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[Josh Greenman <josh.greenman AT gmail.com>]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/24/magazine/24CHIMPS.html?

July 24, 2005
Planet of the Retired Apes

By CHARLES SIEBERT
This past spring, in a secluded patch of forest in northwest
Louisiana's Caddo Parish, a singularly bizarre bit of evolution
unfolded. There, amid the sun-dappled pines and flitting birds, a pair
of 40-something chimpanzees named Rita and Teresa -- lifetime research
subjects who were originally taken from Africa for use in NASA's space
program -- became American pioneers of a whole other sort: the first
beneficiaries of an inspired piece of retirement legislation passed by
the United States government. Under the watchful eyes of animal
behaviorists, veterinarians, enrichment specialists and daily
caretakers, Rita and Teresa checked in on the afternoon of April 4 at
the recently opened Chimp Haven, the first federally financed,
taxpayer-supported retirement home for chimpanzees.

They arrived in a specially equipped trailer after an eight-hour drive
from the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research in San Antonio,
Tex. After receiving full physicals from Chimp Haven's in-house
veterinarian, including dental checkups for possible extractions or
root canals, the two chimps were shown to their spacious new sleeping
quarters, complete with fresh running water and cross-ventilation,
multiple windows and skylights, hammocks made of neatly crosshatched
sections of used fire hose, bedding of warm blankets and hay, vanity
mirrors, as well as a TV, a VCR and DVD and CD players.

Following a long nap, Rita and Teresa awoke to a couple of banana
smoothies and were shown the door to their courtyard. As it was
recalled to me by a staff member, they paused a moment to regard the
somewhat otherworldly prospect of a wide-open, odor-free patio, a
playground jungle gym and, just beyond the play yard's far walls,
their own private five-acre expanse of grapevine-laced pines and
sweetgums. And then, as if in some unwitting primate pantomime of the
very Apollo 11 moonwalk they'd helped to make a reality, they stepped
out into the sunlight and tentatively down onto an equally unfamiliar
earth.

In the months since Rita and Teresa arrived at Chimp Haven, a number
of fellow research chimps have followed in their bold footsteps:
Augusta, Conan, Suzanna, Ellie, Puddin' and Merv, all from the Yerkes
National Primate Research Center, a major facility for
infectious-disease and behavioral research in Atlanta. Another group
of chimps from the Southwest Foundation in San Antonio came soon
afterward. Thirty retirees are now in residence. By the time Chimp
Haven, parts of which are still under construction, has its official
ribbon-cutting ceremony in October, approximately 75 chimps will have
settled there. When the facility is fully completed, sometime in 2006,
it will hold up to 200.

Chimp Haven is a happy consequence of the Chimpanzee Health
Improvement, Maintenance and Protection (or Chimp) Act, passed in the
final days of the Clinton administration. The bill allotted up to $30
million, pending matching funds from private donations, for the
construction of the facility, which, with future expansions, could
house as many as 900 chimps and serve as a template for the nationwide
''system of sanctuaries'' mandated by Congress to accommodate the
country's growing number of surplus chimpanzees. Whether or not Chimp
Haven is, as its publicity brochure proclaims, ''what chimpanzees
dream of,'' a fellow primate -- a human being, let's say, also living
in this country in the year 2005, when the future of Social Security
and old-age pensions is very much in doubt -- could be forgiven for
trying to pinch himself awake upon encountering the splendors of this
monkey Delray Beach.

Still, for all of its feel-good aspects and carefully considered
creature comforts, Chimp Haven is also a reflection of a darker set of
realities, a particularly topsy-turvy time in the already tumultuous
history of our so-called compact with the wild; a moment when the
number of chimpanzees in the wilderness is rapidly decreasing and the
number of those in captivity continues to rise. In fact, while
chimpanzees in the wilderness are now officially designated
endangered, those in captivity are not. There are an estimated 2,500
captive chimps in the United States, a number that's difficult to
pinpoint because of the many private breeders still turning out baby
chimps, mostly for private ownership or use in entertainment. Of the
1,500 or so laboratory chimps, nearly half are no longer being used
for experimentation. Lab chimps today are largely confined to
behavioral studies and hepatitis and malaria research, and an even
greater number may soon be rendered unnecessary for research by
advances in DNA analysis and computer modeling. As for the remaining
refugees of entertainment and private ownership, their ranks continue
to swell even though chimps are unmanageable much past the age of 6
and despite the fact that advances in computer animation may soon
obviate altogether the need for actual animal performers.

Chimps are spilling forth now from all quadrants of our keeping --
research labs, traveling zoos, movie and TV studios, backyard pens --
and an international network of sanctuaries, in Canada, Europe, Africa
and South America, along with the United States, has sprung up to
accommodate them. Indeed, one newly expanded, privately financed
sanctuary called Save the Chimps will soon accommodate more than 250
former lab chimps, the largest collection of retired primates in
history.

