Debra Rosenman, ed. The Chimpanzee Chronicles: Stories of Heartbreak and Hope from Behind
the Bars. Santa Fe, NM: Wild Soul Press, 2020. ISBN: 978-1-7324651-0-7.
$28U.S. paper. 378 pages. Illustrated.
“It’s a difficult and complicated relationship on both
sides of the cage.” Diana Goodrich (194).
I didn’t know what to expect before reading this
book, and I’ve been reared for at least a decade on scientific papers and
monographs by primatologists and anthropologists, including field narratives
like those by Jane Goodall, Biruté Galdikas, Dian Fossey, and Shirley Strum. I
was not prepared for the words in these pages. Why? Although many of the
contributors to the volume are qualified professional researchers,
veterinarians, psychologists, primatologists, and anthropologists, the
narratives offer a much needed qualitative and not merely a quantitative
perspective. By the time I finished the book, I had gained intimate knowledge not
only of the characters of the authors but also of the ape persons they cared
for. For anyone interested in animal studies or ethics, particularly of great
apes, this book is necessary reading. For anyone interested in human-ape
communication, using that word broadly, this is an impressive book. While there
is indeed some joy and hope in these pages, I must admit you’d have to possess
an ironclad emotional constitution to get to the end without having shed tears
of sadness.
Drawing from Rosenman’s overview in her
introduction, the book reveals the physical, psychological, and emotional lives
of captive chimpanzees, whether in the U.S. space program, biomedical labs, the
entertainment industry, or as part of trafficking to become pets or zoo
spectacles. In one instance, we learn that a lab in Texas housed three thousand
baboons and hundreds of chimpanzees at once, staggering numbers. The historical
arc of the book is excellent. Many of the contributors offer for the
uninitiated a timeline of how chimps were used, and where, across facilities in
the U.S. and elsewhere. Moreover, the chronicling continues with the lives of
particular apes after their persecution as lab subjects or humiliation as
circus performers to their experiences in sanctuaries. The book reinforces how
each ape person has an individual personality and temperament with his or her
own quirky needs and desires. Contrary to the flawed philosophy of seeing “animals”
as automatons without souls, this book demonstrates qualitatively (and
quantitatively) that great apes are indeed persons in the full sense of that
word.
Commercial deforestation deprives chimpanzees of
essential foods and habitats. Families are slaughtered so babies can be sold
into captivity, and then the dead apes become bushmeat for someone’s meal. In
the early twentieth century, Rosenman goes on, there were about one million chimpanzees
in the wild; today, a high estimate puts them at about three hundred thousand. Human
encroachment devastating chimpanzee lands spreads disease, and yet, not without
irony, the chimps in labs had been used for decades as test subjects for drugs
to treat a range of human ailments, from HIV and AIDS to Hepatitis. As I write,
primates are being used as subjects for a Covid-19 vaccine. One dreadful facility that comes up repeatedly is
the now shuttered Coulston Foundation lab in New Mexico, where maltreatment of
chimps occurred routinely. Another facility, also closed, that pops up across
contributors is the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in
Primates, N.Y., which in 1988 had nearly one thousand primates and about three
hundred chimps. The name alone gives you an idea of the Frankenstein torment
that transpired behind those concrete, cellblock walls. Early on, when chimps
became test subjects, there were no care or welfare protocols – experimenters
had free reign, separating babies from mothers, engaging primates in painful
and intrusive operations, subjecting each of them to hundreds of rounds of
anesthesia, and forcing all of them to endure a solitary life in a small cage
with little or no mental stimulation or psychological nourishment. In one
account, a chimp was under anesthesia for seventeen consecutive days. As
Rosenman rightly says, clearly the researchers were totally unaware of how the
apes lived, their wants, or simply did not care. If chimps and other apes were
the subjects of medical experimentation because they are so like us, to
paraphrase a paradox of primatologist Frederick King, then wouldn’t that
likeness be a reason not to
experiment on them?
I cannot offer a synopsis of the many contributors
to this remarkable, award-winning book – my scribbled notes amount to twelve
pages, and I did not even record as much detail as I could have. Besides, I
don’t want to give away any “plots” but, instead, encourage readers to purchase
the book and read for themselves. Part of the proceeds go to chimpanzee causes.
This is a substantial contribution to our understanding of ape lives in
captivity. While there is some overlap across the contributors, I think that
was a strategic approach by the editor. Certain ideas and themes are effectively
repeated, but from different angles depending on the perspective of the writer.
To my reading, there is a lot of wisdom in this book about interspecies
communication and caring. Captivity comes up often, including guilt by the caregivers
for confining chimps who know humans are free. Individuality is also a
recurring theme. As for ideas, there’s an underlying assumption in these pages
that “animals” (a horrid word) are not on earth for human convenience or
exploitation. Another theme that repeats strongly is how incredibly forgiving
of their human captors apes tend to be; there’s a lesson in there for all of us.
