Chimpanzee News - Captive Chimpanzees
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Biology and Behaviour | Evolution and Genetics | Conservation and Threats | Other Great Apes
Apes' home reclassified as funding dries up
13-01-2012 - Des Moines Register
The financially troubled Great Ape Trust, touted as a world-class research institution when it opened in 2004, has converted into a sanctuary. The federally mandated board that supervised research involving the seven bonobos and two orangutans at the trust disbanded Friday, said its chairman, physiology professor Edward Finnerty of Des Moines University. “Since the trust has made the decision to move to sanctuary status, then it’s not a research institution any longer,” Finnerty said. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which issued the permit allowing the trust to house the apes, still conducts inspections there. |
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Claim of octogenarian chimp prompts questions
30-12-2011 - CNN
A Florida primate sanctuary on Thursday maintained its chimpanzee named Cheetah, who died last week, was more than 80 years old and acted in the Tarzan movies during the 1930s, amid doubts about his age. Cheetah died Saturday after suffering kidney failure the week before, the sanctuary said on its website. Several chimpanzees appeared in various Tarzan movies, many of which were popular in the 1930s and 1940s. Debbie Cobb, outreach director at the Suncoast Primate Sanctuary in Palm Harbor, Florida, said Cheetah appeared in the Tarzan moves from 1932 through 1934, meaning he was older than 80. "I've been around this chimp for 51 years, so we know he's 51, and he was an adult when I met him," Cobb said. |
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Video: A sanctuary in the Congo takes in orphaned chimpanzees
29-12-2011 - Public Radio International
Orphaned chimpanzees are common in central Africa, their parents poached and killed for exotic restaurants or sold into the pet trade. But a sanctuary for young chimps is taking them in and hopes to return them to the wild.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, years of war have left many young Chimpanzees without parents or a family group.
For years that's meant they'd be sold into the exotic pet trade or, perhaps worse, onto the bush meat market. But some of them have hope. Meet J.A.C.K, the sanctuary for Jeunes Animaux Confisques au Katanga, or the sanctuary for young animals confiscated in Katanga.
One small step for chimpanzeekind
20-12-2011 - Huffington Post
Chimpanzees have been much in the news recently. There's been a lot of concern about their use in invasive biomedical research and deceptive ploys by those who want to use them (more background information and discussion can be found here and here and here and here) and also some exciting news about the complexity of their social relationships that bears on the evolutionary origins of friendship and surely is relevant to the continued use and abuse of chimpanzees in all sorts of research.
According to a report in the New York Times
For sale: Infamous chimp lab
19-12-2011 - El Paco Inc.
ALAMOGORDO, N.M. - The long, dark and aging buildings are lined with small steel cages that look rather like dog kennels. But the animals who lived in them were large chimpanzees, higher primates that are the closest relative to the human race. For almost a decade, the massive biomedical research lab here was a chain link and concrete home for hundreds of chimpanzees used in medical research, the descendants of NASA's "astrochimps" that paved the way for the space flights of John Glenn and Alan Shepard. No chimps were experimented on at the Alamogordo facility, but federal officials would come to discover that the chimps had been horribly abused and mistreated. They were isolated from one another, housed in dangerously hot or cold buildings, and worse. |
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NIH temporarily bans new chimpanzee research
15-12-2011 - Washington Post
The National Institutes of Health has placed a temporary moratorium on new studies using chimpanzees, it announced Thursday in response to a report that marks nearly all medical research on the great apes as scientifically unjustified. “Effective immediately, NIH will not issue any new awards for chimpanzee research” as the agency puts in a place a committee to review research proposals, NIH Director Francis Collins said during a press briefing.
Chimpanzee research that does not meet rules established by the report will be phased out, Collins said. He estimated that about half of the 37 current NIH-funded chimp studies would not rise to standards proposed in Thursday’s report from the Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academy of Sciences.
The congressionally mandated study concluded that any future studies using the great apes need to clear a “very high bar,” said Jeffrey Kahn, a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins University.
Gruen’s “First 100" chimpanzee stories featured
02-12-2011 - The Wesleyan Connection
Professor Lori Gruen’s The First 100 web site was featured in The New York Times. The web site provides biographies of the first 100 chimpanzees used in scientific experimentation. Gruen is chair and professor of philosophy, professor of feminist gender and sexuality studies, professor of environmental studies.