Retirement for chimps is, in its way, a perversely natural outcome,
which is to say, one that only we, the most cranially endowed of the
primates, could have possibly concocted. It's the final manifestation
of the irrepressible and ultimately vain human impulse to bring inside
the very walls that we erect against the wilderness its most inspiring
representatives -- the chimps, our closest biological kin, the animal
whose startling resemblance to us, both outward and inward, has long
made it a ''can't miss'' for movies and Super Bowl commercials and a
''must have'' in our laboratories. Retirement homes are, in a sense,
where we've been trying to get chimps all along: right next door.

A Little Piece of Heaven

The narrow two-lane road to Chimp Haven winds through a sparsely
populated stretch of forest, punctuated here and there by trailer
parks and roadside farms, a few new housing developments and, just up
the road from the entrance to the Eddie D. Jones Nature Park, the
paint-chipped hull of the Macedonia Baptist Church. Chimp Haven's 200
acres are situated within the grounds of the park, which assures the
chimps a relatively good buffer from human encroachment. The only
other tenants are a cemetery for war veterans and the Forcht Wade
Correctional Center, a state prison with its own new geriatric
facility for aging lifers.

A prison work crew was scything a field in the park not far from Chimp
Haven's entrance gate the afternoon I arrived. One prisoner pulled
back from his work as I drove up and he locked eyes with mine, a
searing, deeply unsettling stare that suddenly had me wondering if
there wasn't something to the rumors I'd heard that the inmates
weren't pleased about their new neighbors. I'd ask Forcht Wade's
assistant warden, Anthony D. Batson, about this later that afternoon,
making an impromptu visit to the correctional facility after leaving
Chimp Haven. Batson came to the front desk and showed me to his
office, a veritable museum to the Tigers, Louisiana State University's
beloved football team. He told me the prisoners were certainly aware
of Chimp Haven, having access to TV and newspapers, and doing
occasional work in the area, but that he hadn't heard them express any
particular opinions about it. ''A number of guys have asked me what
would happen if one of the chimps gets out,'' he said. ''Whether
they'd have to go get it. But we both have our escape procedures.
Theirs is a modern, up-to-date, first-class containment facility.
They're on top of it. Of course, they tranquilize. We don't
tranquilize.''

At the request of Chimp Haven's president, Linda Brent, a behavioral
primatologist specializing in chimpanzees, I timed my arrival at Chimp
Haven for a few days before any chimps arrived, so that the retirees
could get acclimated to their new environment and to one another with
as few distractions from humans as possible. Brent, an expert in
captive-chimpanzee management, is a slight woman in her early 40's
with a Midwestern country-girl swagger. She wrote her dissertation on
infant chimp development, conducting her research at Gombe National
Park in Tanzania, the site of Jane Goodall's pioneering work on wild
chimpanzees. For Brent, the experience of seeing chimps in the wild,
''just walking by, doing whatever they want, whenever they want,'' as
she put it, changed her life. Now, after 17 years of being what she
calls ''the entertainment director'' for the research chimps at the
Southwest Foundation in San Antonio, she could hardly contain herself
when talking about Rita and Teresa's imminent arrival.

''It's been since the 1960's that they were in the wild,'' she said.
''We don't even know where they were taken from. The records from back
then aren't very good. Just the fact that you could import them --
that was done away with in the early 70's, which is why they started
breeding programs for research. But I think they'll be fine. They'll
be nervous at first. They aren't used to trees. That type of thing.''

At the beginning of my tour of Chimp Haven, I walked out into one of
the facility's two wooded areas, accessed from the chimps' bedrooms
and play areas through a system of metal chutes. Each section is a
five-acre wedge of woods, secured with a combination of 8-foot-deep
moats (chimps, being all muscle, sink like stones) and 17-foot-high
concrete walls with inset metal-barred apertures running their entire
length, so that even from their pastoral remove the chimps can look
back toward the hubbub of the facility's central residence. A number
of Chimp Haven's incoming retirees will still be sexually active and,
chimps being quite promiscuous, all the males will be vasectomized,
thus allowing them to ''express their normal behavioral repertoire,''
as Amy Fultz, Chimp Haven's primate behaviorist, put it.

Fultz worked with Brent at the Southwest Foundation in San Antonio,
doing behavioral studies and devising what they call ''enrichment''
activities with the research chimps there. In 1995, she and Brent
founded Chimp Haven, which then was dedicated primarily to gathering
concerned primatologists and chimpanzee specialists to start devising
a way of dealing with the country's growing number of surplus
chimpanzees. The great lab-chimp surplus is, in large part, an
unforeseeable consequence of AIDS. In 1986, the National Institutes of
Health began an aggressive breeding program that nearly doubled the
number of research chimps in the country, on the seemingly logical but
ultimately incorrect assumption that our closest genetic kin would
serve as ideal models for developing a vaccine. Chimps, it turns out,
can contract the virus, but they are virtually immune to its effects.

Suddenly faced with the huge ethical and economic problems of what to
do with so many surplus chimpanzees (each chimp costs roughly $10,000
a year to maintain), the National Research Council issued a report in
1997 advising Congress against euthanizing the chimps, calling instead
for some way of properly repaying them for services rendered. With the
urging of a consortium of animal-welfare organizations known as the
National Chimpanzee Research Retirement Task Force, and with support
from numerous laboratories and various zoological organizations, the
Chimp Act passed unanimously. Chimp Haven was awarded the contract to
construct and maintain the government's new chimpanzee-sanctuary
system in September 2002, and when a group of local developers and the
Caddo Parish Commission offered up 200 acres of parish parkland, all
the pieces for constructing the flagship of that system were in place.


