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Lion Country chimp Nolan dies at 32

By Scott McCabe, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 5, 2002

Nolan, the king of Chimp Island at Lion Country Safari, the chimpanzee who loved to play toss each Christmas with Santa, died Wednesday after a suffering a stroke. He was 32.

Nolan was born in Africa in 1970. African primate dealers that same year shot Nolan's mother and sold him to a laboratory in New York, according to officials at the drive-through zoo off Southern Boulevard in western Palm Beach County.

Nolan spent his first years without seeing the sun, a tree or a full human face. Home was a small steel cage illuminated with fluorescent lights 24 hours a day, officials said.

Nolan and the other lab apes only glimpsed humans behind surgical masks and rubber gloves in a medical laboratory. They only glimpsed one another through steel.

By the time Nolan was 2, he had been drugged 52 times and had undergone 65 liver biopsies, they said.

After an attempt to transfer him to Mexico failed, Nolan was sent to Lion Country, where he lived with other former lab primates. While many chimps have difficulty adjusting, Nolan soon became the alpha male, or leader, of his lab ape family, they said.

Each year around Christmas when Santa arrived to throw brightly wrapped gifts to the park's 33 chimps, Nolan hammed it up for the crowd. He tossed some toys back to Santa before leaving the rest to the others.

He and Swing, a chimp from the same test laboratory, had an offspring, Dandy.