Ending Mad Chimp Science Experiments

Back in the late 1970s, I received a videotape from anonymous animal rights activists who had broken into a research lab and stole videotapes of orangutans having their brains scrambled, ostensibly to help treat automobile head injuries.

The terrified orangutans were strapped to a machine that shook their heads so violently, that everything inside their skull was rattled loose.

At the conclusion, the bewildered, addled and uncoordinated orangutans reached out for help from the only source they knew for comfort -- the very people in white smocks who administered the torture. In was inexpressibly sad and couldn't help but remind me those poor souls in the Soviet Gulag who bemoaned: “If only Comrade Stalin knew, he’d save us.”

Worse was when the researchers posed and mocked their wards -- putting cigarettes in orangutan mouths, imitating their discombobulated state. I thought of those unhappy, psychotic orangutans after reading a new book by Toronto writer and primatologist Andre Westoll -- The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary -- which documents the only chimpanzee sanctuary in Canada, at Cambly, Quebec, about 25 km southeast of Montreal.

Gloria Grow and her veterinarian partner, Richard Allan, turned their 240-acre hobby farm into a retirement home for chimpanzees who’d been mentally and physically ravaged from invasive experiments for decades. Infected with the HIV-AIDS virus, hepatitis, various biopsies and experimental surgery, it was hoped cures would result for human ailments.

It was all largely a waste of time. AIDS does not affect chimps, but the torturous treatment they received -- being removed from their mothers within a few days, being kept in a five by five by seven-foot cage for decades, tranquilized by dart guns hundreds of time, enduring surgery and needles, every chimp was an emotional wreck. All were psychotic, some mad. Theirs is a horror story without pause.

Chimps have never been my favourite animal. Ever since reading of the exceptional research by Jane Goodall on chimpanzees at the Gombe National Park in Tanzania, chimps have in fact long been my least favourite primate.

As the world’s foremost expert on chimps, Goodall has documented how loving they can be, how loyal, trusting, generous and compassionate they can be. But also how cruel, mean, vindictive, and brutal they also can be -- just like humans, with whom they share roughly 98 percent of the same DNA.

Perhaps they are just too human for my tastes. In a pinch, with the right blood type, chimp blood can even be used in human transfusions. Chimpanzees are genetically so close to humans, and five times as strong as peak-condition human athletes, that Stalin ordered the insemination of chimps with human sperm, in hopes of producing a warlike hybrid race. The experiment failed.

But my views on chimps have now softened. Westoll, who worked at the Fauna Sanctuary while researching his book, tells a heartbreaking story. Yes, the chimps are rescued, live better, gradually adapt, establish new friendship, but none are normal.

These days, medical research on chimps is no longer fashionable. Every country in the world has stopped the practice  -- except the US. Westoll says there are now only six such research centres, involving maybe 1,000 chimps -- down from a peak of 3,000. Instead, sanctuaries exist.

Each of the 13 chimps at the Fauna Sanctuary has a horror tale. Each handles life differently.

Old Tom, the patriarch, so to speak, was in his forties and throughout his life was subjected to being rendered unconscious some 396 by dart guns. His body was a mess. All chimps dread the needle and go berserk and try to hide when there is no hiding place. Tommie was something special at Fauna. When he had a torn foot that needed treatment, rather than use a needle for antibiotics, the foot was bathed and treated externally.

Tom, watched, learned, and began applying the disinfectant and ointment himself.

Not only that, when other chimps got injuries he appointed himself as the medic, cleaned wounds and administered ointment under watchful eye of staff.

His intelligence was prodigious and chimps relied on him. His death by heart attack at age 44 in 2009 was mourned by both his human and chimp friends. Westoll was inconsolable.

When four chimps once got out of their pen and messed up the kitchen area, it was realized that they were trying to mop the floor, wash dishes, prepare meals -- to do what they saw humans do. It bought tears to the eyes of the staff when they realized what they were seeing.

Although there are research holdouts, it’s generally realized that no significant medical breakthroughs occurred from decades of invasive experiments on chimpanzees. So why do some still resist this reality? Philosophy professor Charles Magel has noted the contradiction of justifying experiments on animals “because they are like us.” When challenged on moral grounds, the justification is “they are not like us.”

But chimps and other primates have imaginations, know what fear is, and have degrees of all the emotions we human have. Most of Gloria Grow’s 13 chimps came from the New York University research facility, the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery (LEMSIP). Before it was shut down (after a documentary by Jane Goodall), LEMSIP had 100 chimps.

Among the chimps at the Fauna Sanctuary are a couple of circus chimps, also maladjusted, which stand on their hands, do flips and try to be entertaining to escape what the humans in white smocks want to do to them.

Westoll says it costs about $250,000 a year to run the sanctuary, mostly from donations. Chimpanzees are a dwindling species. Hunted for jungle meat, the exotic animal market, or the American biomedical industry, there were around a million of them in Africa in 1960; today there are fewer than 200,000.

With some 149 Congressional co-sponsors, the Great Ape Protection Act (GAPA) would prohibit invasive biomedical research on chimps and all great apes -- something the European Union has already banned. GAPA is vehemently opposed by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) on grounds that “If adopted, this bill will not only prohibit needed research for human disease, but will prevent research on behalf of these animals . . . the legislation seeks to protect.”

As for chimps, Westoll notes: “We’ve shot chimpanzees into space, implanted electrodes into their brains, shattered their skulls with blunt-force trauma, attempted to inseminate them with human sperm, used them as crash dummies, exposed them to pharmaceuticals and toxic chemicals, injected them with deadly human viruses, deprived them of their mothers’ care, driven many of them psychotic – all the while protecting our moral position ... that a chimpanzee in a biomedical lab is somehow less ‘endangered’ than its wild compatriots in Africa.”