Every aspect of Chimp Haven has been carefully considered, right down
to the grief counselors for the staff for when the chimps pass away.
Touring the facility's huge main kitchen, I saw refrigerator shelves
lined with rows of ''apesicles'' -- plastic cups filled with a frozen
fruit-juice suspension of raw vegetables and fruit. Against the
opposite wall, alongside a popcorn maker, stood a massive container of
primate biscuits -- essentially dry hunks of
vitamin-and-protein-enriched kibble. Set out on a long metal
food-preparation table were rows of turf boards: square sections of
thick plastic covered with AstroTurf onto which staff workers were
getting ready to smear a mixture of peanut butter, nuts and seeds,
which the chimps must ferret out with their fingers. Insofar as the
better part of a chimpanzee's day in the wild is spent foraging for
food, many of these enrichment devices at Chimp Haven are geared
toward alleviating the boredom of having three squares regularly
served up to them.

''Everything we use here we try to evaluate on a scientific level,''
Fultz explained when I asked her about some of the other enrichment
items I'd been shown: crayons and chalk, giant plastic toys and
Nylabones (basically big dog-chews), Mighty Mouse and Woody Woodpecker
videotapes and television sets, specially rigged with clear plastic
coverings to protect the electronics. Chimps have very strong and
immediate likes and dislikes. Observational evidence to date has
revealed that chimps find nature-sound CD's soothing. Younger chimps
prefer kids' movies, Disney specials, ''Barney'' and the like. The
mature chimps' tastes, on the other hand, tend toward melodrama and
anything with lots of action and aggression. Soap operas like
''Passions'' and ''General Hospital'' are big hits, the latter, it
seems, because lab chimps have gotten so used to people in white
coats. ''The Jerry Springer Show'' and N.F.L. football games are also
quite popular. Golf, baseball and PBS programming (except, of course,
for nature shows) are not.

Along with indulging acquired tastes, however, Chimp Haven
simultaneously strives to revive long-dormant inherited ones. Most
surplus chimps were born in captivity and, after years of proximity to
and interaction with human beings, they are, as primatologists say,
''highly enculturated,'' or habituated to life on human terms. Indeed,
staff members cited a particular sense of urgency about getting Rita
and Teresa to Chimp Haven. They are among the few remaining wild-born
captive chimps, and it was hoped that they would ''remember what they
did as little kids,'' as Brent put it, and teach those habits to their
captive-born brethren, animals that have essentially become hybrids of
us and them, a cosmopolitan monkey for whom a sudden and complete
severance from us and our ways would constitute the next form of
abuse.

In short, the place is a veritable chimpanzee Jurassic Park, a shining
example of just how far we can extend the inherently paradoxical
process of trying to liberate and dignify a wild creature within
captivity. It's all a direct answer and antidote to the days of the
old inner-city-zoo ape house, where all that the inhabitants got was
the equivalent of a tiled public lavatory stall with a token section
of log and a metal nameplate secured out front, a dot on a silhouette
of Africa indicating the captive's original home. By the exit of those
old ape houses there was sometimes one of those silly mirrors with
bars painted in front and a caption below that read, ''The Most
Dangerous Animal of Them All.'' Chimp Haven is, in essence, a result
of one long, serious look in that mirror.

Earlier on the morning of my visit, I stopped by the Chimp Haven
office in downtown Shreveport to meet the executive director, Linda
Koebner. A lifetime New Yorker, born and raised in the Bronx, where
she still lives part time, Koebner is something of a pioneer in chimp
retirement. In 1974, she transferred nine chimpanzees from the
no-longer-operational Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery
in Primates in Tuxedo, N.Y., to a new home on their own island in a
habitat facility known as Lion Country Safari, in Loxahatchee, Fla.
Koebner showed me film clips of the chimps' initial arrival to that
island. It was some time before three of the chimps, , Swing, Spark
and Doll, could even be coaxed from their cages, having known only
those until then. Once outside, Doll shot up to the top of the nearest
tree. Spark held to his cage even as he was leaving it, and then
nestled alongside the open door, where he ripped away an attached
packaging slip and put it over his face. He kept gingerly pawing at
the ground, as if testing its reliability. Koebner could observe her
newly freed charges only from the far side of their moat. (Full-grown
chimpanzees are several times as strong as humans and can be quite
dangerous.)

Nineteen years after the chimps' arrival on the island, however,
Koebner, accompanied by a habitat employee wielding a movie camera,
was allowed to try a firsthand visit. In the film you can see a couple
of chimps coming forward from the far side of their island toward the
same climbing platform that Koebner's boat is fast approaching. ''Hey
. . . remember me?'' Koebner keeps repeating in a soft, breathy voice
to Swing and Doll, waiting now at the edge of the climbing platform.
As the boat arrives, Koebner pauses a moment, then reaches across the
prow and, within seconds, she is being enveloped, her slight frame
slipping in and out of deep, alternating hugs from Swing and then
Doll, each politely waiting turns for another embrace of their sobbing
liberator.