Chimpanzees live 50 to 60 years in captivity, so those who are retired have long histories, although the details can be spotty. On her web site, Gruen has thumbnail biographies of the first 100 chimps used in research in the United States. She hopes to create a similar site for chimps now in research laboratories, called The Last 1,000.
The chimps pictured in the article – some with long histories, others with uncertain futures – are at Chimp Haven and The New Iberia Research Center, both in Louisiana.
Nine chimpanzees find a new home at a sanctuary in Fort Pierce
02-12-2011
Nine chimpanzees have made their trip as part of the "great chimp migration," to their new home in Fort Pierce.
They rode in a custom-made trailer, each fed French fries, looking out their own window at the first view of their new home. Anticipation built in the air as the newest residents rolled into the Chimps Animal Sanctuary. The chimpanzees have come from a former biomedical research lab in Alamogordo, New Mexico. "It was cement blocks, the one Building 300 was called 'the dungeon' and it was one cement block after another, seven by seven by five," said Jocelyn Bezner, a veterinarian at the sanctuary. The animals are grouped into what caregivers call a "family." They are comfortable and knew each other before arrival at the facility.
NIH accused of dishonesty over chimp research plans
02-12-2011 - Wired
After national outcry over its plan to send 209 retired, federally owned chimpanzees back into traumatic medical research, the National Institutes of Health said it would wait. The chimps’ fate would only be decided after independent experts judged whether research was necessary. But animal advocates say the NIH has already planned to pursue the controversial program, though the Institute of Medicine report on chimp research won’t be released until later in December.
Documents obtained by animal advocacy groups show that the National Center for Research Resources, the NIH’s chimp-overseeing division, approved in September a $19 million proposal to move the chimpanzees from their current home in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and back into lab duty at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute. “The NIH’s actions here are deceitful and incredibly unethical,” said Laura Bonar, program officer for Animal Protection of New Mexico. “The public has been misled. The public was told, ‘We’ll wait to see this independent report before we decide what to do.’ But the NIH has already decided to move forward.”No more research on chimpanzees, CBCD applauds GlaxoSmithKline decision
01-12-2011 - PRWEB
The CBCD commends GlaxoSmithKline, a major pharmaceutical company, for its animal friendly decision. According to virologist Stanley Lemon of the University of North Carolina: “The chimpanzee model has been very valuable in leading up to where we are now with drug development, but it’s not necessarily on the critical path to discovery now. The need for chimpanzees in antiviral drug development is much less than it was five years ago. You could argue that it’s not there any more.”
The CBCD believes that now, since new methods are available, more pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies should follow the GlaxoSmithKline lead and also implement animal friendly policies. In addition, the CBCD is happy to mark biotechnology companies that already develop treatments and remedies through animal friendly methods, specifically methods that do not include animal testing.
Astrochimp’s 1961 bermuda splashdown
29-11-2011 - Ignition
Chimpanzees are the forgotten link in America’s manned space programme — with the first, simian-piloted US space capsule to orbit the earth splashing down off Bermuda 50 years ago today [Nov. 29]. When the space programme was in its infancy in the early 1960s, the US National Aeronautics & Space Administration used chimps to test how space flight would affect the human body. Before astronaut Alan Shepard Jr. made his famed first American suborbital space flight in 1961, a chimpanzee named Ham completed a successful suborbital flight in a Mercury capsule. “There were a lot of unknowns back in the ’50s about how the human body would react to space and some real bad concerns that you might die,” former NASA space shuttle astronaut Robert Crippen has said. “And these [chimps] opened that up to at least give people confidence that it was OK to go put Al Shepard and the guys up for the first time.” |
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Breeding contempt
24-11-2011 - Nature
By failing to explain why a moratorium on breeding chimpanzees seems not to have been enforced, the US National Institutes of Health risks a further loss of public support for chimp research.
Research using chimpanzees is under closer scrutiny than usual in the United States, with the Institute of Medicine scheduled to report next month on whether government funding for the work continues to be scientifically justified. So it is, to put it mildly, an unfortunate time for questions to be raised about a key research centre's ability and willingness to follow a 16-year-old moratorium on chimpanzee breeding. It is also a sensitive time for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland — the agency that funds the research on behalf of the US taxpayer — to be reluctant to answer key questions about its enforcement of the moratorium at the New Iberia Research Center (NIRC), near Lafayette in Louisiana.
