I had the wonderful and awful opportunity to meet Tom and other “retired” research chimpanzees.

Westoll tells the story of chimpanzees from LEMSIP, one of the infamous primate research laboratories. He tells of their rescue by Gloria Grow, who gives the chimpanzees a chance for some small degree of normalcy at her Fauna Foundation sanctuary. But he does much, much more than that. He honors his readers by letting us experience deep and honest empathy for real beings.

The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary is not a fictionalized attempt to play with our emotions. It is not a tale of make-believe corporate villains and sexy primatologists. This is the real deal, and Westoll's true narrative hits multiple targets with unnerving precision. The targets? The heart, which aches for these chimpanzees and for the people who are their caregivers. The gut, which wrenches with the realization that nearly a thousand chimpanzees -- still in laboratories -- are experiencing the sickening trauma that created havoc with these lives. And the head that reels with the absolute certainty that research on chimpanzees must stop. Now.

Mr. Westoll has done all of us a favor by writing so beautifully about these chimpanzees. In the end, his sensitive yet vivid portrayal gives us more than knowledge... it gives us the moral challenge to right this dreadful wrong.

So many people are now trying to right the wrong. Giving testimony at the recent federal meetings considering the use of chimpanzees in research, Theodora Capaldo, speaking for Project Release & Restitution, tried to help committee members visualize the too real consequences of research when she described the heartbreaking results of Tom’s autopsy. (If you want to read about the devastation done to Tom’s body, see page 8 of Theodora’s written testimony.)

We need to find a way to honor Tom, permanently. Getting chimpanzees out of research and into sanctuaries would be a fitting honor.

Discovering new truths, bad and good

2011-08-20T07:15:00.003-04:00

I thought I knew what I knew. I knew what happened when dad injected himself with cyanide, and then drank it. He died almost immediately after I left him in the house. Except it didn’t happen exactly like that, and he didn’t die quickly. This summer, I finally tracked down the police report and autopsy records from dad’s suicide in 1967 and, as much as I thought I was prepared to read them, I wasn’t. I learned that he didn’t die as quickly as mom had told me back then. He didn't die immediately. He suffered for an hour or more, asking why death was taking so long. The implication of that long ago lie makes me angry beyond words.

I knew about my brother’s suicide, when he shot himself in 2000. Except I didn’t know all of it. Last week, I found the police officer who responded to the call about his death. She called me back near the end of the first day of the meeting of the Committee on the Use of Chimpanzees in Biomedical and Behavioral Research. There were only two presentations left, so I stepped outside to talk to her.

She didn’t want to send me the report because the details were too gruesome, she said. Instead, she took the time to talk to me about it and, even though she was compassionate and sensitive, her description of the sickening ugliness resulting from the high-powered rifle shot to his head tore me apart. After listening to her, I had to go home rather than return to the meeting.

I had nightmares that night. I could not get rid of the truth that had gained a new shape, a new intensity, in my mind’s eye.

The next morning, I arrived at the committee meeting dreading more descriptions about chimpanzees suffering the physical and psychological trauma of biomedical research. If there was ever a time I needed to hear something uplifting, that morning was it. As it happened, I got what I needed.

Lincoln Park Zoo's Keo in the early 1960s

I was lucky enough to run into Steve Ross, the assistant director for the Lester Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo. We were casually chatting about their chimpanzees, and he gave me a new truth. A good new truth. Steve told me about Keo, a grand old chimpanzee at Lincoln Park Zoo. Keo’s truth pretty much demolishes the old canard about chimpanzees having a rough go of it in accredited zoos today.

Keo is the oldest male chimpanzee in a U.S. zoo. Oh, the changes he’s seen in his lifetime!

Like almost all of the chimpanzees in U.S. zoos in the 1950s, Keo was born in Africa. He came to Chicago in 1959 as a year-old infant. Lincoln Park Zoo didn’t have a chimp show like the Detroit Zoo (and the St. Louis Zoo) but they still used their chimpanzees inappropriately. The zoo staged Keo “presiding” over tea parties in the children's zoo as publicity stunts for TV and newspaper photographers. They used him in a publicity stunt at a polio vaccine clinic. They dressed him up and put him behind the wheel of a car for some kind of publicity stunt that is long forgotten. It was essentially the same old crap that happened to hundreds of zoo chimpanzees in the U.S., minus the roller skating or banjo strumming -- and unfortunately continues to happen to chimpanzees in Hollywood today.

But then today’s Lincoln Park Zoo did something very cool. They kept him and took care of him through the years. The care and respect the zoo gives to Keo is phenomenal. Lincoln Park Zoo thinks of his needs, even though it means keeping him mostly out of view from the public. He lives in a roomy, airy space with its own private yard.

Keo

Even more heartwarming, though, is who belongs to Keo’s group. This 53-year-old chimpanzee is able to live with his real daughter, 46-year-old June. (Before you start counting years, just know that Keo was… ahem… “active” at a young age.) Another female in Keo’s small group is Vicky, who was also captured in Africa, near Kumasi, in Ghana – the same place where Keo was born, just five years before her. (A 2009 survey in Ghana failed to confirm the survival of chimpanzees near Kumasi. Keo and Vicky’s ancestral group has been wiped out, which means that Keo and Vicky would likely be dead now, too.) Kibali, Vicky’s daughter, completes Keo’s tight knit Lincoln Park group.