Us and Them

The sophistication of the chimpanzee mind has been well documented in
the near half-century since Jane Goodall's pioneering studies of
chimps in the wild. Chimps learn and use American Sign Language. They
have been taught to do math fractions and have demonstrated the
intelligence level of a 5-year-old. They have a clear sense of
self-awareness. Hold a mirror in front of a chimp with a toothache,
and he'll immediately set about pulling back his gums to find which
tooth it is that's hurting. Chimps feel sorrow and remorse. They will
mourn the death of a friend or a relative. They are even thought now
to have the rudiments of their own culture.

''When we went and started looking at different populations of chimps
across Africa, we found variations in behavior that could not be
explained in the usual biological ways,'' William McGrew, a field
primatologist and professor of anthropology at Miami University in
Ohio, told me. ''They are passing on behavioral patterns that seem to
vary from place to place, and group to group, and from generation to
generation, and we were sort of forced in a way into the cultural
analogy as a way to explain it because the traditional biological ways
for explaining it wouldn't suffice.''

Two years ago, McGrew, who has been observing chimps in the wilds of
East, Central and West Africa for more than three decades, came upon a
group of chimps in southeastern Senegal that were living in caves.
''No one had ever seen it before,'' he said. ''I mean, chimpanzees,
you think of them swinging through the trees. But at the peak of the
dry season, when it's very, very hot, these chimps retreat into the
cooler caves, and they take food with them and have a siesta and a
picnic.''

Clearly, the more we understand about the complexity of the
chimpanzee, the more complicated keeping them -- be it for research or
for our own amusement -- becomes. There was a certain innocence and
naivete about our earliest containment and representation of them as
conveyed in the anthropocentric framing of the first ape houses or
movies like ''King Kong'' and ''Mighty Joe Young.'' Now, however, we
and they seem to be caught somewhere between that original childlike
exuberance over having them close to us and an increasingly subtle and
discomfiting awareness of just how close to us, in every way, they
actually are. We can see so clearly in the chimpanzee some former and
formative version of ourselves that, if only as a further extension of
the very vanity that led us to co-opt them in the first place, we are
compelled to find them better and more civil accommodations.

Many established zoos have now erected habitat-minded enclosures that
allow chimps some semblance of their natural social groupings and
behavior. Privately financed sanctuaries, meanwhile, have sprung up
across the country, even as private breeders go on churning out more
chimps for entertainment or private ownership. In either role, chimps
have only five to six years of viability before they grow too strong
and willful to be controlled. Most of them end up spending the rest of
their 45 to 50 years, on average, in breeding compounds, research lab
facilities or roadside zoos. Even established zoos now regularly turn
away former pet and entertainer chimps, because of their aberrant
personalities and often antisocial behaviors.

I met a number of these chimps this past spring at a 100-acre
sanctuary known as the Center for Great Apes in Wauchula, Fla., a
veritable Hollywood Squares of washed-up ape actors, far more
accustomed to humans and movie-set caterers' tables than to other
monkeys and monkey chow. After I said hello to one 24-year-old, a
former five-shows-a-day entertainer named Roger, he stood in his
enclosure, thrust his chest forward and threw one arm straight up in
the classic stage-show ''ta da!'' pose. Roger was originally trained
for work in the Ringling Brothers circus. After his trainer retired,
Roger ended up in a roadside zoo in Kissimee, Fla., called Jungleland,
from which he was eventually rescued by the founder of the Center for
Great Apes, Patti Ragan. Like many of Ragan's other charges, Roger has
a number of odd behavioral tics and psychological scars that can
contribute to sudden outbursts -- like those that characterized the
much-publicized mauling this past winter by two retired entertainment
chimps of a visitor to a California sanctuary.

''They will take an instant like or dislike to different people,''
Ragan told me, ''especially if they're loud, or if they talk to them
in a certain way, or if they're domineering. Whenever Roger sees a
tall, white-haired man of a certain type of build, he becomes
incredibly frightened and goes into a screaming rage, banging his
head. There's something in his history. It just sets him off.
Sometimes, in the middle of the night here, when I have all the
surveillance cameras on in the different enclosures, I'll get up for a
drink of water, and I'll see Roger just sitting up alone in the dark,
holding on to his cage, rocking.''

Monkey Purgatory

I witnessed pathologies similar to Roger's in the spring among the
inhabitants of a former biomedical research facility known as the
Coulston Foundation in Alamogordo, N.M. Each day near dusk on the
treeless, sun-bitten outskirts of Alamogordo, the shrieking,
cage-rattling clamor of captive chimpanzees fills the high-desert air.
Suppertime is the usual catalyst. On the early April evening I showed
up there, however, a stiff, unseasonably cold wind stirring dust and
tumbleweed, it was the fast-spreading news of my approach that was
setting off the occupants. My escort, Carole Noon, and I were still
some 75 yards away from Building 700 -- the first in a series of eight
long single-story chimp residences that make up Coulston's
barrackslike compound -- when the ruckus began, a slow series of hoots
quickly swelling to shrill screams followed by intense pounding, the
same pattern repeating from building to building, off into the
distance.

