Kindred Beings

by Sheri Speede

  The battles exacted a toll on both of them, but their wounds were mild compared to what I would see in some chimpanzees in years to come. I cleaned gaping bite wounds on Pepe’s back and arms, but nothing severe on his face. At first, Jacky didn’t seek my attention for his wounds the way Pepe did. I wanted to provide medical care to both chimps, although I was still wary of Jacky. When I called to him from the side of the cage, usually somewhat tentatively, he pretended to ignore me, although I sometimes knew he was watching me tend to Pepe’s wounds. I soon realized that by taking care of Pepe, but not Jacky, after their fights, I was playing a role in the social dynamic—giving support to Pepe in the unsettled conflict. I didn’t know how significant my role was, but in any case, I really did believe that Pepe would be a better leader of this little group that would soon expand. Pepe was the sane one, after all.

  However, after about three months at the sanctuary, Jacky’s stereotypical self-abuse had stopped almost completely, and he seemed like a different chimpanzee. One afternoon he surprised me by initiating a change in his relationship with me. I was just outside the cage grooming Becky through the bars, and Pepe was on the opposite side of the cage visiting with caregiver Akono. Jacky suddenly walked up next to where Becky sat across from me, and she considerately scooted over to make room for him. He was only two feet away from me, and although the cage wall separated us, the holes in the metal latticework of that first cage were large enough for his arms to fit through. Easily within range of his arms, I leaned back away from the cage reflexively, but I stayed seated. As Jacky faced me, he kept his eyes down, and I had no idea about his intention until the moment he turned to push the right side of his big black back against the cage wall. He was showing me the deep gash extending into his muscle under his right shoulder blade. I had seen the wound inflicted by Pepe during their last altercation two days earlier, but I hadn’t held any hope of treating it.

  I could hardly believe that Jacky was asking for my attention to the wound. He was choosing to trust me. It should have been natural for me to trust him in return, at least in this particular circumstance where he was asking for my help, but having seen how he had hurt people, I was still nervous. My heart raced as I examined the infected wound. As my shaking fingers touched the skin around it, I made rhythmic clacking, smacking noises with my mouth to reassure him. When Jacky relaxed into a comfortable sitting position, keeping his back to the cage wall, I relaxed a bit too. Worried that he would leave, I hesitated before walking to collect the disinfectant from the nearby table, but he waited patiently for me to return and allowed me to flush the debris and pus off the exposed muscle in the deep laceration. After that first occasion, Jacky solicited and received my attention to his wounds on his terms, when he decided he needed it.

  Finally, in April 2000, about a month before we brought Dorothy and Nama to the sanctuary, we released Jacky, Pepe, and Becky into their five acres of forest. The electric fence around the tract of forest consisted of thirty-two wires, each carrying eight thousand volts. Each of the three chimpanzees had reached through their cage and taken a nasty shock from the hot wires before we released them into the enclosure. I had designed the fence with some of the wires passing close to the cage so the chimpanzees would learn about its unpleasantness from the beginning. Because the wire fence itself was not a strong physical barrier and the electricity running through its wires could be grounded out by a falling tree or limb, it was important for the fence to be a strong psychological barrier. This aspect of the process, allowing them to naively touch the fence, was mean, but using electric fencing was the only way we could afford to give the chimpanzees their piece of the forest. By the time we opened the sliding door to let them go outside, they knew that touching the fence was a very bad idea.

  When caregiver Assou pulled open the sliding door for the first time, the chimpanzees didn’t know what to do at first. They rushed to huddle at the open door and then just peeped through at the expansive forest on the other side. Becky looked up at me quizzically like she thought it was a trick. “It’s okay, Beck. Go outside.” We had cut narrow crisscrossing trails that traversed the expanse of the lush forest, and we had cleared about two yards along the fence line so they could easily walk around the perimeter of their new territory. It was all waiting for them, and I could hardly wait to see them enjoy it. I advanced along the fence line and called to them over and over while they continued to think it over for several minutes. Finally, Jacky marched out bravely through the sliding door, but he only walked about five steps toward the forest before he turned to run back into the cage. In the end, Becky took the lead. Clearly afraid of the electric fence, she sat in the doorway and inched her head through it very slowly to look up at the hot wires over her head. When she was sure that there really was an open path from where she sat to the forest, she made a run for it. By the time Jacky and then Pepe had followed her out, she was already climbing a tall tree. I started walking along my side of the fence line and called them to follow. The immediate pitter-patter of Pepe’s feet on the firm red dirt told me that he was with me before I could turn my head to see him. Jacky and Becky followed after him, and we walked—side by side—them in single file on one side of the fence, me just a few feet away on the other—around the enclosure for the first of many, many times.