There is something comforting knowing that Keo is able to share his life with his daughter, and with Vicky and her daughter. This group enjoys the new enrichment that zoo chimpanzees experience today. Keo even knows how to work a touchscreen computer, a talent that mysteriously eludes me!

I feel like I’ve got a connection to Keo’s group. In 1989, another one of Vicky’s daughters, Akati, was transferred to the Detroit Zoo where she still lives with her son Ajua. Even better, the lovely lady is a proud new mother! Akati, now 25 years old, gave birth to a healthy baby girl on July 28. It’s just so damned nice to know that these chimpanzee families are together and thriving. So different from the old truths of the old zoos…

Discovering new truth is not always a nice experience. Some facts are difficult to hear, and even harder to absorb. I don’t know why I was so determined to find out about the suicides of my dad and brother, why I couldn’t just let it all stay buried. I do know why I want to learn the truth about zoo chimpanzees, about their histories and their nows. So many lived hard lives, and died harder. But so many, today, are living lives of dignity.

Many entertainment chimpanzees from the old Detroit Zoo ended up as subjects in biomedical research laboratories. Still today, nearly a thousand chimps are in U.S. labs. It is time that they discover a new truth for their own lives. Chimpanzees deserve better.

Day two at the federal committee meeting on using chimpanzees in research

2011-08-12T12:31:00.005-04:00

Public deliberations ended this morning. I’ve got to try very hard to keep my optimism from overtaking my more pragmatic expectations for the committee’s recommendations on chimpanzees in research. During my 30+ years of working in public affairs, for or with all levels of government, I’ve seen committee reports make totally unexpected swings, usually attributable to the voices we didn’t hear during testimony or deliberations.

With that said, however, I must admit to being a tiny bit encouraged by the presentations yesterday and today. Last night I gave a sense of my reaction yesterday. Today was even better.

Bioterrorism is often thrown up as the big fear factor to keep chimpanzees handy for testing the response to… well… whatever. Is it a legitimate reason, or a canard?

Is chimpanzee research critical to the health security of the U.S. “No,” answered Joseph Bielitzki, an expert on security research.

Is there a role for chimpanzees in biodefense research? “No,” said James Swearengen, from the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center. He’s not aware of any past use of chimpanzees, there is no current use, and he doesn’t envision the need for chimpanzees in the future.

The same question on biodefense was put to Michael Kurilla, director of biodefense research at the National Institutes of Health. Mr. Kurilla phrased his “no” in government-speak: chimpanzees do not offer any advantage over any other animal model.

The only presenter today who asserted that chimpanzees were needed (although he failed to make the case that they were “necessary,” which is a small but important difference) was Thomas Rowell, director of New Iberia Research Center, which has 360 chimpanzees, 120 of whom are considered “NIH chimps.” About 8 percent of his income is from outside use of his chimpanzees for the biomedical “chimp model.” (To view a video of conditions at New Iberia, see this report from the Humane Society.) Rowell told the committee that requests for chimpanzees were declining, and when committee members asked him if the chimpanzees were necessary for those requests, he spoke in terms of profitability for pharma and biotech companies. “I remember when their stocks split!” he declared when talking about a “promising” result from research. “Smaller companies will be handicapped,” he explained, noting that they didn’t have access to emerging alternative research tools like Big Pharma does.

In last night’s blog, I failed to mention the considerations on using chimpanzees in behavioral research. As much as I admire Frans De Waal, I must say that he did not have a compelling answer to the question of necessity in the current research paradigm. “If we didn’t have chimpanzees in behavioral research, what would be lost?” he was asked. He responded that we would lose the evolutionary framework for studying humans. Beyond that, the major justification seems to be that chimpanzee behavioral studies are useful for informing human mental health research, although Frans conceded there wasn’t a direct connection. (Regular readers of my blog might guess that I have a very personal interest in this line of research.) Judging by the reactions of the committee members, I am not sure they were convinced that that is an overwhelming justification for studying chimpanzees at the Yerkes Center rather than in African sanctuaries. It seems to be a matter of convenience, one presenter suggested, that U.S. centers have the technology and equipment and caging, and some researchers don’t want to spend time in Africa. I will be very interested to see what the committee recommends on this.

The Committee on the Use of Chimpanzees in Biomedical and Behavioral Research will now recede from the public view, at least for the next couple of weeks. They will write their report, and anonymous reviewers will critique it. The plan is to issue a public report by the end of the calendar year.

To borrow a couple of weasel words, I am cautiously optimistic. I will be shocked if nothing changes, but I’m not sure how far the committee will go in curtailing the use of chimpanzees. Almost all of the objective presenters (those whose incomes/profits don’t depend on the use of chimpanzees) stated that chimpanzees are no longer required for research. Unfortunately, my experience tells me to fear the voice that doesn’t speak during public meetings.

If you'd like to send comments to the committee go to this site.

Day one at the federal committee meeting on using chimpanzees in research

2011-08-11T20:39:00.010-04:00

Men are from Mars, women are from Venus? Hey, at least they are in the same universe. At today’s meeting of the federal committee that is examining America’s policy on the use of chimpanzees in biomedical research, I felt like the biomedical research industry and the opponents to invasive chimp research live in different galaxies. With a gigantic black hole dividing them.

When most people look at this picture, they think it is a chimpanzee. His name is Tom. On the other hand, I learned today that if you do biomedical research you don’t see a chimpanzee named Tom. You see an “animal system,” a “case,” an “animal model.” Or, the director of the Oregon National Primate Research Center explained, the animal is what one of her colleagues called “a lovely term: a living medical library.” It (not he) has a name. It is something along the lines of “4x0139.”