''How's our boy Ollie doing?'' Noon muttered into her walkie-talkie.

Noon, a husky-voiced woman in her late 40's with piercing blue eyes
and long, sandy-blond hair tied back beneath a Save the Chimps cap,
was asking after a resident of Building 700 named Oliver, an
adolescent male who had the cornea of his right eye badly scratched in
a tussle with another chimp and needed to be anesthetized in order to
be treated.

''Still sleeping,'' came the reply.

The better part of Building 700's facade was, like all the others at
the facility, covered in thick sheets of plastic to hold in heat
around the chimps' outer cages during the winter and early spring. I
therefore didn't see the advance scout for the building's 59 other
chimps until Noon and I were about to enter. He was a massive,
thick-limbed male hovering directly above us, clutching to the
uppermost reaches of his cell, trying to size me up through the same
murky polymer prism that was rendering him a dark apparition, as if
from some drug-induced dream.

''In the old days,'' Noon explained, ''they couldn't even go out in
the cold months. Now they can at least be outside, and we can clean
the inner cages.''

Of the captive chimpanzees in the United States about to enter into
retirement, the greatest number of them don't live under federal
auspices and are not on the way to Chimp Haven. They reside at the
former Coulston Foundation, 260 chimps in all, the lot of them soon to
become residents of Noon's Save the Chimps island sanctuary outside
Fort Pierce, Fla. A 200-acre patch of former orange groves, the
sanctuary is being expanded into a series of 12 three-acre islands to
accommodate the influx.

Noon originally founded Save the Chimps back in 1997 when the United
States Air Force -- which had been leasing its flight-training chimps
to research labs since the early 70's -- decided to get out of the
chimp business altogether. Offering its surplus inventory up for bids,
the Air Force awarded most of the chimps to Frederick Coulston, a
native New Yorker who was among the first scientists in the country to
perform toxicology and physiology experiments on primates back in the
1940's. Coulston, who died in 2003, would go on to become the
country's primate maven, owning well more than 600 chimps, then
roughly half the nation's total, in the mid-90's. Noon, with the
support of Jane Goodall and other prominent primatologists like the
chimp sign-language specialist Roger Fouts, successfully sued the Air
Force for custody of 21 of their former chimps on the grounds that
they had not honored a commitment to fully safeguard their welfare.
Meanwhile, she raised more than $2 million to erect her Fort Pierce
sanctuary to house the chimps she had saved.

In 2002 the Coulston Foundation, having already lost its N.I.H.
financing after a series of Animal Welfare Act violations led to the
deaths of dozens of chimps, filed for bankruptcy. With the help of a
$7 million grant from the Arcus Foundation, a philanthrophic
organization with a broad range of causes, Noon acquired the Coulston
facility and all 266 of its remaining residents (300 of the others
ended up in another private facility). She moved into a 28-foot-long
house trailer at the rear of the grounds and with the help of local
contractors and Save the Chimps staff members set about trying to
soften and brighten the place's many hard, dark edges. Half a million
dollars was spent to remodel the cages alone, expanding them outward
and upward, with overhead ''penthouses'' allowing the chimps their
first views of the sky and of the nearby Sacramento Mountains. In the
two and a half years since Noon took over, fairly hellish quarters
have been upgraded to a kind of primate purgatory, where the occupants
now await deliverance to their future island paradise.

''So,'' Noon said, showing me through the entrance to Building 700,
''you ready to be horrified?''

Seated before me on the cement floor of a narrow, rank-smelling
ante-room to Building 700's main chimp cell block were Jocelyn Bezner,
the staff veterinarian, and the staff caregiver, Jen Feuerstein, the
two of them staring through the bars of a portable pen at the soundly
sleeping Oliver. Bezner was holding one of Oliver's huge black,
leathery fingers, which jutted out between the bars. I slowly sidled
up to the cage and -- I suppose because I could -- grabbed another
finger, gently squeezing the weighty, inordinate humanness of it.

Through the pair of swinging doors just behind us, Oliver's mates had
by now worked themselves up into a full-fledged frenzy. Noon opened
one of the doors to say hello and try to settle things down a bit.
Inside was a picture of true bedlam: opposing rows of cages, 12 deep,
chimps everywhere swaying and dashing, whooping and screeching. A
chimp named Devon seemed to be the maestro of the mayhem, grabbing
hold of the bars of the cage nearest the door, madly thrusting toward
and away from them, screaming.

Just then I felt Oliver's finger twitch slightly in my palm, and
suddenly he was sitting bolt upright, eyes wide. His face was fixed in
a kind of hysterical grin that gradually expanded, as if trying to get
more air, into a soundless, slow-motion version of a chimp's fright
scream, finally culminating in a series of short, breathy,
high-pitched squeals.

''It's O.K, it's O.K.,'' Bezner kept repeating to him softly, and then
once more to the rest of us. ''He's just hallucinating.''

