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  • From: Carrie McLaren <carrie AT stayfreemagazine.org>
  • To: submit AT monkeywire.org
  • Subject: Aussie Estate Bequeathed to Chimp Kalu
  • Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 22:17:25 -0400


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DAILY MAIL (London),
November 27, 2000

SECTION: Pg. 43

LENGTH: 327 words

HEADLINE: Best address in Ape Town

BYLINE: Nigel Dempster

BODY:

WHEN former Olympic swimming star Frank O'Neill returns from Sydney to
Broadlands, his wife Pat's sprawling estate outside Cape Town this weekend,
he will find their farm and mansion has been bequeathed to her pet
chimpanzee, a 15-year-old female called Kalu.

Aussie Frank - who has twice married Pat, sister of Irish peer Lord
Waterpark (they divorced in 1954 after four years and remarried in 1969)-
has never much liked Kalu, whom he once found smoking one of his cigarettes
and drinking beer from a can.

'Kalu takes off the filter tips and can open a can of beer or a bottle.

She's frightfully clever,' Pat tells me.

The 'ape', as Frank calls the chimp, was rescued in 1985 from the
war-ravaged former Zaire after Pat heard that she had been left tied to a
tree outside the home of the Argentine consul general, who had fled the
country.

Pat, 75, who has decided to leave her estate to the Jane Goodall Institute,
says: 'I sent money so that someone could look after Kalu while I arranged
for the necessary permits to bring her to South Africa. She was traumatised
and terrified when she arrived.' Now Kalu, who lives in a fenced-off area
beside Broadlands house, will be joined by more than four dozen other chimps
under the care of Professor Peter Gray, the institute's South African
trustee. Last week, he moved from the University of Witwatersrand and awaits
planning permission for a primate sanctuary.

Pat has also provided for her farm-workers - including one who sleeps in a
room off Kalu's quarters - but says that the farm will belong to Kalu and
the other animals (she has 56 rescue dogs, peacocks and 22 baboons) until
they die.

She formerly lived in Kenya near the Somali border with just a lioness for
company.

'Kalu can live to the age of 60, which is way past my expectancy,' says Pat.

'So you see why I had to do it. I could not bear the thought of what might
happen to the animals after I died.'

GRAPHIC: SOME DAY, ALL THIS WILL BE YOURS: PAT, WITH CHIMP KALU





  • Aussie Estate Bequeathed to Chimp Kalu, Carrie McLaren, 11/30/2000

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