Jane Goodall, who spoke by videoconference to the meeting today, crystallized the difference between these opposite sides of the galaxy. When you look at a chimpanzee as an individual, she pointed out, you must consider ethics to inform your considerations. Unfortunately, I learned today, the industry doesn’t look at chimpanzees as individuals. And besides, the committee has been directed by the National Institutes of Health to base recommendations on protocols, published literature, scientific evidence, and its judgment. Ethics are not mentioned.

Identification of the chimpanzee isn’t the only difference between the two sides. They each approach the whole question of modern research differently. “The past is prologue,” said one research industry speaker. “I don’t know how we do this without the animal model,” said another. “Can’t be done,” another agreed. (Note: Genentech and GlaxoSmithKline have stopped using chimpanzees and are now setting a powerful example for their reticent colleagues in the industry.)

Goodall, on the other hand, was inspirational and positive. She spoke softly, but forcefully. “We are at a crossroads for chimpanzees,” she told the group. “Because of the explosion of technology over the past ten years, we now have an opportunity to find a new way forward.”

Several presenters took up Goodall’s challenge. Brian Hare, an assistant professor with the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University, gave a riveting presentation on finding that new way forward. He presented intriguing potentials for alternative research sites. Instead of studying chimpanzees in a stressful lab environment, why not try to work respectfully with zoos and sanctuaries, especially sanctuaries in Africa?

A series of three-minute presentations from the public followed Hare’s presentation, and most of them offered intriguing differences from the almost unanimous monotone chorus of the biomedical research industry.

Lincoln Park Zoo’s Steve Ross suggested that using chimpanzees in zoos offers compelling alternatives. Sue Leary, president of the Alternatives Research and Development Foundation, pointed out that the industry assumed that using alternatives would mean a loss, when the opposite is true and that innovative researchers need to think differently.

Beth Cataldo, the president of the San Francisco chapter of the Cetacean Society USA, caught the audience's attention when she compared the industry’s traditional fixation on chimpanzee research to the innovative approaches of the next generation of whale and dolphin researchers.

Raija Bettauer, a retired researcher, told the committee that any program that used chimpanzees must demonstrate relevancy, while now much is just implied. Pamela Osenkowski, with the National Anti-Vivisection Society, charged that there are significant flaws with the “chimp model.”

Several of the public speakers challenged the committee. Laura Bonar, of Animal Protection of New Mexico, forcefully argued that the committee cannot separate ethics from their considerations without violating the public trust. Eric Kleiman, the research director at In Defense of Animals, gave a particularly forceful statement on the lack of transparency at the research centers. He boldly told the committee that they cannot render judgment on the efficacy and safety of research without the ability to examine the records.

Other persuasive statements were offered by representatives of the Humane Society of the United States, the Animal Welfare Institute, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, and PETA.

Theodora Capaldo, speaking for Project Release & Restitution, tried to help committee members visualize the too real consequences of research when she described the heartbreaking results of the autopsy of Tom (see picture above), a research chimpanzee who finally found sanctuary at Fauna Foundation.

Despite the same old, same old thinking of research industry representatives, I actually left today’s meeting more hopeful than when I entered. Perusing the backgrounds of the Committee on the Use of Chimpanzees in Biomedical and Behavioral Research, it appears that most members would support the continued use of chimpanzees in research. I was impressed, though, with the question and answer sessions. Several of the committee members asked probing questions, challenged researchers' assumptions, and seemed open to new thinking. I am cautiously hopeful that they are taking Jane Goodall’s challenge to heart. Perhaps, maybe, possibly, they will look at chimpanzees as more than “living medical libraries.” Maybe they will see Tom.

Update: My feelings about day two, here.

If you'd like to send comments to the committee, go here.

How real is Rise of the Planet of the Apes?

2011-08-08T07:51:00.009-04:00

How real is Rise of the Planet of the Apes?

That’s the question that great ape advocates hope audiences will ask themselves as they walk out of movie theaters and talk about how good the movie is. (And it is good. Very, very good!)

Q. Are those real apes in the movie?

No. Those apes are humans, whose performances are captured by an innovation called computer-generated imagery, or CGI. To see how technology captured actor Andy Serkis' fantastic performance as Caesar, see this clip. Producer Rupert Wyatt did not want to use real chimpanzees in the movie. As he told Peter Singer, there were practical reasons for not using animals, but he also understood the ethical issue. "There are things I didn't want to be involved in" he told Singer. "To get apes to do anything you want them to do, you have to dominate them; you have to manipulate them in performing. That's exploitive."

Q. Do companies really experiment on chimpanzees?

Yes. The U.S. is the only country in the world (besides Gabon) that allows bioinvasive research on chimpanzees. In fact, not only does the government permit experiments, the federal government owns many hundreds of chimpanzees for the sole purpose of conducting research on them. For more information, see Release & Restitution for Chimpanzees in U.S. Laboratories.

Q. Are sanctuaries as bad as the one Caesar is put into?

Absolutely not, not the accredited ones. I wish everyone could see what accredited U.S. and Canadian sanctuaries are really like. The chimpanzees and orangutans are as healthy as is possible under captive conditions. Of course, many of the animals are in the sanctuary because they were previously living in horrible conditions – in entertainment, as pets, or in research – but the sanctuaries give them an opportunity to recover. See the links to sanctuaries at Project ChimpCare, or go directly to the website of my favorite sanctuary, Center for Great Apes.