After a few moments, Oliver tilted back over to sleep, in spite of
Building 700's racket. Noon signaled that we should leave to let
things simmer down. As we were headed toward the door, Bezner went
over to Devon's cell and in a beautiful, clear soprano, began bringing
Devon and his fellow cellmates back down to earth with the Irving
Berlin standard ''Cheek to Cheek'': ''Heaven, I'm in heaven. . . . ''

Chimps crave such attention. They also will go out of their way to get
it, as I learned firsthand during the following day's tour. We started
at the compound's former breeding building, Building 300, referred to
now by Save the Chimps staff members simply as the dungeon. It was a
similar arrangement of long, opposing rows of adjacent cement and
steel cages, enclosures that, before Noon's modest renovations, were
only slightly larger than the minimum 5 feet by 5 feet by 7 feet
required, to this day, by federal law for the lifelong keeping of
animals that grow as tall as 5 feet and weigh as much as 200 pounds.
''O.K., picture these cages,'' Noon said, narrating her way down the
central corridor, ''but without penthouses, without the windows,
without the hammocks, without the blankets, without the toys, without
any enrichment. Just steel and cement boxes.''

Before we went in, Noon had us wait outside the set of rolling chain
link gates at the head of the Building 300's cell block so that staff
members could get the chimps to their outside cells, thus clearing the
way for our passing. The building's occupants, however, were proving
to be somewhat uncooperative that afternoon.

''Oh, no!,'' Noon said, scrunching up her shoulders and then calmly
starting away from the front gates, revealing the feces-splattered
back of her blue denim work shirt. Plum, a female chimp in one of the
first cages, had somehow managed to peg Noon through an opening in the
gates no wider than a foot. Within seconds, a worker at the back of
the building was struggling his way toward us, head down, arms
flailing, Plum's successful strike having set off a feces-flinging and
water-spitting maelstrom. Chimps are remarkably good shots with both.

''They don't really like it,'' Noon said, dropping her work shirt into
a washing machine in a staff laundry room just around the corner.
''Any normal chimp I know wipes their foot off when they step in it.
But these chimps? Well . . . when you start thinking this is fun, it
suggests a deep disturbance, and it's sick.''

Before heading back that afternoon to the Save the Chimps
headquarters, where I'd avail myself of the staff lavatory for a quick
stand-up bath, Noon took me to see the small cinder-block building in
which toxicology experiments had been conducted. Inside were two
large, adjacent cages. One side of each cage could collapse inward,
making the cage about the width of a chimp, to facilitate the
injection of whatever drug or disease was being tested. As I was
peering inside one of the cages, Noon shut the building door. The
place went pitch dark.

''O.K.,'' she said. ''Your number's up. You're called in for research.
If you're lucky you've got a guy next door. You've got a squeezable
cage and you're getting a drug in ever increasing doses to see what
happens. And that's your life.''

As we were leaving, Noon noticed me staring at the only other fixture
in the room, what looked for all the world like one of those elevated,
wall-mounted TV stands you see in hospital rooms.

''You got it,'' Noon said, walking off. ''That was their enrichment.
It's amazing they're not more maniacal than they are.''

The Research Quandary

''That one there is a chimpanzee brain,'' Patrick Hof, a professor of
neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan told me
one afternoon this past winter, the two of us standing in a giant
walk-in cooler of brains just down the hallway from his office. On the
same shelf as the chimp brain (''about half the size of an adult
human's,'' as Hof described it) were those of gorillas and orangutans,
each one adrift in glass containers of formaldehyde. On a separate set
of shelves at the rear of the cooler was an assortment of
marine-animal brains: dolphin, porpoise, killer whale. Just below
them, at the base of a huge Rubbermaid garbage pail, was a sperm-whale
brain, like the one housed in Moby-Dick's skull. It was about the
circumference of a cafe table. On the shelves opposite the chimp and
gorilla specimens were a number of human ones.

An expert in aging and its effects on the brain, Hof is an unexpected
beneficiary of today's chimp boom. Chimps in captivity live about
twice as long as those in the wild do. Males in the wild rarely make
it to 30, owing to the wilderness's daily stresses and conflicts. Most
captive chimps, by contrast, are now not only reaching human
retirement ages; they are also developing all the same attendant
ailments: arthritis, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, obesity.
Everything, it seems, except for brain disorders like Alzheimer's and
dementia.

''They prove to be a real problem of geriatric veterinary medicine,''
Hof explained, referring to the aged chimps, ''and yet at the same
time they offer an extraordinary opportunity for us to learn more
about the evolution of aging. And it may well be a unique opportunity,
because I don't think there will be that many more generations of
chimpanzees behind the current ones, because it's just too complicated
and expensive to keep them.''

In fact, our increasing appreciation of the chimpanzee's
bioevolutionary complexity may be bringing us to the point where the
most significant knowledge we can gain from chimps is best obtained
simply by letting them be themselves, either in what's left of their
natural habitat or in or our best re-creations of it. In a sense, the
saga of our keeping of the chimps has now come full circle. The chimps
themselves have become the edifying mirror of the old ape houses. They
are offering us the best view into our own nature. Indeed, much of the
work being done now with chimps is focused on behavioral and
neurological science, where researchers from a variety of disciplines,
from evolutionary biology to neurology, are often engaged in
observational studies in which the healthier and more natural the
environment is for the chimp, the more reliable and useful are the
results.

