>> Former lab chimps and other cast-off critters find sanctuary at the Fauna Foundation

by MARK SLUTSKY
photos by JASON FELKER

Billy Jo’s teeth were shattered with a crowbar, and fits of anxiety would later cause him to chew off his thumbs and an index finger. Rachel’s cheeks were cut out and coated in saccharine. Tom was inoculated with HIV and would later lose 56 chunks of his liver to “punch biopsies.” Yoko went through 144 punch liver biopsies and for two months was knocked out every two days, all while sustaining a high fever. Donna Rae went through pain so intense she would slip into a state of shock.

These five unfortunates are all chimpanzees, animals who genetically most closely resemble us. Their lives, and the lives of the eight others they live with, have taken strange journeys, with decades spent in circuses and labs, performing tricks and undergoing constant experimentation. But for five years now, these 13 chimps have found a new, considerably kinder home at the Fauna Foundation, a 150-acre farm on the South Shore run by Gloria Grow and her veterinarian husband, Richard Allan.

Expanding menagerie

In 1990 Montrealers Grow and Allan purchased the farm after, according to Grow, “Our house just got too small for all the animals we had living there.” For several years the two would rescue unwanted animals: ageing zoo creatures, horses on the way to the meatpacking factory, overgrown pets. “When I was approaching 40,” says Grow, “I wanted to do even more for animals than just look after them. I wanted to get involved in animal rights.”

It was at about this time, in 1997, that the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine in Surgery in Primates (LEMSIP), in Albany, New York, shut down in the face of growing opposition to primate research. The facility had housed around 200 chimps, and they all needed homes. Grow and Allan made their decision after being tipped off to the situation by Dr. Roger Fouts, of Washington’s Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute (CHCI)-where, incidentally, chimps are taught sign language.

“We had the budget,” says Allan. “I had the money, and we said, we’ll build [the habitat] if you give us the chimps.” Funded almost entirely by Allan’s successful Greenfield Park veterinary practice, the chimp house was built at a price tag high in the six-figure range. Looking like a cross between a playground, a condo development and a high security prison, the place has, for the last five years, been the home to 15 rescued chimpanzees (two, Pablo and Annie, are recently deceased). Located in Charignan, near Chambly, it’s the only facility of its kind in Canada, and one of only three in North America.

Lost tribe

The chimps have all been scarred to some extent, both physically and psychologically, by the years they spent in the labs, most often living in cages roughly the size of a large outhouse. Pablo, who died last year, had chronic infections all over his body. One of his testicles had atrophied due to lost circulation, and his intestines, in the words of Fauna worker Diana Goodrich, “were a mess. They were adhered to the walls of his body and in places they were adhered together.”

With fellow worker Jon Mulcahy, Goodrich takes care of the chimps’ day-to-day needs. Goodrich and Mulcahy both did their master’s degrees in experimental psychology at CHCI; Goodrich studied play behaviour, and Mulcahy studied the opposite, the tense and communicatively complex several minutes before a fight.

Though they’ve only been at Fauna for a couple of years, it’s been enough to witness the lasting trauma and its effects on the chimps, like self-destructive behaviour (nail-biting, hair pulling), and daily throwdowns between chimps where the entire building seems to shake with loud, agitated howling.

“When they first got here they were totally shut down. They were not chimps-they weren’t anything that was like a chimpanzee. I don’t know how you’d describe them. Not anything like humans, not anything else,” says Arryn Ketter, a McGill law student originally from Sudbury, Ontario. Ketter’s been volunteering at the Foundation for around five years now, and she’s taken on the status of an honorary employee.

Ketter knows all the chimps by name, and is familiar enough with their personalities to have some idea of their complexity. “Now they’re like a tribe of individuals who’ve had their culture taken away,” she continues. “So they’re living in this culture that doesn’t really accommodate them that well, but they have to get used to it.”

The chimps range in age: the lab-born Binky and Jethro are both 13; the group’s eldest, the greying old Tom, was born in Africa sometime in the ’60s. Some of the chimps, like Billy Jo, started out in entertainment; travelling circuses and the like, where losing their teeth might be one of many abuses (“To get chimps to do the same stupid thing over and over again you’ve got to get them pretty damn scared of you,” notes Ketter). All would eventually end up at LEMSIP.