How do you tell if a sanctuary is legit? Here are some hints: If it breeds animals, separates youngsters from their mothers, and/or takes young animals on tour to book signings or TV shows, it is not a real sanctuary.

To read more about chimpanzee experimentation AND sanctuaries, I highly recommend a new book, The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary: A True Story of Resilience and Recovery, by Andrew Westoll. If you are more into fiction (that nevertheless is “primate-accurate”) pick up a copy of UNSAID, a wonderful novel by Neil Abramson.

Q. Do people really keep chimpanzees as pets?

Unfortunately, yes. It is unfortunate for the chimpanzee, for the neighborhood, and ultimately for the owners who cannot really keep a chimpanzee healthy and happy for the 40 or 50 years of his natural life. Animal advocates are trying to stop the practice, for everyone’s sake, but so far Congress is turning a deaf ear. See this report on Senate Bill 1234 by the Humane Society of the United States.

Q. Did Andy Serkis deserve an Academy Award nomination for best actor?

Absolutely. I would argue that Caesar was every bit as good looking as perpetual nominees Brad Pitt and George Clooney, and his acting was just as good (if not better). Seriously, I truly believe that one day the Academy will recognize Andy's amazing work.

Life (or not) after rejection

2011-08-06T14:02:00.002-04:00

This summer I found a man who had talked dad out of suicide a couple of times in 1966. I didn’t know him, but he was very kind to talk to me now. Why was dad so intent on killing himself, I asked. Without missing a beat, even 44 years after the fact, he told me: after dad lost his job at the Detroit Zoo, he would get very depressed and felt the only way out was to commit suicide.

That’s not the complete story, of course, but it was certainly an important factor in his decision. The zoo meant everything to dad.

In 1964, the Detroit Zoo had enough of Art Brown. They fired him after he was seen throwing a chimpanzee against the wall in fit of rage. Knowing how violent dad could be, I don’t question the zoo’s decision. But I cannot begin to imagine the despair dad must have felt, especially with a wife and five children to support.

It is sadly ironic that the Detroit Zoo treated dad the same way they treated the chimpanzees who dad trained. You’re going to react violently against a chimpanzee who bit you? You’re fired!

And you, chimpanzee…You react violently against a trainer who is trying to control your every move? You’re outta here!

I’ve written about the zoo using a hundred chimpanzees in their shows between 1934 and 1984. I’ve written about their fates, being sent to research facilities or to god knows where. They were shipped out as soon as they started acting up at around 8 or 9 years old, often earlier. Disobeying the trainers and biting was inevitable given their training and living conditions, and their intrinsic independent spirit.

But was it inevitable that they would all go to die in desolation, isolated in research cages? The story of four chimpanzees is instructive, especially now, as the federal government re-examines its policy that sends retired chimpanzees back into active research. Hey, retired chimp, someone wants to give you more disease! Back you go!

I am surprised to learn that Detroit Zoo director Steve Graham sent four zoo chimpanzees to a research facility in 1982. I’ve praised Graham for tearing down the awful chimpanzee amphitheater and taking the costumes off the chimps. But I can’t understand his decision to dump these four.

Mia was born in Africa in 1965. She was transferred to the Detroit Zoo in January 1983 to be a breeder, but her timing was unfortunate. That year, in order to tear down the great ape exhibit, Graham had to move the chimpanzees out. By August, just eight months after bringing Mia to her new home in Detroit, the zoo got rid of her by transferring her to the Primate Foundation of Arizona, a facility that ran a breeding colony and a holding operation to supply chimps to biomedical experiments.

In April 1989, people protested the Detroit Zoo's plans to
import chimps from overseas while they had three chimps
in a research facility.

Graham got rid of four-year-old Donnie, four-year-old Jo Mendi III, and two-year-old Charley the same way. He sent them all to the Primate Foundation of Arizona, to spend the rest of their lives as research subjects.

After the zoo’s new Harambee great ape exhibit was built, Graham started bringing chimpanzees in to populate it. But he didn’t bring back the four he sent to Arizona. To be fair, he couldn’t bring Mia back, because she died just two years after she got to Arizona. But why abandon the three little ones? According to a Detroit Free Press article in April 1989, the zoo planned to import four chimpanzees from Australia and Mexico, instead of taking care of their own.

In 1989, animal advocates in Detroit protested against Graham’s decision. (Graham had already become a controversial director, especially when he supported euthanasia for “surplus” zoo animals.) Graham held firm against the animal advocates, asserting that the young chimpanzees were antisocial and unsuitable for display. He must have forgotten that the zoo had taken each one away from their mothers before they were a year old, and raised them from infancy. He must have forgotten that his zoo made them what they were, and added to it when he turned them over to the research industry. He must have forgotten his own deliberate role in their physical and mental development.

Graham resigned in February 1991. The zoo named Khadejah Shelby as interim director, and that appointment may have saved the chimpanzees. Under her leadership, the zoo brought the three chimpanzees out of the research program. After nine years at the Arizona Primate Foundation, Donnie, Jo, and Charley were transferred back to the Detroit Zoo on November 12, 1992. They were able to live out the rest of their lives at respectable zoos.

As usual, when I asked the Detroit Zoo for more information, they refused to provide any information or comments on what seems to be, after all, a story with a good ending. Judging from the information on their website, today's Detroit Zoo would never think of putting one – let alone four – of their chimpanzees into research. Detroit views its mission now as being a sanctuary for animals.

