SAVING CHIMPS

I don't consider myself a bleeding heart animal lover. I'm a vegetarian, but I understand animals are pretty tasty. Still, I find it baffling that animal experimentation continues to play such a huge role in biomedical research. Chimpanzees are the most genetically similar primate to humans, so they have really gotten the crap end of the stick when it comes to animal experimentation. One of the most heart-wrenching things about using animals as research subjects is that the relevance of the information they get is debatable at best. Meanwhile, medical researchers have inflicted all kind of diseases on chimpanzees, including HIV/AIDS, only to discover they were not an effective model for many human diseases. What the eff? Sure, using chimps for medical research is less common than it once was, but there are still hundreds of chimpanzees living in research facilities (which are often taxpayer funded) because no one knows what else to do with them. Oh, and don't get me started on zoos.

The Fauna Foundation is an animal rescue sanctuary located a half-hour outside of Montreal that opened its doors in 1997. It's one of the few chimpanzee sanctuaries across North America and was the first to provide a home for chimpanzees infected with HIV due to laboratory tests. So I figured this would be a great place to try and see the light at the end of the cruel, HIV-infected tunnel. Fauna is currently home to 13 chimpanzees as well as other rescued animals. I was able to visit the sanctuary which is located on a huge wildlife sanctuary in the middle of nowhere. It's incredibly picturesque--the chimpanzees have these amazing outdoor wooden playhouses connected by these crazy bridges and walkways that look like the most fun things ever. The other animals they rescued were totally awesome too. I met an adorable donkey who likes to flirt with women, some gnarly dreadlocked goats and the biggest fucking pig I have ever seen. When you're walking around the sanctuary it's so peaceful that you almost forget this is a place where abused animals live. Until the insane primate screaming starts. But all of the volunteers and employees I met were so genuine and have truly dedicated themselves to repairing the damage inflicted on all the animals and giving them the best quality of life possible. I spoke to animal rights activist and Fauna Foundation co-founder Gloria Grow about the sanctuary and how the entertainment industry, medical research, deforestation, and the bushmeat trade in Africa are destroying the chimpanzee population in the blink of an eye.

Vice: Owning and operating a sanctuary seems like a complicated process. Which came first, the sanctuary or the chimps?
Grow: I had always been interested in running a sanctuary. In 1997 we received word that the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine in Surgery in Primates (LEMSIP) in Albany, New York, would be shutting down. The chimpanzees needed to be out in three months so we built the main building quickly and modified as time went on. There were about 200 chimpanzees there and 15 came to live at our sanctuary. In 2002 we welcomed one from the St-Felicien Zoo, and in 2007, three more from the Quebec City Zoo who were used in research in their youth.

Wow, that's not a very long time to prepare for such a big commitment. Running a sanctuary like the Fauna Foundation must be incredibly rewarding but also draining at times.
I have always felt a strong connection to animals, my best friend growing up was my dog. I think empathy is the right word to use, as a child you kind of understand what it must feel like for them. I think most children have a feeling growing up, they have this love for animals that gets taken away as they get older. They really understand that it isn't right to do certain things. As we grow up we are sort of trained or conditioned to not feel that way anymore. I was fortunate enough to have parents who had a lot of understanding for my feelings for animals. Working in animal rights, working to get this information to the public is difficult because it's very upsetting. A lot of people just choose to ignore what's going on around them. It can be very difficult to witness and process, you have to be strong. You have to have a mission and a purpose. And you have to feel it to want to help. You can't escape what you've seen sometimes, it becomes part of who you are so I strive to pass on the information, the things I've seen and the things I know. It is very emotionally difficult, this kind of work changes who you are as a person. People are susceptible to compassion fatigue, at a certain point they don't want to know any more or see any more. Its unfortunate that animal rights activists kind of get pigeon-holed into this "crazy cat lady stereotype" because they have big hearts.

Did you have any trouble opening this kind of facility? I know I'd be a bit wary if I heard chimpanzees with HIV were moving in down the street.
Well yes, we have an ongoing problem with the commision de protection du territoire agricole du Québec. In Quebec, "sanctuary" is not an understood or accepted term. People don't believe in keeping animals on the farm without using them for food. There is a very backwards mentality here in that regard, and the way people think has to change. There is definitely a growing trend in animal rights which has been a long time coming in Quebec. Take for instance the issue of puppy mills, Quebec is one of the worst offenders. Twenty years ago people didn't care about puppy mill issues. Now you can read about it in newspapers, whereas you couldn't even bring that up before. You can't do anything if people don't care, you have to wait until they are ready to accept it before any change can begin. Young people are making the difference right now, they are going to make the future better for all of us. No historical change is made overnight.

Did you know about all the stuff the chimpanzees went through in these facilities?
Yes, I was very well aware of the research issue. In 1994/1995 information about biomedical research started leaking. At the lab where some of the Fauna chimps came from some were being used for crack cocaine studies. Tests on chimpanzees at NASA involved burning the chimps to death on the tarmac, they would have their skin burned off. They were infected with HIV. Taxpayers are paying billions for this kind of research, this includes Canadians. There are definitely research chimps in Canada but if the companies are privately owned then obviously their information is not available to the general public. We were the first sanctuary to publish the medical files and information from some of these laboratories. American sanctuaries have more difficulty because they can be sued.