In an African sanctuary, help and hope for orphaned chimps
16-11-2011 - The Globe Mail
In June of 2009, wildlife officials in this small central African country confiscated a baby chimpanzee from his human keeper. The one-year old ape was emaciated and extremely malnourished, unable to drink water without vomiting, infested with lice and suffering from a candida infection so severe that his digestive system was on the verge of shutting down.
After a short respite at the Brazzaville Zoo, the sickly infant was sent about 40 kilometres northwest of Congo’s second-largest city, Pointe-Noire, to the Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Centre, built on a hilltop surrounded by an oasis of tropical savannahs, wetlands and emerging forest. It is the largest chimp sanctuary in Africa and one of the Jane Goodall Institute’s flagship operations.
“We had four people working on him 24 hours a day for three weeks,” says Debby Cox, the interim director of Tchimpounga and one of the world’s leading experts on chimpanzee rehabilitation. “That’s the only reason he survived.”
Chimps’ days in labs may be dwindling
14-11-2011 - New York Times
In a dome-shaped outdoor cage, a dozen chimpanzees are hooting. The hair on their shoulders sticks straight up. “That’s piloerection,” a sign of emotional arousal, says Dr. Dana Hasselschwert, head of veterinary sciences at the New Iberia Research Center. She tells a visitor to keep his distance. The chimps tend to throw pebbles — or worse — when they get excited. Chimps’ similarity to humans makes them valuable for research, and at the same time inspires intense sympathy. To research scientists, they may look like the best chance to cure terrible diseases. But to many other people, they look like relatives behind bars. |
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Hepatitis C: The last chimpanzee research battleground
14-11-2011 - Wired Science
When Katrina was nine months old, she was taken from her mother and sent to a laboratory in New York. At an age when young wild chimpanzees receive a level of maternal care not unlike the love provided by human mothers, she lived in a cage and was infected with hepatitis B and hepatitis C. Later she was infected with HIV.
By the time Katrina was 15 years old, she’d been sedated 268 times. During 36 of those episodes, doctors pushed a needle into her abdomen and took samples of her liver, and she didn’t receive so much as an aspirin after waking. Sometimes biopsies were taken from her lymph nodes or rectum. Once she went into respiratory arrest during sedation and had to be revived. Another time she self-mutilated her left thumb while coming out of anesthesia. Delirium is common among patients waking from a ketamine stupor. When Katrina was 19, doctors observed that she had a tendency to compulsively groom herself, a behavior that — in humans, chimpanzees’ closest relative — often occurs in individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder. That condition also afflicts chimpanzees.
“Save the Chimps” sanctuary builds a home for traumatized apes
07-11-2011 - Scientfic American
His name is Clay. He’s a happy, creative 24-year-old male who prefers to live in solitude. Although most of the time he is peaceful, he has been known to become aggressive and violent in a manner that can terrify the people who love him.
If Clay were human, he would probably have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But Clay is a chimpanzee, a survivor of years of invasive medical experiments, and a resident of the Save the Chimps sanctuary in Fort Pierce, Fla.
“Clay’s a fabulous guy,” says Sanctuary Director Jen Feuerstein. “He’s really engaging with humans and loves to play. But he does not tolerate other chimpanzees at all. He gets very aggressive around them.” Several attempts have been made to introduce him to other chimps, but none have been successful. “He lives on his own and it’s going to stay that way.”
Almost human: why a laboratory is no place for great apes
21-10-2011 - The Conversation
Twenty years ago, Jared Diamond’s book “The Third Chimpanzee” highlighted a startling fact. If we adhere to the scientific rules for classifying species (taxonomy), humans should be classified as a third species of chimpanzee, or bonobos and chimpanzees should be classified as human. Genetically, chimpanzees and bonobos are more closely related to humans than they are to gorillas (who are their next closest “relative”). In evolutionary terms, chimpanzees are no more closely related to monkeys than we are. Twenty years ago, we discovered that human and chimpanzee blood haemoglobin have identical sequences of amino acids, and if blood chemistry is matched, humans can have a blood transfusion from chimpanzees. |
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U.S. laboratory chimps under the microscope in Washington
13-10-2011 - Reuters
Cute TV chimps may harm their wild brethren
12-10-11 - Science
Seeing dressed-up chimps, such as the one in this tea advertisement, made people less likely to donate to a conservation charity.