  After lengthy consideration I had decided that the chimpanzees would spend their days in the forest, and we would try to bring them into the satellite cage to sleep at night. While I wanted them to have a natural life, I had good reasons for wanting them to sleep inside. First, if a storm came and dropped a tree or branch that grounded out the fence while we humans were sleeping, I didn’t want to worry about where the chimps were in the morning. Second, getting the chimpanzees to sleep inside the cage would spare the forest of their enclosure. Night nests can be destructive to trees, and if the chimps nested outside every night, they would eventually break down their tract of forest. This would be especially true when we enlarged the group. And third, bringing our beloved chimpanzees into the cage every evening would allow us to know if anyone was sick or injured.

  Long before we finished the electric enclosure and let Jacky, Pepe, and Becky into it, we began beating our drum at each mealtime. What we called our “drum” was actually a five-gallon plastic container that made a loud noise when our caregivers hit it with a stick. They tapped out the same rat-a-tat-tat pattern every day, just before each meal, so the chimps understood it signaled the serving of food. Now that they were going outside, we used it successfully to call them back to the cage for meals. When they came into the cage for dinner at the end of each day, we closed the sliding door until morning, and no one among the three ever objected. They seemed to be perfectly comfortable with the schedule.

  I soon learned my own healthy respect of the electric fence the hard way. One day when I was kneeling close to the fence taking photos of the three chimpanzees, I made the mistake of touching one of the hot wires with both my knees. I was knocked back on my behind and I must have yelled, although with the force of the shock, which sounded like a gun going off in my head, I couldn’t tell if I made any noise. When I caught my breath, I looked out into the empathetic, concerned faces of Jacky, Pepe, and Becky. They had run up to the fence and were now watching me very closely. Of course they understood what had happened to me. “I’m okay, guys.” I stood up to demonstrate. I was fine, but my ears were ringing and I needed to take a break for a while.

  I hoped none of these chimps I loved would ever touch the fence again. I hoped that their new home would be rich and wonderful and that they would never want to leave it—would never risk getting shocked. The relatively vast territory within the enclosure offered so much more to explore and enjoy—leaves, bark, insects, an expansive view from high in the canopy—than they had ever known. I had left my own home and dramatically changed my life in order to give it to them, and when I was with them here I didn’t regret it in the slightest.

  Eleven

  Fat
eful Alliances

  Dorothy and Nama spent their first three months at the sanctuary together in a satellite cage with two chambers. Only one chamber connected to the enclosure where Pepe, Jacky, and Becky spent their days. We had tested Dorothy and Nama for tuberculosis before bringing them from Luna Park, but I wanted to treat them thoroughly for parasites and keep them separated from the other chimpanzees past the incubation periods of most infectious diseases. The standard medical quarantine period for primates in sanctuaries was three months. Ours was a loose form of quarantine. Jacky, Pepe, and Becky could emerge from the forest to see Dorothy and Nama and to vocalize with them whenever they felt like it, but they couldn’t get too close to them. It was a good beginning for a gradual social integration.

  Initially, the vocal overtures of Jacky, Pepe, and Becky were threatening barks. They frightened Dorothy terribly. She screamed and took comfort in the arms of much smaller Nama, who from the beginning seemed more curious than afraid. When we had first released the two long-suffering females into the cage together, they had stayed several feet apart for a few minutes. I had expected them to fly into each other’s arms and was surprised when they didn’t, but I concluded that they just weren’t accustomed to getting comfort from one another that way. When Nama finally made an overture toward Dorothy, the latter welcomed her with open arms, and then they embraced over and over. During this transition period at the sanctuary, when they were in the cage alone together, Dorothy and Nama cemented a lasting and loyal friendship that would never waver.

