The #1 source for news about monkeys and apes

[Carrie McLaren <carrie AT stayfreemagazine.org>]

Belfast News Letter, October 31, 2000

BELLEVUE ZOO FAVOURITE DROWNS

BYLINE: Ian Starrett

Annie, the 17-year-old whose home for years was Belfast Zoo, drowned trying
to save the life of her infant son, Angus, when the opening of a new African
Plains exhibit at Dublin Zoo turned to tragedy.

Belfast Zoo staff were heartbroken at the news of the double-drowning.

Panic-stricken Angus, who had been on his mother's back, jumped into the
lake in fright from an electric shock at a fence designed to keep apes away
from the water.

Frantically, Annie followed her son into the lake in a desperate attempt to
save him but both of them drowned.

Annie, who was loved by thousands of Ulster children, and Angus had just
arrived a few days earlier from their Bellevue home. Dublin Zoo had borrowed
them, along with two other chimpanzees.

The management there had planned to build a new chimp colony using new stock
from Belfast, breeding them with two chimps reared in Dublin.

Roddy Guiney, Dublin Zoo spokesman, said that the drownings were a "freak
accident".

He added: "Everybody was cut up about it, very upset about it. There have
been chimps on the islands in the zoo for the last six or seven years. They
are more than safe there.

"There has never been an incident and I don't think there would have been
except that it was a baby chimp that fell in."

Experts say that the mother-infant bond among chimpanzees is extremely
strong and that this was why Annie risked her own life to save her child.

Mother chimpanzees nurse their infants for up to five years. Chimps, which
have a lifespan of over 50 years, are almost identical in their genetic make
-up to humans, sharing about 98 per cent of human DNA.

Dublin Zoo said that there were no plans to replace Annie and Angus.