World Wild Vet

by Evan Antin

  Lwiro’s director, Itsaso Vélez del Burgo, led me to the one place that could definitely keep me wide awake: the nursery. And when I say “nursery,” I’m not kidding. These chimps are between six months and three years old, and they truly look and act like human toddlers in chimpanzee suits. They’re a little stronger and a little rougher than children, but the way they laugh and play and interact with one another, the way they get sleepy or grumpy or snuggly—it’s like looking at any other bunch of “kids” at preschool.

  The chimps have caretakers with them all the time, feeding the babies, cuddling the youngsters who need loving contact, redirecting the troublemakers, and constantly steering all of them to form bonds with each other. The caretakers do their best to mother the orphans so they can survive, heal, and become part of the chimp family at the center. If these animals are ever going to be able to be released into the wild, they need to have a bonded family of their own. Since every one of these chimps has a story similar to Mussa’s—a violent murder, a lost family, a rescue, a trip to Lwiro—the only way they’re ever going to have those bonds is by building them with each other.

  I desperately wanted to go into the enclosure and play, but since these babies are meant to return to the wild, it’s best to limit human contact. Itsaso also reminded me that even though the chimps were mostly gentle with the teachers who were with them every day, they would probably want to play rough with me. Primates all over the world typically perceive me as a big, sturdy male, suitable for climbing and poking and roughhousing. Chimps in general, even juveniles, are much stronger than humans—typically about four times stronger. The secret to that difference in strength is in the way their muscles are constructed, with the fibers closest to their bones longer and denser than ours. And while those muscles pack a lot more punch than ours, the delivery is not as finessed—meaning sometimes a chimp swats at something (or somebody) and hits it (or me) much harder than is necessary to make their point. Even these young chimpanzees could harm a person if they wanted to, and even their “play” bites can inflict gnarly injuries.

  So I sat outside the enclosure, and it turned out that I still had whatever “it” factor it is that makes so many of these guys want to be my friend. After just minutes of waiting, a young chimp with huge eyes waddled my way, gave me a wide-open gummy smile, and eased up to the other side of the fence. Itsaso warned me that this little girl was usually shy, so I just watched and waited. She was pretty subtle about it for a baby chimp, but she did want to get close to me, and I spoke softly through the fence to her until the other babies got curious about the new person in their home. The second was a lot bolder, demanding my attention instead of politely asking, and blocking the rest of the chimps from getting too close until the novelty of holding my attention wore off. When he finally got tired of me, a third chimp approached. He leaned toward the fence, resting his head against it, and looked straight into my eyes with his stern baby face. Itsaso, behind me, quietly said, “This is Mussa.”

  This was the chimp from Anthony Caere’s video, the chimp who’d sat on his lap and cuddled him and won the heart of the world with how adorable and vulnerable and trusting he was on his way to the rescue. This completed the full circle for me. In the months since I’d seen that video, the sweet, gentle chimp who’d watched the clouds go by in the cockpit had come into his own. Mussa had actually become quite a little handful for his caretakers at the rehab center. He loved to engage and was an instigator, looking to get attention any way he could.

  I said, “Hey, Mussa, it’s great to meet you, man,” and in response, he pushed his hand through the fence, reaching for my hand.

  Looking at this playful, trusting little guy, I could still make out the marks where he’d been tied up as a captive. On arrival, the majority of the chimps at Lwiro have open wounds, scabs, and scars from being bound with rope around their waists. Some have also been tied around their necks. Many of the chimps suffer psychological damage, so some don’t want to be touched and others pull out their hair or, at first, refuse to eat. As they realize that they are going to be treated gently and given their independence, most of them start to bond, sometimes first with each other, sometimes with the caretakers who feed them.