As you read, it becomes clear that the apes were
victims of abuse. In one story (Gloria Grow), Jeannie had been experimented on
for fifteen years and suffered a breakdown. In this broken condition, the
facility she was in decided to euthanize her, but she was rescued to live her
remaining years in the comfort of a sanctuary. A filmmaker (Allison Argo) tells
about her trip to the infamous Coulston lab after its 2002 bankruptcy. Carole
Noon, a primatologist who was then in control, literally broke down walls so
the inmate chimps could roam freely and socialize instead of facing persistent confinement
in very small cages. The film would document the chimpanzee transfers out of
the facility to sanctuaries witnessing, even in the aftermath, overwhelming
injustice.
Some of these narratives (Debby Cox) understate the
immense amount of physical strain and emotional stress these exceptional humans
endured in rescuing or relocating chimps. Readers cannot help but feel
heartened that there are indeed courageous and virtuous people among us working
for the benefit of all living creatures. One of the authors (Jenny Desmond)
tells the harrowing story of the sixty six chimps literally abandoned, by the
N.Y. Blood Center, on an island off the coast of Liberia. This was big news at
the time, and keep in mind that in addition to facing starvation and
dehydration, these chimp persons had been subject to years of experimentation,
like countless liver biopsies. One writer (Mark Bodamer) says that the director
at one lab facility viewed the inmate primates as little more than “hairy test
tubes” (232). The cruelty is almost beyond comprehension, salved only by the
stories of restoration.
In many of the stories, we learn that female chimps
were used as “breeders,” and their babies would be taken from them soon after
birth. In the wild, great ape infants, like humans, require a prolonged span of
caring years. As Jenny Desmond is correct to say, “grief and sorrow transcend
all differences between species...” (80). One contributor using a pseudonym is
a whistleblower having worked at a biomedical lab where there was such
insensitivity that part or all of a chimp’s organ would be removed. This
facility provided no enrichment for the primates and those running the lab
exhibited a total lack of empathy. Male macaques who protected their young were
disciplined. Baby monkeys were taken from their mothers at birth, put in black
boxes, and used in eye research – nearsightedness, for which we have corrective
lenses! While not explicitly stated through the book, but certainly touched on
from time to time, funding dollars were important to facilities for experiments
that likely duplicated research already done or for studies with no proven
purpose.
More than a few of the contributors who started
sanctuaries did not work from a blueprint. Their commitment to animal welfare
or rescue eventually blossomed into new directions, sometimes haphazardly, but
always with noble intentions and good outcomes. In one turnaround (Lesley Day),
the writer who had bought a baby primate started shopping for an infant chimp
when the monkey died. This led her to a breeder, and utterly dismayed at the
living conditions of the apes, many in states of depression, she decided on a
rescue mission to start her own sanctuary. Importantly, the best sanctuaries
are set up so that chimps can make choices about socializing and enrichment for
themselves. Some of the accounts involve those who went into biomedical labs
with the sole purpose of helping care for babies separated from their mothers
or setting up enrichment programs for the chimps while training the
technicians. Painfully, it’s not clear how much of these efforts lasted after
the interventions absent stringent legislative guidelines to enforce.
These stories of physical abuse and mental trauma
are difficult to read but necessary as part of the historical record, to ensure
that we try to eliminate whatever remnants of this experimentation still exists
and prevent it from ever happening again. Across many of these authors one
reads how the chimps and other primates spend decades upon decades – their
entire lives – in cramped cages behind cinder block walls. Nevertheless, there
are also buds of color in the stories of rescue and integration into
sanctuaries where many of the authors make meaningful connections with our
primate cousins. Some of the more painful accounts to read are those involving
apes who learned how to use sign language. They could communicate not only their
thoughts but their innermost feelings, and quite often we read how they ask an
interlocutor to unlock the cage and set them free. Their lives of captivity
deprive them of many natural tendencies, like roaming and foraging, and
experiences, like socializing with conspecifics. However, reading what apes
have to say and how they feel will be a breakthrough moment for many readers
unfamiliar with primate intelligence.
I cannot but marvel at the moral integrity of this
editor and these authors, many of whom made (and continue to make) great
sacrifices as they work to provide care for sentient and sapient beings. This
is an important book since it questions our ethical obligations after having
captured or bred apes without their consent. We are not powerless. In the words
of contributor Rosa Garriga: “One person cannot change the world, but small
gestures from many people can go a long way” (131). So in some respects this
book is also a call to action. Work on behalf of our fellow creatures; speak
out; enlist the help of others; donate what you can, either money or time; lend
moral support to causes for animal welfare; consider a vegan ethos.
- Gregory F. Tague, Ph.D.,
Professor of English/Interdisciplinary Studies and founder of The Evolutionary
Studies Collaborative, St. Francis College. Author, most recently, of An Ape Ethic and the Question of Personhood
(2020).
Copyright©2020 by Gregory F. Tague. All Rights
Reserved