For some, however, the chimp remains an indispensable tool for medical
research, and some have expressed fears that by endorsing the
retirement of even a select number of chimps, the government might be
opening the doors to their removal from research altogether. Stuart
Zola, director of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, fully
supports animal sanctuaries but argues that there will always be a
need to study chimpanzees. ''The only thing we can predict with
certainty is that there are going to be new epidemics that will arise,
as they have throughout history, and the chimp is going to be a unique
animal model.''

Joe Erwin, a former curator of primates at the Brookfield Zoo in
suburban Chicago, who for the past three years has worked as an
independent consultant to research labs looking to improve their
facilities, also cites the continuing importance of chimps for
research. ''That chimpanzees can be surplus to research needs strikes
me as quite unlikely and shortsighted,'' he told me. ''It is my
impression that there is no chimpanzee on earth from which humans
cannot learn something useful -- without in any way compromising the
health or well-being of any individual chimpanzee.''

There are several major facilities that still have chimpanzees --
Yerkes; Southwest in San Antonio; the Alamogordo Primate Facility
situated on the grounds of the Holloman Air Force Base some 15 miles
from the former Coulston Foundation; the Michale E. Keeling Center for
Comparative Medicine and Research in Bastrop, Tex.; Bioqual, a
biomedical facility in Rockville, Md.; and the New Iberia Research
Center in Louisiana, the world's largest chimpanzee lab. Of these, not
one is quite so bleak as the former Coulston Foundation. Each has made
efforts to give chimps at least some outdoor access and group
interaction, as well as various enrichment and behavioral care from
trained primatologists.

Still, both the Alamogordo Primate Facility and New Iberia have been
targets of recent lawsuits involving animal rights violations, and
both cases are still pending. And while overall standards at research
facilities have been improving over the years, there is no getting
around the inherent constraints and hardships on both the chimps and
those who work with them on a daily basis. It is no coincidence that a
number of the people now involved in the retiring of chimps were
former employees of research labs. ''Most people end up leaving
because they can't do it anymore,'' Jen Feuerstein, a former staff
member at Yerkes, told me. ''They can't be the bad guy anymore. If a
chimp is on study, you have to participate. You have to separate a
young chimp from its mother and send him or her to the main center for
research. A lot of people sort of seal themselves off and stop caring
because it's too painful to care. They go and do the bare minimum to
keep the chimps alive, and then they go home.''

There is no handy list of the dividends gained over the years from
chimp research, and many of the results are mixed. In the early
1930's, long before ethical restrictions were imposed on research
techniques, a good number of chimps were sacrificed to various
brain-mapping and other invasive approaches that yielded a great deal
of early data on the evolution of the primate brain. On the other
hand, notwithstanding the early heroics of the Air Force's
chimpanauts, it is most likely that the space program would have gone
ahead as planned without them, as would the use of seat belts, for the
early trials of which a number of Air Force chimps were reportedly
used as living crash-test dummies in the early 60's.

In 1996, after several injections with H.I.V., one chimp at Yerkes
named Jerome did finally develop AIDS, but it was a mutated strain
that proved to be of little value in the search for a cure in humans.
Jerome became so sick that he was eventually euthanized. Important
information, however, was gained in early testing about the
pathogenesis of the disease and the use of therapeutic antibodies, and
a limited number of previously infected chimps are still being used
for H.I.V. research in an attempt to understand precisely why
chimpanzees are so resistant to developing AIDS, information that
could prove of some use to humans. But one of the greatest recent
rewards of chimp research has been the hepatitis-B vaccine. Strides
are also currently being made toward developing vaccines for hepatitis
C and respiratory syncytial virus (R.S.V.), which is potentially
lethal in newborn babies.

''In an ideal world they'd all be swinging in the forests of Africa,''
McGrew, the field primatologist, said to me. ''But I can understand
how they got into labs, and I'd be a hypocrite if I said that I
haven't benefited from it. I take the hepatitis vaccine developed from
chimpanzees before I go to Africa to study them.''

Some scientists, however, say that they believe we might soon effect
an ideal solution to the chimp-research quandary, thanks to some of
the very technological advances that chimps have helped to foster. For
instance, scientists at Washington University in St. Louis and M.I.T.
are completing the mapping of an entire chimp genome. It belonged to a
chimp named Clint, a longtime Yerkes resident who recently died of
heart disease. Many scientists now say that the use of the DNA
database and human tissue samples will obviate the need for research
on chimps or any other animal, the results of which, they argue, are
often misleading and inapplicable to humans. The recently appointed
scientific director of Europeans for Medical Progress, Jarrod Bailey,
is now leading a campaign to end research on animals, not on the basis
of animal rights but rather on the grounds that such methods are by
and large archaic and have prevented scientists from making the best
use of new technologies.

''We are a very technological species,'' Carole Noon said to me at
Save the Chimps in Alamogordo. ''We can come up with something better.
Something less cruel.''