  But like Mussa, some of these chimps actually arrive completely open to being loved. While I was at Lwiro, a new chimp was rescued and brought to the center. Her arrival will stick with me forever. This little girl, orphaned and alone, had traveled for hours in a plastic crate. Watching that crate be unloaded, I wondered what could be going through her mind. She looked so patient—waiting and wondering. We know chimps grieve and experience complex emotions, but she looked calm.

  I don’t know what I was expecting when the door of this crate was opened. Maybe that the chimp would cower in the corner, afraid to come out. Maybe that she’d come barreling through and try to get away. Or maybe that she’d be angry and fly at the face of the first person she saw, swinging her little limbs and baring her teeth in rage and frustration.

  None of those things happened. Instead, a young veterinarian on the Lwiro team knelt down in front of the crate, reached up and unclasped the door, then sat back and waited. The door swung open and this little chimp eased slowly out, tilted her head to look up at the man, opened her arms wide, and reached up for a hug. This chimp leaned all the way into the embrace of the rescuer who’d freed her, resting her head on the man’s chest, nuzzling against him.

  Take my heart and stomp on it. After all the bullshit and agony my own species had put this baby girl through, she still just wanted to be loved.

  I knew the chimp would be loved and taken care of at Lwiro, but the question that kept hitting me over and over again was Why can’t she just be with her mom?

  Standing by my side, witnessing the welcome of this chimp to her new home, was Anthony Caere. Of course he’d been the pilot to fly her to safety.

  We sat down to get to know each other. In that place and in those circumstances, however, it was almost impossible to turn our thoughts to anything but the chimps.

  The illegal pet trade in this species is a sick, ridiculous machine, built on the idea that apes make desirable pets or that they’re great entertainers. News flash: chimpanzees may just be the worst pets on the planet. Yes, they are unbelievably endearing when they’re babies. But by age five (if not sooner), most chimps (still juveniles) are stronger than most adult humans. Soon after that, they reach sexual maturity, and high levels of sexual hormones like testosterone make them all the more dangerous.

  FYI: sexual maturity is the most common period when young wild and exotic animals (primates but also raccoons, wild cats, and so many others) stop being passive and rapidly grow out of their cuteness. They start having minds of their own and resenting being told what to do. They play rough; they break things. They shit wherever they feel like it, and they have a nasty habit of throwing that shit around—playfully, angrily, or out of boredom. Chimps bite. They slap. They hit. They can purposely or accidentally hurt or even kill a human owner.

  Of all the creatures on earth, the one I’d least want to be trapped in a small space with is a chimp, because they’re the reason the expression “Go ape” exists. Jane Goodall even noted in her books that chimps appear to have very little empathy. They are capable of violent and horrifying treatment of one another. I’d rather be up against a big cat or a bear or a hippo. Any animal can be ruthless when it’s being territorial, but there’s a logic to that. Grown chimps, though, are capable of flat-out sadism and have been witnessed cruelly taunting and even torturing others of their kind. At least any of those other dangerous animals would kill you fast.

  Oh yeah: and they live, on average, about fifty years.

  Why on earth would anybody want one of these creatures for a pet? Because they saw a picture of a baby chimp sitting on someone’s lap, playing with a child’s toy, or wearing a child’s clothes. Adorable? You bet. Good idea? Absolutely not.

  Awesome Alpha

  Lwiro has two
huge enclosures for its growing chimp population. The first is for adolescents, and as we walked along the outside of it, Itsaso told me about the histories of some of the residents. Like people, chimps have widely varied personalities, so some of these guys came running up to the fence to see me or reach out to touch my hand. Others hung back, shy and a lot more reluctant to get close to a stranger. I’m sure there were others I didn’t see at all, safely tucked back in the heavily vegetated section of the enclosure.

  The second enclosure is the home of the growing Pori family. At the time of my visit, the group was thirty-five individuals strong. The enclosure itself is massive—over six acres—and it encompasses grassland, jungle, and a running stream with fresh water. It is the closest thing to being in the wild that is possible for these rescued chimps, and they have a ton of room to roam within its borders.