  The thirteen feet of vertical space in the satellite cage, with platforms at various levels, provided opportunities for Dorothy and Nama to climb and strengthen the muscles in their arms. Nama took full advantage and grew stronger by the day, but Dorothy didn’t climb much. I thought the chain had grounded her for too many decades. Nonetheless, as the days passed Dorothy seemed happy to groom with Nama and to interact with her caregivers, the volunteers, and me from where we would sit just outside the cage. I tried to provide as much enrichment as possible. They had been traumatized by a decades-long nightmare, and though this new environment afforded them the freedom of movement they hadn’t known since they were juveniles, and allowed them to engage as often as they liked in the most important chimpanzee social activities of grooming and hugging, they were still in a cage. It was much less than they deserved, and I delighted in making them happy in any way I could.

  One cool morning when it had rained the night before, Dorothy and Nama were both shivering when we delivered their breakfast at seven o’clock. Seeing that they were cold, I rushed back to the camp to make them some hot tea. Their breakfast that morning had included a half baguette each of French bread, simply called long bread by the locals. Roger Odier had brought a big bag of it from Bélabo. When I handed them their plastic cups of tea, which barely fit through the holes in the cage wall, a half hour after the breakfast had been given, Nama took a sip and then immediately reached around behind her to retrieve the uneaten half of long bread she had left on the cage floor. Without a moment’s hesitation—she knew exactly what she was doing—she dipped the end of the big piece of bread into her cup of tea and bit off the soaked part, grunting with delight as she enjoyed the special treat. While her mouth was full and chewing, her eyes found mine for a brief glance of gratitude before she turned her full attention to the sweet indulgence.

  Dipping bread in coffee is customary among many Cameroonians, a breakfast tradition shared with them by French colonizers. As a juvenile, Nama must have lived in a house among people, either French or African, who had dipped their bread—possibly the family of Luna Park proprietors, which had kept her cruelly chained for so many years. Someone must have shared the practice with her when she was young, and she still remembered it after so many years.

  During those first months when Dorothy and Nama were in the satellite cage, I indulged them with the tea and bread breakfast after each of our weekly trips to the small bakery in Bélabo. At first, Dorothy ate her bread dry and sipped her tea separately, but after a couple of weeks, she too was enjoying her bread soaked with tea. She, however, used a different method. Instead of dunking and biting from the end of a big piece of bread as Nama did, Dorothy pinched off small pieces, dipped them into her cup of tea, and plopped the whole morsels into her mouth, chewing and swallowing them one at a time. As a captured infant, decades earlier, had Dorothy too watched humans eat this way? Had she herself partaken of tea or coffee with bread? It could have explained her different dunking method. Or perhaps she simply got the idea from Nama and adapted her own way of bread dipping. Of course, I had no way of knowing, but I wondered about it as I watched them sitting quietly together, using different dunking methods to enjoy their bread with tea.

  Another clue that Nama had lived in a house was her propensity for cleaning. One morning I arrived at the cage to discover that Nama was holding a washcloth-size piece of one of the big blankets I had left for her and Dorothy. I didn’t see whether she had torn it off intentionally with a purpose in mind, but she was guarding it carefully. Later in the morning when the caregivers poured water and soap on the cement of the cage to perform their daily cleaning, Nama used her cloth to help them scrub, periodically wringing soapy water from it. Our staff used brushes and brooms to clean the cages, so Nama hadn’t learned to use cloth from them. She had seen that somewhere else, and it had been many years earlier that she had seen it. No one had been cleaning the dirt where she was chained for sixteen years.