Showing chimpanzees dressed in clothes and clowning around in films and commercials may not be particularly dignified, but it fosters sympathy for the species and makes people want to protect them in the wild. At least that's what some in the entertainment industry like to think. But a new study from a team of scientists and marketing experts shows just the opposite. People who watch such shows or ads actually come away thinking that chimpanzees are abundant in the wild and don't need further protection, the researchers report in a study published today in PLOS ONE. In reality, of course, chimpanzees are endangered and face an uncertain future in Africa due to habitat destruction, disease, and hunting.
Apes as Family: the first film made for chimps
29-09-11 - NewScientist
Earlier this year, I reported on the first advertising campaign made exclusively for monkeys. There must be something in the air, because now we have the first film to be made expressly for non-human primates: Primate Cinema: Apes as family, by Los Angeles-based artist Rachel Mayeri. Apes as Family is a dual-screen installation. The right-hand screen shows a kind of chimp soap opera - with chimps played by humans in costume - and the left-hand screen shows the reactions of captive chimps to a screening of the ape drama. It's a great idea, although it's not easy to gauge the chimps' reactions. We start off seeing a "chimp" in undergrowth. It's an animatronic ape - a realistic-looking animal, but it didn't convince me that it was a chimp. |
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No retirement in sight for aging research chimpanzee
30-09-11 - AJC
Wenka, like many working stiffs, will probably have to put in a few more years on the job. At 57, she is holding forth as the oldest research chimpanzee at Emory University's Yerkes National Primate Research Center.
But there's a grassroots effort brewing to help her into retirement. At noon Saturday, members and supporters of Georgia Animal Rights and Protection plan to protest in front of the North Decatur Road entrance of Emory, asking that Wenka be allowed to enjoy her sunset years outside a laboratory environment. They've started a "Free Wenka" campaign and are asking that the chimp be moved to one of the several animal sanctuaries in the United States .
Free at last! Chimps caged for 30 years and injected with HIV in cruel experiments finally feel the sun on their faces again
08-09-2011 - DailyMail
Like prisoners emerging from a lifetime behind bars, a group of chimpanzees step blinking into the sunlight with what appears for all the world to be a wave and a smile. And they have much to be joyful about. For this is the first time they have felt grass under their feet and breathed fresh air for 30 years. Though a few of the chimps were born in captivity, most were kidnapped from African jungles as babies and flown to Europe, where they were locked in metal laboratory cages to be used in a long series of experiments. |
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Should captive-bred chimpanzees have full Endangered Species Act Protection?
07-09-2011 - Scientific American
In a move that’s probably long overdue, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) announced last week that it will conduct a status review to determine if captive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) should be reclassified from “threatened” to the more protected status “endangered” under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Wild-born chimpanzees have been fully protected under the ESA since they were classified as “endangered” in 1990, but chimps and other great apes in captivity have not enjoyed the same protection under what is known as the “captive-bred wildlife exception.” According to the Michigan State University College of Law’s Animal Legal & Historical Center, this means “people who register with FWS can legally export, re-import, sell and ‘take’ (including euthanize) their captive-bred apes as long as those activities enhance the survival of the species.” |
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Those activities include scientific research, exhibition (this applies to show-biz chimpanzees) or “holding and maintenance of ‘surplus’ apes (meaning those not immediately needed for scientific research or breeding).” The “threatened” designation also means that people can import, export or sell great apes with an FWS permit (pdf).
Chimpanzee research an endangered species as experts debate usefulness, ethics
13-08-2011 - The Washington Post
They were crucial for vaccines against hepatitis A and B. They took part in hundreds of early studies of HIV. And in 1961, two of them were shot into space. But the role of chimpanzees in medical research is at a crossroads. Last week, the highest scientific body in the land put the issue on trial as a committee of the Institute of Medicine, part of the congressionally chartered National Academy of Sciences, met to deliberate the fate of nearly all of the world’s remaining medical research chimps.
The European Union banned the practice last year, leaving the United States and Gabon as the only countries conducting medical research on chimpanzees. At drug companies, chimp research is waning with the emergence of lower-cost, higher-tech alternatives. “If you’re a scientist, a chimp is really a sort of last resort,” said Harold Watson, who directs the chimpanzee research program at the National Institutes of Health, which manages 734 of the nearly 1,000 medical research chimps in the United States.