What is a typical day like for the chimpanzees at the sanctuary?
Every morning they wake up around 5:30 or 6:00 AM, I hear their calls from my house. In the morning they typically eat apples, bananas, oranges, lettuce. Actually its kind of funny, one of their favorite things to start the day off with is an onion.
Eww.
We don't serve food on a meal to meal basis to avoid being too similar to a laboratory so there is always food available to them. Food becomes a huge part of enrichment for captive chimps, letting them choose what they'd like to eat is a form of self-medicating for them. The chimps create nests for themselves out of things like blankets and boxes, so after breakfast they go back to sleep and nap for a couple of hours. Their days consist of playing in different areas, depending on the weather, interacting, and doing different activities. At lunch time all the chimps have hot tea which has a great healing property for them, they find it very comforting.
No way!
They get a kick our of how hot the tea is and they all have their own different techniques for drinking it. After lunch they have another nap until about 2:00 PM and when they wake up they usually have a smoothie, it can be difficult for them to get all the vitamins they need. For dinner they like to eat things like fruit, protein biscuits, popcorn, nuts, they also like soy milk. Before they go to sleep we provide fresh sheets for them to add to their nests if they want. They sleep in the same spots every night which is unnatural for them because in the wild they can move up to 30 Km in one day. The chimps don't usually share nests but sometimes we see sharing between older and younger individuals which is very touching,

That sounds pretty adorable. What are some of their favorite activities?
Captive chimps are obsessed with cleaning which is obviously a learned behavior. They see humans doing it and want to do it too. We give them buckets of water and soap with a towel and they just go to town. They love to play musical instruments like tambourines as well. They can be very artistic, so sometimes we provide them with crayons or paint depending on their mood. Some of them are sun lovers, they love to just be outside and eat leaves off the trees. Chimpanzees also love parties. They have picnics, we throw birthday parties for them. We put out plastic tables and give them party favors and streamers which always causes a lot of laughter and fun. One of the chimpanzees, Sue Ellen, loves to wrap the streamers around herself and run around. She loves to wear bright colors.

How do the chimpanzees interact together? Do they all get along?
A normal life for a chimpanzee in the wild would be living in a big social group. Right now, the building is designed so the chimps have freedom to come and go amongst different groups as they please. Sometimes they live together in groups for a couple weeks at a time, but obviously these are not normal chimps. The lifespan of a research chimpanzee drops significantly because of anxiety--they have elevated cortisone levels and develop horrible emotional problems.
How bad does it get?
There are fights and killings in sanctuaries because chimpanzees need alliances and family members within their social groups. In a sanctuary they don't always have that kind of connection to one another and the dynamics between the chimpanzees are always shifting. Chimps must be accepted by the alpha males in the sanctuary otherwise they can be killed. One chimp named Toby had been here for a few years when the dynamic shifted and seven other chimpanzees broke into a room and beat him up. He could have died, we encounter scary situations here sometimes but that's just a part of our work. We have made areas for chimps with psychological problems where they can go to be alone when they need to be. Chimpanzees can have identity problems when they come from the entertainment industry or private ownership and were basically raised as human children. Some chimps are raised to wear diapers and go on picnics. They are treated as funny little human beings but by the time chimpanzees are a few years old they can be twice as strong as two grown men. Then all of a sudden they aren't wanted anymore, so they are sent back to lab settings and stripped of their home and objects.
I bet a lot of people thought getting a pet monkey was a good idea after watching Friends.
One of the chimps here, Rachel, was raised as a human child, she slept in a bed and had a nanny. She has suffered from an identity crisis her entire life so she has a special room here she can lock herself in when she can't cope with the stress of social situations. I have seen chimpanzees in extreme distress, they have meltdowns where they scream, cry, defecate, and urinate on themselves. Our roles as caregivers is to try and recondition their brains, to comfort them and eliminate stressors. We try to give them back what they lost and we want them to evolve and grow again.

Are you planning to acquire more chimpanzees in the near future?
Of course we would always like to take on more animals but this is a big issue in terms of sanctuaries right now. There are many animal care facilities with no lifetime care fund and no one to take over if something happens to the director. You need to have a lifetime care plan, there must be someone who can take over. When we accept animals from facilities we expect a lifetime commitment from the facility that the animal we are rescuing won't just be replaced by another one. We strive to be a responsible and progressive sanctuary, so until we have enough money set aside we do not rescue new animals, even though we could probably take about 30 more chimps. Some people who run sanctuaries, very well-meaning people, love to rescue new animals all the time without being able to properly care for them. New animals bring in a lot of donations which is also appealing to them. I heard about a sanctuary which held about 600 animals, 89 chimpanzees, bears, lions, monkeys, and all kinds of animals. There were two caregivers for the entire facility which is just unacceptable. At Fauna we have a ratio of one human for every four chimpanzees.

How do you personally feel about the future of chimpanzees in the wild?
I would like to be as optimistic as possible. There is progress being made through people like Jane Goodall and the Pan African Sanctuary Alliance (PASA) who are working with African people to create awareness. People unknowingly contribute to the destruction of chimpanzees by consuming resources the way we do. They buy things and have no idea where the materials come from, a lot of wood comes from Africa or Indonesia and every time a rainforest is cut down the chimpanzees are put in harm's way. It's very difficult to find environmentally friendly wood, especially with companies like Walmart who sell at such competitive prices. There is a substance found in electronics known as coltan which is currently being mined in Africa. It's contributing significantly to the bushmeat trade, which involves killing and eating chimpanzees and other primates such as gorillas. Chimpanzees only have babies every four to five years and they are single births. They can't sustain that kind of population attack. I think that young people get it, they are the best audience we have. If we educate kids we might be able to save chimpanzees in the wild, not only chimps but apes in general. In terms of biomedical research, I am optimistic that I will see the end of chimpanzees in laboratories in my lifetime, hopefully within the next 40-50 years.

KRISTINA MAHLER