  After three months of visual contact, with the period of medical quarantine over, I allowed Dorothy and Nama to interact with Jacky, Pepe, and Becky through the side of the cage that connected to the forested enclosure. Nama made friends with the two males quickly, and with Becky a little more slowly. In the early days of the integration, her relationship with Pepe was playful. She often lay on her back, up against the cage wall, squirming and laughing heartily as Pepe reached through the cage with both hands to gently poke and pinch her belly and the backs of her thighs. In those moments, Nama was a kid again. With Jacky, she groomed more often than played. Nama and Becky sat calmly within each other’s proximity, sometimes grooming, often just sitting.

  Unfortunately, Dorothy was socially awkward. Like Nama, she had not been part of a chimpanzee society since she was an infant, but with Dorothy it had been decades earlier. In addition, Dorothy may have felt disabled by her obesity and general lack of physical prowess—conditions imposed on her by a high-fat diet of palm nuts and the chain that prohibited all exercise. Whatever the reasons, Dorothy didn’t know how to act with other chimpanzees, and making friends was hard for her. She took much longer than Nama to approach the cage interface where the other chimps beckoned. Although she developed friendly relations with Jacky and Pepe, her tentative shyness irritated Becky, who often barked and threw dirt at her. Within the protected cage, Dorothy could keep her distance from Becky, but our goal was to have them all in the forest together.

  Fearing that we might never see the kind of positive affiliation between Becky and Dorothy that would lead me to feel 100 percent comfortable about putting the five chimps together, I decided to move forward with the physical integration one step at a time. I felt sure that Nama was ready to go out in the forest with the others, and I didn’t want to keep Dorothy inside alone.

  The hot wires of the electric fence ran close to their cage, and Nama had touched it. I never saw Dorothy touch it, and neither did her caregivers. She may have touched it when we weren’t around, or she could have taken Nama’s advice that she shouldn’t.

  I started by allowing Nama and Dorothy into the forested enclosure with Pepe, keeping Jacky and Becky in their satellite cage for the afternoon. It was easy to get them in the cage, because we normally beat the drum to call them all for food twice during the day and to come in for dinner at the end of the day. When Jacky and Becky came in for their two o’clock snack, we locked the sliding door behind them. They didn’t mind too much since they had been out a
ll morning. This choice of leading the integration effort with Pepe reflected my bias that he would be the better leader of the group. When we opened the sliding door of Dorothy and Nama’s cage, Pepe squeezed past Nama to enter the cage as she eagerly ran out of it. Immediately he turned and followed her out, staying playfully on her heels as she trotted around in front of the cage, laughing gleefully. After these few moments of elation, Nama realized that Dorothy was afraid to come out of the cage. Reaching out her arm, palm up, she beckoned her less confident friend. Noisily and with a grimace of fear, Dorothy responded. Like she was taking a desperate, fearful plunge into a pool, she rushed through the door screaming into Nama’s, and then Pepe’s, waiting arms. Pepe was gentle and kind that first day.

  With Pepe in the lead, the three started down the foliage-free dirt path that ran along the fence line. Jacky, Pepe, and Becky had maintained the footpath with their regular patrols of the fence perimeter, so it seemed natural that Pepe wanted to take Dorothy and Nama along the path. I followed along on the opposite side of the fence. Dorothy hadn’t walked more than a few feet at a time in decades, and when she fell behind, panting and sweating, it was Pepe who came back to her. From Dorothy’s right side, Pepe wrapped his big, muscular arm around her back and under her left arm to pull her along, encouraging her to continue. With his help, Dorothy made it the half a mile around the enclosure periphery, past the satellite cage from where Jacky and Becky watched quietly but with great interest, and back to snacks and water in the cage. Afterward, while Dorothy rested in the cage, Nama and Pepe entered the forest, out of her sight and mine, for several hours. While Dorothy watched eagerly for Nama’s return, she didn’t seem distressed by her absence. At the five o’clock dinner hour we beat our plastic “drum” to let Pepe and Nama know that food was being served at the cages. Hearing the familiar beckon, Nama returned to a happy welcome from Dorothy, while Pepe returned to the cage he shared with Jacky and Becky. All in all, I felt that Dorothy’s and Nama’s first day in the forested enclosure with Pepe had gone very well.