  Some of the chimps were curious, and others were hungry, heading my way for the handfuls of corn, bananas, beans, and zucchini I had to share with them. Itsaso kept us steadily moving, though, until we stood across the fence from Kongo, the alpha. He was big for a chimp, probably weighing in at around 150 pounds. If gorillas are the championship bodybuilders of the ape world, with their imposing size and bulging muscles, chimps are the Olympic wrestlers—stout, musclebound, and athletic. Kongo’s hands were a giveaway to his strength—far bigger than a man’s (except for the little thumbs) and thick, with ropes of muscles extending up his arms.

  Just as if she’d taken me into his house or his office, Itsaso introduced me to him. Kongo looked me over, calm and steady, and actually gave me a nod. Like, Okay, you can hang for a while. To be honest, standing across from this guy, looking at him with him looking at me, it felt more like I was meeting a person who didn’t speak my language than it did like meeting a creature of a different species.

  It’s pretty obvious when you meet Kongo that he is everything we all want an alpha to be. He displayed a quiet, confident, benevolent authority. All around him, other chimps were watching to see how he’d react to me, and when they perceived that he was relaxed and cool with my visit, they relaxed, too. It was apparent that everyone under him had complete respect for him.

  This wasn’t an alpha who spends his time proving he’s the boss—he’s very secure in that. With all the posturing out of the way, he was free to be a good leader to the Pori family. After he studied me for a while, he turned his attention to engaging with one of the younger chimps. Itsaso told me he gets angrily dominant only when he absolutely has to—like to break up a fight between two junior males. Even when he scraps with the younger apes, he doesn’t hurt them. This guy was mayor, coach, and dad rolled into one—all roles you want filled by someone with a steady temper. And it’s worth noting that this is not typical among adult male chimps. They can be brutal to each other, especially members of other troops, and they can easily go berserk over territory and violently injure or even murder other chimps.

  It’s possible that Kongo’s temperament is a result of his origin story. Just like the other chimps in the Pori family, he came to the center from a terrible life. In 2007, he was found bound to a post by heavy chains around his neck that were secured with a padlock. He was crouched in the full sun, with no food or water. He was so thin that his eyes and ears looked huge in his head, and his hair was coming out in patches. That was the day he was rescued.

  Today, Kongo looks like a different animal. His face is full, his limbs are muscular, and his hair is thick. And his eyes look wise, not haunted, the way they do in the pictures of his rescue. His story of evolution from a broken victim to an alpha male is an inspiring example of the resilience of this species.

  A Problem We Can Help Solve

  Chances are, if you’re reading this book you aren’t saving up to get a pet chimp. But even those of us who have no interest in living with apes can unintentionally be part of the problem they face in central Africa. By responding positively to images of chimps as pets, we feed the idea that they’re fun to have around. So the best thing we can do on social media is not engage with content that depicts primates as household pets. If we don’t “like” or comment when we see pictures of chimps wearing clothes or doing tricks or hanging around people’s houses, we won’t help feed the demand that keeps poachers ripping these babies out of the wild in the DRC every day.

  If you want to help promote change, make a comment about the truths of what this sort of content can lead to. It’s an easy opportunity to educate someone else who might have no idea about how destructive these images can be. I really think most people who engage with this kind of content have big hearts for animals and want what’s best for them. They just don’t know that sharing or liking or saying “omg how cute!” or “I want one!” can lead to more poaching, more deaths, and more orphans.

  13

  Bahamas

  Swimming with sharks in the Bahamas rocked my world. I’ve always loved these animals—their mouths chock-full of razor teeth, their streamlined bodies built for slicing through the water, and their dominance of their domain undisputed. They are ancient creatures—aquatic dinosaurs. The ancestors of today’s sharks have been swimming in the earth’s oceans for more than four hundred million years, predating actual dinosaurs by about half that time. Predating, actually, any living thing that walks on land. And through the millennia and even five mass extinctions, sharks haven’t changed a whole lot. If you could time-travel back one hundred million years or more and go for a dive, you could still easily recognize a shark as a shark.

