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[Benjamin Bayliss <ctrkgrendel AT yahoo.com>]

    Six Chimps at Center of Custody Battle  Judge Orders Chimps to Be Sent 
Back to Facility Where They Were Allegedly Abused  By SHARYN ALFONSI, JOSH 
GAYNOR, JEN PEREIRA and JONANN BRADY  March 21, 2008 — 
     
  http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=4494671
   
  Deep in the woods of northwest Louisiana, hundreds of chimps are living out 
their retirement in ease at an animal sanctuary called Chimp Haven, after 
being used for scientific research. 
  But now six of the primate residents are at the center of a custody battle. 
  The chimps were moved to Chimp Haven after living in allegedly horrible 
conditions at another sanctuary. A judge recently ordered the chimps back to 
their original home, but their new caretakers say they won't let them go. 
  The six chimps, known as the "Keithville Krewe" after their new hometown, 
lived previously at a nonprofit sanctuary called Primarily Primates in San 
Antonio, Texas. 
  People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals shot an undercover video at the 
facility, where it says it found overcrowding and substandard conditions. So 
law enforcement stepped in. 
  Nine chimps were rescued; the six that survived are at Chimp Haven and 
thriving, according to its caretakers. 
  "You don't play if you're unhappy, and these chimps play all the time," 
said Linda Brent, the president and director of Chimp Haven. 
  
  Chimps Feel Pain Too   Primarily Primates now says that the Texas facility 
is under new management and that it wants the chimps back. 
  Primarily Primate officials argued the chimps legally belong to them and a 
judge agreed, ordering the Keithville Krewe back to Texas. 
  "They consider them property, and that's not how we view these 
chimpanzees," Brent said. "They have emotions, they have feelings and they're 
doing well here." 
  Studies have found that chimps share 98 percent of human DNA, and 
scientists claim some chimps are able to communicate as many as 3,000 words, 
including their feelings. 
  To that end, advocates argue that if the chimps are sent back to Texas they 
could become scared or anxious, even depressed. 
  "Chimps can definitely suffer from traumatic events just like humans," 
Brent said. 
  Chimp Haven is appealing the judge's decision. Primarily Primates would not 
speak to "Good Morning America," but issued a statement saying, "Chimp Haven 
should let the chimpanzees get on with their lives and be returned to their 
permanent refuge as soon as possible." 
  The chimps did not comment, but seemed blissfully unaware of the legal 
battle swirling around them. 
  





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Subject: [monkeywire] Book review: This chimp was no monkey
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http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/27/lifestyle/nim_chimpsky.fortune/

Book review: This chimp was no monkey

A fascinating look at the life of Nim, the chimpanzee who was raised
in a human household on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

By Daniel Okrent

(Fortune Magazine) -- Sometimes I stumble across a book that leaves
essential details unexplained and critical questions unanswered, that
stacks the deck in its identification of villains and heroes, and
whose author tries to adopt a pose of cool disinterest but can't
suppress partisan passion.

In fact, I stumble across books like that frequently, and almost
always I close them quickly. But every once in a while I encounter one
like Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human (Bantam), a book so
surprising, so persuasive, and so damn compelling that I raced from
page one to the end forgiving its flaws and emerged genuinely changed
by the experience.

I realize this is saying a lot. But so does Elizabeth Hess's book. In
1973, a Columbia University psychologist named Herbert Terrace, aiming
to disprove the linguistic theories of Noam Chomsky, set out to teach
American Sign Language to a chimpanzee. The adorable creature picked
for the experiment (and named so purposefully) would be raised as a
member of a human family, and as much as possible socialized into
human ways.

The short version of the story is that Nim may have been the most
engaging playmate, the most promising student, and the cutest damn
toddler on the entire Upper West Side of Manhattan. (Let me point out
here that I am generally indifferent to animals and believe in the
necessity of using some species for medical research.)

Human identity

He learned a remarkably large vocabulary, took on innumerable human
habits and inclinations (this being the 1970s, those habits included
cigarette smoking), and bonded not only with his human siblings and
parents but also with Homo sapiens as a species. At one point, asked
to sort through a stack of photographs of humans and chimpanzees and
separate them into appropriate piles, Nim put his own picture in with
the humans'. As one of his babysitters said, "I don't think Nim had
any concept that he was a chimpanzee."

Which, Hess demonstrates, turns out to be the unacknowledged reality
lurking within the best-intentioned of animal studies. For when Nim
grew too large, too strong, and too temperamental to continue what had
become a domestic charade, there was nowhere to go. Far more fortunate
than most chimps used in similar experiments, after bouncing around
from facility to facility Nim eventually ended his days in a cage on
an animal preserve in Texas, where he passed the time vainly trying to
use ASL to communicate with unknowing tourists who came by to gawk.

This tale is not entirely a grim one; Nim was one fascinating ape, and
the people whose lives he touched are a compelling bunch. (I do think
the author is unfairly rough on Terrace, whose instincts and motives
seem nobler than Hess believes them to be.) But at one point in his
post-Manhattan, pre-Texas travels, Nim was locked up in a laboratory
in the Hudson Valley, where chimps bred for medical experimentation
were imprisoned in substandard cages, cramped and isolated.

Though Nim had to abide the grim conditions, he was spared the
experiments. But the doomed chimpanzees who endured them, largely bred
for the purpose, were in fact better off than Nim was. They had never
known the reward of human love and companionship, and then had it
ripped away from them.

The reality, writes Hess, was that "Project Nim had no exit plan." Of
course not: from the beginning, Project Nim was not really about Nim,
but about the species that chose to study him.