According to Project ChimpCare, there are still almost a thousand chimpanzees in research in the United States. (We are the only western nation to allow the use of chimpanzees in biomedical research.) On August 11 and 12, I am attending a meeting of the federal Committee on the Use of Chimpanzees in Biomedical and Behavioral Research. The committee, stacked with biomedical research industry representatives and supporters, is supposed to “obtain background data” on the current use of chimpanzees in research. They will explore alternatives, and listen to public comments. At stake is the fate of many hundreds of chimpanzees.

I will blog from the committee meeting, if I can. I hope I will able to report that the Obama Administration and the biomedical research industry are finally saying the words that research chimpanzees need to hear: You’re outta here!

Wanted: Info about Tulane chimpanzee research in 1964

2011-07-28T21:58:00.001-04:00

Thousands of chimpanzees have been used in bioinvasive medical research over the decades. It was a punch in the gut when I found out that the Detroit Zoo sent some of their chimpanzees into research programs. Most disheartening is the fate of Bobby, Chico, and Sammy. The Detroit Zoo sold them to “Tulane” on 7 October 1964.

It is not clear which Tulane facility Detroit sent them to.

Earlier in 1964, Dr. Keith Reemtsma, a surgeon at Tulane’s School of Medicine, was harvesting chimpanzee kidneys to transplant into humans. Reemtsma tried six chimp-human kidney transplants from November 1963 to April 1964, all failures. Adverse public (and professional) reaction erupted after another surgeon attempted a chimpanzee-human heart transplant, and some transplant experimentation seemed to go underground. In his thorough examination of the history of transplant surgery , author Tony Stark (Knife to the Heart: The Story of Transplant Surgery), quotes Reemtsma in 1964:

“We would emphasize… that we regard this work as wholly experimental. Under the circumstances only the most stringent precautions will make such work justified and justifiable.”

Secrecy was one such precaution, Stark points out.

The three Detroit Zoo chimpanzees were sent to Tulane after the six publicly acknowledged kidney transplant experiments. I don’t know if the medical school used Bobby, Chico, and Sammy for experiments. Another option may be that they could have been among the freshman class of primates used for research by the Tulane National Primate Research Center, which was just setting up operations in 1964.

I’ve asked TNPRC if they have any historical records about these three chimpanzees, and I’ll report here if they reply. In the meantime, I am honored that chimpanzee experts and advocates read this blog. Please contact me at chimptrainersdaughter@gmail.com if you have any information about “Tulane” chimpanzee research in 1964 or 1965.

Bobby, Chico, and Sammy entertained Detroit Zoo visitors for seven years, while my dad was a chimp trainer. These chimpanzees likely gave their lives as experimental projects. They deserve more than anonymous deaths.

More reason to boycott businesses that use apes in their ads

2011-07-13T20:05:00.001-04:00

Advertisers have known for a long, long time that anthropomorphic chimpanzees – chimps made to resemble humans – sell. This photo of Jo Mendi I, taken in November 1932, was devised to encourage people to contribute to the Community Fund, an effort to provide much needed help to people during the Great Depression. The Detroit Zoo, who used Jo for these worthwhile campaigns, suggested a caption for the Detroit News: “Jo Mendi signs a check to do his bit for the Community Fund drive and turns it over to Mr. Wacks. Joe had to borrow the money as the city has taken over all he has earned.”

You know how much I abhor the old zoo practice of putting a chimpanzee into human attire, and training him for unnatural poses or entertainment. But now we have evidence of a new concern altogether. It appears that putting chimpanzees into these types of photo opportunities leaves people with two misconceptions. First, seeing Jo “play” with these two gentlemen (one of whom is his much-bitten trainer, Theodore Schneider), people are more likely to think that chimpanzees are suitable as pets. Second, when they see Jo next to a human, people are not as likely to recognize that chimpanzees are endangered in the wild.

A newly published study, Specific Image Characteristics Influence Attitudes about Chimpanzee Conservation and Use as Pets, found that people seeing a photograph of a chimpanzee with a human standing nearby were 35.5% more likely to consider wild populations to be stable/healthy, compared to those seeing the exact same picture without a human. Wow, that’s a lot of misconception. A 10% swing in perceptions would be substantial, 20% is big, but 35% is huge!

Wild populations are not stable, nor are they healthy. In fact, chimpanzees have been classified as endangered since 1996.

This is important, folks! Imagine, if you will, a massive television audience of a hundred million people viewing such a picture. Imagine the millions of people coming away with exactly the wrong impression of chimpanzee vulnerability in the wild. Well, you don’t have to imagine. Thanks to the use of chimpanzees in a Superbowl advertisement for careerbuilder.com, that happened this year. Despite the pleas of animal welfare advocates and conservationists, ever since 2006 careerbuilder.com has been proud of its use of chimpanzees in its Superbowl ad campaign. They are probably planning the 2012 ad now.

Advertisers seem to think that it takes genius to mimic what was essentially being done in publicity campaigns back in 1932, even before TV broadcasting in America. Actually, if we compare this picture of Jo to careerbuilder’s 2011 ad, we can see that current marketing “geniuses” are just lazy copycats. But I digress…

Maybe, with this new study, advertisers will now look at the empirical evidence of the harm done to chimpanzees by its marketing strategy, and will embark on something really creative… something that doesn’t repeat the tired – but, unfortunately effective – marketing stunt of using chimpanzees in a human setting. Maybe they will recognize that they are contributing to public misconceptions that could very well be harming chimpanzee conservation efforts.