Looking at the Stars

Every other week or so from now until early next winter, a specially
outfitted trailer like the ones that delivered Rita and Teresa and
their fellow research chimps to Chimp Haven will make the
two-and-a-half-day journey from the former Coulston Foundation in New
Mexico to Noon's island paradise outside Fort Pierce, Fla., delivering
10 chimps at a time until all 260 have been transported.

The day after my tour of Coulston, I flew with Noon to Florida to have
a look at her compound there. Set in the midst of a flat expanse of
orange groves and swampland is a huge island of verdant knolls,
jungle-gym platforms, suspended catwalks and earthen culverts, dotted
with shrubbery and trees and huge black blobs, which, as we pulled up
in a golf cart to one fenced-off corner of the island, suddenly began
to move, gamboling toward us in near-upright, front-fisted strides.

''Just to have that option of running,'' Noon said, gesturing at the
chimps. ''That's what tickles me so much about this property. It's one
of the prettiest places in all of Florida, and guess who's moving in.
Not rich people.''

I found it a bit disconcerting at first to see the chimps in such a
setting. It wasn't just the complete anomaly of chimpanzees swinging
and striding against a backdrop of Florida orange trees. Somehow
getting even the merest glimpse into their actual selves only further
distinguishes them and diminishes us. A diminishment accentuated, in
this case, by the fact that these chimps appeared to be so much larger
than the ones back in New Mexico, for the most part because they've
all got most of their health and hair back.

''That guy Waylan,'' Noon said, pointing to an outsize male muscling
his way toward us, then settling alongside a female named Dana, ''is
the largest chimp I've ever known. And the sweetest. Waylan is very
shy. Born in captivity. Didn't know how to be around other chimps. So
when it was time to get Waylan to meet somebody, I said to myself, Who
out of all these people can he meet? And I thought, Dana. She's 42,
born in Africa, and she's so socially sophisticated. So nice. So I
open the door to let them meet. Waylan's afraid. She climbs up and
sits in the doorway. She looks at Waylan and literally takes his chin
in her hand and lifts his face so he can look at her. That's Dana. She
is the queen.''

Lunch hour for the Save the Chimps staff members that afternoon soon
gave way to lunch hour for the chimps. We were sitting at a picnic
table beside the compound's headquarters when Noon stood up and
clanged an old-fashioned ranch dinner bell hanging from a post just
overhead. She waited a moment and rang it again.

''That did it,'' she said. ''Here they come.''

Off in the distance, we could see the black blobs move again, row upon
row of them, coming across the island's grassy mounds, past the strung
catwalks and huge platform jungle gyms, toward the chimps' central
housing quarters. Noon and I and some of the staff members started
over to meet them. Once all the chimps had made their way inside, the
feasting began, chunks of fresh cucumbers and carrots and oranges
giving off, in stark contrast to Coulston, the strongest aromas in the
place.

''The difference is pretty amazing,'' said one staff member, Chance
French, a former employee of Noon's at Alamogordo. ''A lot of the
chimps we bring from New Mexico will be balding. But the minute you
bring them here they stop plucking. They stop smearing feces around.
It's 100 percent better.''

French told me that during the back-to-back hurricanes that walloped
Florida last year, he and the other staff members took all the chimps
there into the main housing quarters and laid in food and blankets and
supplies for everyone, and, side by side in adjacent cells, human and
chimp rode out the storms together. ''The first hurricane, we were
there for two nights,'' he recalled. ''It was a weaker storm but very
slow-moving. Kept going and going. The second hurricane was one night.
Through both storms, I expected the chimps to be more alarmed, but
they were mostly passed out, sleeping, and we were wide awake, glued
to the radio.''

After lunch, Noon made sure all the doors leading back outside from
the chimp's housing were secure, so that staff members could clean up
the island, much of it strewn with toys, baby dolls, plastic buckets,
wheel carts and so on, like a vast kids' playground. Noon took that
opportunity to escort me across the island, out to the very center. It
felt oddly exhilarating: we were in their place now, on their footing,
and on the horizon around us were the 11 other soon-to-be-completed
islands, each with its own pastel-hued housing, all the colors bright
and upbeat -- ''everything as different from Coulston as possible,''
Noon said. ''No associations.''

As we started back across the island toward the chimp's quarters, Noon
recalled a night back at Coulston when, after the renovations to the
cages had been completed, the chimps were allowed to move into their
outer enclosures and could see the dark desert sky for the first time.
Until then, they had been locked inside each day by 4 p.m. As she sat
on the steps of her trailer that night at the back of the facility
grounds, Noon said she could hear all of the buildings talking.
Everyone was talking.

''I understood some of it,'' she said. ''It was, Look at the stars,
and Look at the moon, and What do you think all of that is about? and
How long is it going to last? But then they started saying something I
didn't understand. I struggled to make sense of what it was. And
here's what I think they were saying. They were announcing themselves
to the world. They were saying, We live here. We exist.''

Charles Siebert is a contributing writer and the author, most
recently, of ''A Man After His Own Heart: A True Story.''