Move of 14 older chimps to Texas research lab raises questions
13-08-2011 - The Washington Post
Infected with hepatitis C and HIV, suffering from chronic heart failure and living under a do-not-resuscitate order, Ken, 29, sits at the center of the battle over chimpanzee medical research. Last summer, the National Institutes of Health moved Ken and 13 other older chimps from a retirement facility in New Mexico to an active research laboratory in San Antonio, the Texas Biomedical Research Institute (formerly known as the Southwest Foundation for Medical Research). Activists say that the apes are too old and sick for research. They say the chimps should be removed from Texas Biomed. “We’re claiming that this is not a well-managed, safe, reliable facility for handling these animals,” said John Pippin, a cardiologist with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which promotes alternatives to animal research.
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Charla Nash's new face: chimp attack victim reveals new post-surgery face on 'today'
11-08-2011 - The Hunfington Post
Charla Nash, the woman who was horrifically mauled by a chimp in early 2009, is showing her new face for the first time on NBC's "Today" Thursday.
Nash, who is usually seen with a veil, showed the awful damage that a 200-pound chimp had done to her face when she revealed it on "Oprah" in 2009. The chimp, which was owned by a friend of Nash's, tore off her nose, hands, eyelids and lips.
Nash received a groundbreaking face transplant in Boston in May 2011. On Thursday, "Today" ran exclusive photos and video of Nash discussing the transplant, and her family sat down live with Ann Curry.
A planet for all apes
09-08-2011 - CNN
[...]
In the intervening years, that idea has made steady progress. Since 2010, the European Union has essentially banned the use of great apes in experiments. Experiments on great apes are now either banned or severely restricted in New Zealand, Australia, and Japan.
In the United States, a bipartisan group of members of Congress is supporting legislation to end the use of chimpanzees in invasive research. In Spain in 2008, a parliamentary resolution urged the government to grant some basic legal rights to great apes, but the Spanish government has yet to implement it.
Perhaps the release of these two very different films will lead to a further push to bring great apes within the circle of beings with moral and legal rights. In that way, our closest relatives could serve to bridge the moral gulf that we have dug between ourselves and other animals.
Stop using chimps as guinea pigs
10-08-2011
BEFORE I was elected to Congress, I was a physiologist at the Navy’s School of Aviation Medicine. For our successful missions to transport men to the moon and return them safely to Earth, I invented a series of respiratory support devices, which we tested on primates, including Baker, a squirrel monkey. Before humans were rocketed into space, Baker was the first primate to survive a trip into space and back; Able, her counterpart on the flight, died from an allergic reaction to an anesthetic during a procedure shortly after the landing.
At the time, I believed such research was worth the pain inflicted on the animals. But in the years since, our understanding of its effect on primates, as well as alternatives to it, have made great strides, to the point where I no longer believe such experiments make sense — scientifically, financially or ethically. That’s why I have introduced bipartisan legislation to phase out invasive research on great apes in the United States.
Primates as "pets"? Not on your life
19-07-2011 - HuffPostgreen
In bedrooms and backyards across America, people keep nonhuman primates as "pets." The desperate, misplaced need for this type of cruel companionship is alarming. Chimpanzees and monkeys belong not in our homes, but in the wild, and it is time for legislators in Washington, DC to take a firm stand against this epidemic.
Born Free USA is working to pass the federal Captive Primate Safety Act (S. 1324). Introduced on July 6 by U.S. Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), David Vitter (R-LA) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), the bill prohibits interstate commerce in nonhuman primates if they are destined for private ownership as pets. I hope this bill will become law before the end of the year. Senator Boxer said the ban is "long overdue." I could not agree more.
Why the Stamford chimp attacked
18-02-2009 - TimeScience
The ferocious attack by a chimpanzee of a woman in Stamford, Conn., on Feb. 16 wasn't a question of if but of when. The 200-lb. chimp named Travis, whose owner, Sandra Herold, 70, raised him as part of her own family, had no history of violence — aside from one incident in 2003, when he escaped and stopped traffic in Stamford for hours. But when Charla Nash, 55, a friend of Herold's, visited on Monday afternoon, Travis suddenly lashed out at her. The 14-year-old chimpanzee latched onto Nash's face and tore it apart. The victim's injuries were reportedly gruesome; the head paramedic who treated Nash on the scene told the New York Times that he had "never seen anything this dramatic on a living patient." Nash remains in extremely critical condition. The chimp was shot dead by a police officer, who was also attacked. |
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