Please take a few minutes to read the report of Specific Image Characteristics Influence Attitudes about Chimpanzee Conservation and Use as Pets, just published in Plos One. Share the article, and help spread the word: Stop using great apes in entertainment and advertising.

Chimps, and their zookeepers, can't walk away

2011-07-10T12:06:00.006-04:00

I need to step back from the blog for a while. Constantly pulling up memories can take a toll, and I need time. I want to stop reflecting on the past, and to relax instead. Now is a perfect time for that.

Even as I was putting away the photo albums, a thought struck me – hard. I have a choice to walk away if I want. The Detroit Zoo entertainment chimpanzees from the past half a century didn’t have that choice. Refusing to go on meant “retirement,” and retirement, more often than not, meant going into a small cage or steel box for the remaining 40 years of life, to be subject to the whims of the biomedical research industry.

As I was scanning some of dad’s old photos, I came across a scene taking place in the back of Detroit Zoo’s chimp show amphitheater. The main subject of the photo is a chimpanzee riding on the back of a Shetland pony, which is doing an unnatural trick on a rolling thingamajig. But as I zoomed in, I found this episode happening along the back wall of the stage.

This is one unhappy chimp, deciding not to cooperate with his trainer. Wisely, the trainer has stepped back from a confrontation with the chimpanzee. This was happening during a chimp show.

Chimpanzees in the wild do not normally attack humans. But captive chimps, forced to meet human standards as entertainers or pets, often rebel against their abnormal circumstances. Their efforts to step back, to get away from something they don’t like, are met with punishment, life on a chain, or worse. I’m willing to put good money on a bet that the rebellious chimpanzee in this photo was soon retired from the show, headed for life in a laboratory. (For more on life for chimpanzees inside U.S. labs, see Project R&R’s excellent report.)

You know who else can’t just step away? The zookeepers.

In the November 1948 Detroit Zoo newsletter, the zoo tells how they had to operate on Tiny Tim, a baby chimpanzee who was probably about a year old, for “an infected leg bone.” Dad (“Mr. Brown”), who had recently started his job at the zoo, helped keep an eye on the tot after the operation…

“At about 1:00 P.M. Dr. Appelhof wrapped ‘Tiny Tim’ in a baby blanket donated by Mr. Greenhall for the event. They returned to Tow Animal Hospital where Dr. Appelhof administered penicillin. From there ‘Tim’ was taken to the zoo where arrangements were made for Mr. Schwartz, Animal Keeper in charge of the chimpanzees, to be in attendance until midnight, and for Mr. Brown, Assistant Animal Keeper, from midnight until morning. It was not thought wise to leave ‘Timmy’ unattended while he was still under the influence of the drugs.”

One thing that hasn’t changed much over the decades is the dedication of the zookeepers. Your zoo is closed because of a blizzard? The keepers somehow make it in, to feed the animals. Your state or local government has shuttered your zoo because of a budget problem? Zookeepers take care of those animals, regardless. Through holidays, extreme weather events, and to provide special care to a hurt animal, zookeepers and sanctuary caretakers are on the job. They can’t walk away when they would prefer to be doing something else.

My advice for this summer? Go see Project Nim, read Unsaid, and hug a zookeeper. I've done all three, and it feels great!

Talk to you again in a couple of weeks.

A review of Unsaid, a book that says it all

2011-07-05T14:45:00.003-04:00

Unsaid is my reminder to keep an open mind when starting to read a book. You will often find your initial reaction challenged, sometimes dramatically.

I’m often disappointed by novels that use apes as a central theme. Not always, but enough of the time to feel a bit leery. I received an advance copy of Unsaid, a novel by Neil Abramson that is coming out in August. By the first three pages, I was feeling my usual pang of disappointment. The premise is that Helena, a veterinarian who was involved in chimpanzee research, comes back as an ethereal being after dying from cancer, and watches her husband slowly disintegrate while events unfold. I don’t buy the premise – loved ones who have passed, watching human events before they are able to move on – so I was sure I was going to hate the book.

I was totally, one thousand percent, mistaken. I loved this book. I must have cried at least five times as the story progressed. If that happens to me, the person who doesn’t believe in afterlife, etc., I can only imagine the reaction of caring people who believe in heaven and redemption. OMG, so to speak, they (you) will love Unsaid.

Unsaid has it all. The totally believable characters have human failings and aspirations, and secrets. I could feel for each one of the characters. I especially felt the heart wrenching pain of Jaycee, the chimpanzee researcher who will do anything to prevent “her” chimpnzee from being dumped into the abyss of the federal biological research program.

Once I decided to go with the premise of an afterlife as a literary device, I could not put the book down. I became part of this story, looking on – as Helena was – with a growing sense of helplessness to stop events. As the plot unfolded, I couldn’t help but take the revelations to heart. I recalled, and regretted, so much that I had left unsaid with my dad and my brother before they died.

Reading this book, I remembered when I was a child and touched the soft hand of a chimpanzee. I understood the connection Helena felt, when she was alive and touched the hand of a chimpanzee for the first time. The connection stays with you for life.

The sensitivity and love that emerges from these pages makes me think the author may have touched the hand of a chimpanzee before he sat down to write this book. Unsaid will certainly touch many, many hearts. I hope it touches yours.