Risky business

Those who work in close contact with the chimpanzees, to a certain extent, put themselves at risk. Several of the chimps are HIV-positive, and while the risk of transmission is small, it is real. Ketter, having been around them for years, is almost casual about it: “I don’t have sex with them and I don’t share needles with them. I’m not going to get it any other way. If you get a bite, you’re going to have so much blood flowing out, it’s never going to travel back in.”

But Grow is more cautious. “The problem is you stop worrying about it, and that’s when it becomes really dangerous. You’re not always on guard. It’s not something we think about every day, but it is something we absolutely should be thinking about every single day. Like we worry about them escaping every day, or about the chimps being sick every day.”

A far more likely disaster would be a staff member being clobbered by a chimp, intentionally or not. For that reason, and because of the chimps’ enormous strength-estimated at up to seven times the strength of a human-Fauna staff and volunteers never enter an occupied chimp cage. They’re always a set of bars away.

“I think probably any one of us could go inside,” says Ketter. “I don’t think they would hurt us-they certainly wouldn’t hurt us intentionally. But they play pretty rough, so you could be hurt unintentionally. And then of course there’s the worry that a fight might break out and you’d get caught in it. You’re totally inadequate for a chimpanzee fight.”

Trouble in town

Looking after HIV-positive chimps in a rural area like Charignan hasn’t always been easy, public-relations-wise. When the Foundation first acquired the chimps, says Allan, “the city agreed to it because there was nothing in the by-laws that said you couldn’t have chimpanzees. Then they got really pissed off when they found out that they were HIV-positive. That’s when the shit started.”

Neighbours worried that the virus might be transmitted through drinking water, or even through the air. But the health board deemed that there was no danger given certain precautions, so the chimp house went up.

There was still opposition to their plans, though, on the part of the city council, who blocked permits the Foundation applied for to improve the land. Grow feels that a degree of opposition still exists, even though there’s been a new municipal government in place since elections in 1999. She believes that some city folk still have what she calls a “ridiculous mission” against them, due to what she perceives as anti-chimp prejudice.

But Marguerite Roussel, a Charignan town councillor and Fauna volunteer, has a different view. “There are a lot of things we can’t approve because they’re not in the by-laws,” she says. She claims the real problem exists with the Commision de protection du territoire agricole du Québec, who don’t approve of Fauna farmland being used for non-agricultural means. In other words, they can’t understand why they keep animals without using them for food.

“The committee is very stupid,” she says, “because they say they can’t have animals if they’re not for production.” She claims the city is often stymied at a higher bureaucratic level, but, essentially, “We really approve of what they’re doing.”

The captors’ contradiction

The sad contradiction at the heart of the Fauna Foundation is that as much as the staff and volunteers obviously love the animals, and as well as they treat them, they are still, essentially, their jailers. Though the chimps’ lives are undoubtedly much improved at Fauna, they’re still far from ideal. They still live in what is essentially a cage, albeit a comfortable one where they can watch TV and eat popsicles. The chimps themselves probably don’t realize how little they’d last out in the wild, but like anything that lives in a cage, they’d rather not be behind bars. “They’re locked up every day, and they’re bitter and angry about it,” says Grow. Often they’ll point to the locks on the doors as if asking to be let out.

For many reasons, though, there’s just no way to release them. Having lived in captivity for all their lives, the chimps lack the simple survival skills necessary for survival in the wild. They’d starve to death, or approach poachers in hopes of getting a treat. What’s more, chimp-habitable wilderness areas are rapidly disappearing as farmers burn forests to create pasture for grazing cattle, or as lumber companies grab loads of valuable wood. “Africa’s being chopped down and turned into lumber so that you can have some nice piece of furniture,” says Grow.

But Grow believes the chimps have a real role to play at Fauna: “They are the ambassadors. It doesn’t mean they’re any more special-pigs are still my favourite animals-but the chimps have a different role. They have a job, actually. They have a huge mission in life and they can do something really special for other animals.”

Since most people can relate to a chimp more than to a pig, it’s Grow’s belief that contact with them can raise people’s awareness about animal rights issues. “When the chimps came along, people from all over the world started writing and calling, wanting to meet the chimps,” she says. “It was like this door opening, and it proved to me, 100 per cent, that chimps truly are the animals’ ambassadors. People really care a lot about them, and when they come here they’re sort of forced to see the farm animals.

They go away far more educated than they ever would have been. And all because of the chimps.” :

Wild kingdom >> Other animals at Fauna

Behind the bars >> A look at some of the Fauna Foundation’s star residents