  Even in a world of constant evolution, there are a few things Mother Nature seems to look at and figure, If it ain’t broke …

  Maybe even more remarkable than the age of some shark species are the ages of some individual fish. In 2016, scientists used radiocarbon dating to determine the age of a single Greenland shark at around four hundred years. That guy was practically prehistoric all by himself.

  A Giant PR Problem

  Two facts:

  Every year a handful of people (an average of six) die as a result of interactions with sharks.

  Every year approximately one hundred million sharks die as a result of interactions with humans.

  So for every single person who meets a Jaws-like end, more than ten million sharks kick the bucket. And we’re afraid of them? This is a group of species with a serious image problem. Cattle, deer, bees, dogs—they’re all responsible for far more human deaths than sharks every year, but we don’t shiver at the thought of any of them.

  I’m a firm believer that if you don’t love a creature, you won’t care about conserving it. And if you don’t know it, why would you love it? Sharks are the ultimate example. Almost everything most of us know about them comes from movies and headlines and Shark Week. And while we’re busy not caring, the number of endangered shark species is increasing every year. Some of them—about 16 percent—are teetering on the brink of extinction.

  In 2018, I got it into my head that I wanted to find a way to know these amazing animals better. I’d had encounters with several shark species by this time, but never a species that had a forbidding reputation, and never outside of a cage. My objective was to get into the water and meet one of my favorite mega-carnivores, the tiger shark, and share with the world how special, beautiful, and impressive these animals are—and why we should not be immediately afraid of them.

  And if there was any way to pull it off, I wanted to have that experience without being in a cage.

  I asked around about the possibilities, and a friend in the diving community put me in touch with some fellow shark enthusiasts in Florida. These two dudes are dedicated shark conservationists, and they share a deep love of the ocean and a commitment to educating the public about the vital role sharks play in our underwater ecosystems.

  Of the possible itineraries, diving at Tiger Beach in the Bahamas sounded like the perfect trip. This location is a destination for shark aficionados from all over the world, and it’s the rare environment where you can consiste
ntly encounter tiger sharks within a few dozen feet of the surface. These animals are comfortable at depths over one thousand feet, but they continue to show up in the same shallow Bahamas waters year after year.

  Even though their numbers rise and fall with the seasons, tiger sharks live near their namesake beach year round, so the odds of a sighting were good as we left the Florida coast before dawn, heading southeast toward the Bahamas.

  I’d seen a tiger shark once, from a distance, during a dive in Fiji. That one was about six feet long—a juvenile—and he was just passing by. The experience stuck with me and kept me hungry for a real encounter with one of these massive fish.

  My hosts, Chris and Mike, had been leading expeditions like mine for years, so I trusted that I was in good hands. Chris, the captain, manned the helm while Mike, the videographer, and I prepped our gear. As we suited up to dive, he told me the most important thing to remember underwater was to keep my head on a swivel. Always be looking, he said, because even though these sharks are not coming for you, they could still easily bump into you. He also warned me to pay attention to personalities. A fish is definitely not just a fish (something I did already know after years of working with fish and realizing that they do not get nearly enough credit for their individuality and intelligence). Some sharks can quickly be identified as shy, some as curious and interested in divers, others as especially skittish or bold and thus potentially dangerous.

  We weren’t keen on hand-feeding sharks, figuring that the practice is both unnecessary and asking for trouble. Instead, we dropped a weighted bait crate into the water at the dive site to bring the sharks closer. For some conservationists, even this method of drawing wildlife in is controversial because it facilitates contact between our species. But given how terrified people are of sharks and how rarely they hurt us, it seemed to me that helping responsible divers learn about these creatures and serve as ambassadors back to the rest of the world was probably worth putting out a snack tray once in a while.