PTSD: humans and chimps suffer consequences of trauma

2011-07-01T10:13:00.002-04:00

I’m beginning to realize that lies and more lies were interwoven through my childhood. I always knew dad lied about a lot of things. After I started writing this blog, though, I realized that I based much of my “knowledge” about dad on anecdotes from my mother, a woman who had been deeply hurt, and who wasn’t very emotionally stable. So I’ve been digging. I’m getting police reports, autopsy and toxicology reports, records from the courts, and vital records. Frankly, I am shocked by the scope of the lies that I used to define dad in my own mind.

Dad's Marine Corps
photo.

One truth that emerged this week was about dad’s military service. I knew dad got an early discharge from the U.S. Marine Corps in World War II, but I knew little else. Dad’s twin sister, Audrey, said he got a medical discharge when a machine gun blew up in his face. My sister remembers a discussion with mom about dad’s dishonorable discharge when he slugged a superior after a couple of months in the service. Mom told me dad got a “psycho discharge.”

It turns out the “psycho discharge” was the closest to the truth. Actually, the military board gave him an “honorable discharge by reason of inaptitude for the service,” because he was “suffering from a ‘Psychoneurosis, Traumatic’ that existed prior to his entry in the service.” Traumatic psychoneurosis is the old term for post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

In a completely serendipitous turn of events, on the same day I got dad’s military records, I saw a new report, “Signs of Mood and Anxiety Disorders in Chimpanzees.” The study, led by Hope Ferdowsian, M.D., M.P.H., found that chimpanzees used in experiments and some other captive settings display symptoms comparable to post-traumatic stress disorder and major depression.

The similarities give pause. Chimpanzees cannot clearly articulate their thoughts, feelings, and experiences to humans, and captive chimpanzees don’t have the freedom to choose what they do in their life. Although chimpanzees used in invasive experiments show symptoms of depression, anxiety, and compulsive behaviors, similar to mood and anxiety disorders seen in traumatized humans, how close is the match to human behavior? If chimpanzees could act on their PTSD symptoms, as dad did, would they end up like dad? Would they become alcoholics to drown their depression? Would they take amphetamines to try to face the day? Would they go into irrational rages? Would their “self-directed behaviors” eventually include suicide attempts? Would they drink cyanide if they could?

But I’m getting ahead of myself…

On December 8, 1941, the day after Japanese forces attacked the American military base at Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt asked for a Declaration of War with Japan. Congress granted that request, and, in the following days, hundreds of thousands Americans rushed to enlist in the armed forces. Dad, who was 17 years old, was one of them. He quit high school and volunteered for the United States Marine Corps on December 28. He was accepted to serve for four years, and officially enlisted on January 19, 1942. Within 10 days, the Recruit Depot at the USMC Base in San Diego referred Art’s case to the "Aptitude Board." The initial reason for a referral to the Aptitude Board seemed to indicate a physical problem, from before he officially joined the Marines: “History of two head injuries prior to enlistment, one in Nov. 1941, the other in [sic] Dec 31, 1941. Since then has had almost constant headache, frequent dizzy spells, and occasional fainting spells.”

The Aptitude Board asked for a psychiatric review. The psychiatrist’s report stated:

“Even prior to his head injuries which were only light ones, this boy was of 'nervous' unstable temperament. Since his injuries, he had been largely incapacitated because of the symptoms listed above. Physical and neurological examinations show no defects, but the mental state of the recruit is such as to render him unfit for military training.”

The board stated what they call their “impression”: “Psychoneurosis, Traumatic” that existed prior to his entry in the service.

By February 7, the board was recommending a discharge, and on February 16, dad was out.

He lasted 28 days in the Marines.

The military for dad meant failure. A young man with PTSD quits school to serve his country, and then faces the scorn of friends and family when he comes home, just as the rest of American manhood is shipping out to defend our nation. Damn.

Ferdowsian’s study shows that the chimpanzee experience isn’t that far removed from dad’s, in several important ways.

“Chimpanzees clearly have the capacity to suffer mental and physical anguish, much as humans do,” says Dr. Ferdowsian. “We now know that a chimpanzee's mind and emotional well-being are affected by experimentation in ways that parallel the psychological trauma experienced by victims of torture and other forms of abuse.”

I don’t know what abuse dad experienced when he was a boy. Whatever it was, many men and women escape the despair of a bad childhood by joining the military. Through training and service, they gain a sense of self-worth. That’s what I did, and I’ve never regretted it. But dad’s trauma must have been so much worse than mine was, because the military for dad meant failure before he even started training.

There’s nothing I can do for dad. He’s been dead for 44 years now. I wish with all my being that we could stop the wars, and prevent the thousands of cases of PTSD that are the “promise” awaiting our troops today.

But we can stop the trauma for chimpanzees who undergo invasive experiments. Now. Today. The United States must join the long list of countries that have ended invasive experiments on chimpanzees. Congress must approve the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act. To do less is to be less than humane. It is less than human.

“Signs of Mood and Anxiety Disorders in Chimpanzees,” was published June 16 in PLoS ONE, the Public Library of Science’s peer-reviewed journal. Dr. Ferdowsian co-authored the report with PCRM senior research scientist Debra Durham, Ph.D., a senior research scientist with Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.

Project Nim: a chimpanzee lesson about human arrogance

2011-06-26T15:23:00.007-04:00

I loved it when the chimps came to visit.

Back in the 1950s, we had a big cage set up in our basement and, when a Detroit Zoo chimpanzee needed to recuperate from an illness or injury, sometimes dad was able to bring him home. It was one of the wonderful benefits of having a chimp trainer for a dad. With chimpanzees visiting the house since I was born, I kind of thought it was normal to have an ape in the house, but my cousin was astounded when her family came to visit and saw “our” chimpanzee.

I remember the first time I held a chimp’s hand. The first touch between human and ape fingers establishes a connection, and you never forget the soft leathery feel of a chimpanzee’s palm. What should be an ordinary sensation is not. It is unforgettable and forever.

The problem arises when the chimp-human connection becomes subject to human arrogance, sometimes cloaked in love, other times defined by science, and often supported by stupidity.

Today, I saw an advance screening of the new documentary, Project Nim, the true story of a chimpanzee who was taken from his mother to participate in a 1970s university research project on communications. I am absolutely blown away, as was the crowd who attended the sold-out showing at the Silverdocs Film Festival. The movie has all three components: love, science, and stupidity, all adding up to a level of human arrogance that is almost incomprehensible.

Nim’s story begins at an Oklahoma primate research project, when the mother chimpanzee, Carolyn, is shot with a tranquilizer so the research director can grab Carolyn’s sixth newborn, Nim, like they stole all the others. (Already, human mothers in the audience are gasping in pain.) Nim goes from his mother's arms, to adored and beloved “child” of a human mother, to precocious subject of young college students’ attention, to an independent young male actually starting to act like a chimpanzee. All along the way, we hear directly from the people who played the supporting roles in Nim’s young life. As I listened to them tell their stories, from their perspectives, I could identify with their good intentions. And judging by the laughter in the audience at several of the statements, I knew I wasn’t alone in my amazement at some of the naivety, even now.

And arrogance. A university researcher who doesn’t believe the “science” was compromised when he seduced the project’s sweet teenage “education director.” A college graduate who lets a chimpanzee nurse from her breast for months, and then years later thinks she can walk into the (by now) adult chimp’s cage, when he is screaming and “displaying,” and thinks the chimpanzee won’t hurt her. So much arrogance.

Fortunately, Nim also had people who related to him as a chimpanzee, who cared deeply and personally for his welfare.

After Herb, the university researcher, realizes that the adult Nim is a chimp (DUH!), with all a chimpanzee’s strength and unpredictability, he sends Nim back to the Oklahoma facility where Nim has to be in a dark cage for the first time in his life. When the facility runs out of money, Nim is sold to LEMSIP, an infamous experimental research facility, and he is subject to conditions and protocols that are deeply disturbing for any chimpanzee, but are unspeakable for a chimpanzee raised as a human.

Enter Robert Ingersoll, who met and befriended Nim in Oklahoma. Thanks to Robert, and a good lawyer who brought public attention to Nim’s situation, LEMSIP decides to sell Nim to a horse sanctuary. From there, Nim’s life starts to improve again – not to a standard we would wish for, but at least one that is better.

Detroit Zoo chimps Tommy and Mary at our
home for the holidays, circa early 1950s

Watching this movie, I couldn’t help but think about two of my family’s chimpanzee visitors. Tommy and Mary, young chimpanzees at the Detroit Zoo, were our guests for Christmas in the early 1950s. How could they fail to steal a heart or two? They both came to zoo as one or two year olds. Tommy arrived in spring 1951, and Mary followed the next April. They each did their five-year stint in the chimp show, and then the zoo transferred them out when, as adolescents, they got too independent to obey orders from the trainers. A slap or punch from trainer will keep a youngster in line but, as Project Nim explains in painful detail, an adolescent chimp is prone to bite. That’s not something you want to show the kiddies who are there to watch chimpanzees act like buffoons. It ruins the fantasy.

I would have been the happiest girl on earth if we could have kept Tommy or Mary, to raise as a member of the family. Or at least, I always thought so. Project Nim shows us, in a totally engrossing – almost haunting – movie, how keeping a chimpanzee, essentially as some kind of sub-human in costume, is grossly unfair to the chimpanzee, besides being just plain stupid and dangerous.

Detroit Zoo transferred Tommy to “Leonardo” in January 1956. I have searched and searched and I can’t figure out who, what or where “Leonardo” is. The zoo sent Mary to Calgary Zoo in October 1956. Within a year, she was gone from there, and there are no records to tell us where they shipped her, although Calgary Zoo is on record for turning chimpanzees over to research facilities. Tommy and Mary became two nameless chimpanzees, probably with numbers tattooed on their chests, likely among the thousands used in research.

Tommy and Mary in the 1950s and 60s, and Nim in the 1970s and 80s. Decades of human arrogance hurt innumerable chimpanzees. The unforgiveable thing is that, in the U.S., it still happens. And we let it continue.

Project Nim is not just for chimp lovers. It won the award of Best Documentary at the Edinburgh Film Festival last week. You don’t want to miss this one. And while we wait for the DVD, read the terrific book, Nim Chimpsky, by Elizabeth Hess.

Update Dec 28, 2011: If Project Nim gets an Academy Award nomination, look for theaters to rebook the movie. In the meantime, U.S. DVD release is set for February 7. (Amazon is taking pre-orders, for $16.99!) Canada already has their DVD release, but without the extras, and the UK DVD release (with extras) is sometime in early January.

Update Nov 18, 2011: The Academy announces that Project Nim is a step closer to Oscar gold.