Editorial: Retired chimps are at home in the woods of Louisiana

Fri Jun 15, 2007

Pam Rittelmeyer, a camera operator currently working on the major motion picture, "The Great Debators" which is filming in and around Shreveport, La., attended the June Chimpanzee Discovery Day here at the sanctuary. She is also a photojournalist and wrote this editorial that appeared in the June 15th edition of the Shreveport Times. Pam lives in Malibu, Calif., and was a stunt ape in "Planet of the Apes."

Pam Rittelmeyer: Retired chimps are at home in the woods of Louisiana
June 15, 2007
 
"Monkeys have tails, chimps don't."

When I worked on the movie "Planet of the Apes" this is the response that I heard the animal handlers say to people who mistakenly referred to the chimpanzees as monkeys. Chimpanzees are our closest living evolutionary relatives. We share somewhere between 95 percent and 99.4 percent identical DNA.

photo courtesy of Pam Rittelmeyer

Puddin', a 28-year old male chimpanzee, roams the habitat during June's Chimpanzee Discovery Day.

These similarities are what make them useful in biomedical research. From 1930 until 1970 they were imported into the United States from Africa for this purpose. There are still about 1,000 of them being used today.

In the wild where they have natural predators their life span is about 40 years. This is the age when they start to become weaker and slower. In captivity where they don't have predators they live much longer. Cheeta, the chimp from the original Tarzan movie is now 75 and lives in Palm Springs, Calif.

I work as a stunt person and camera operator on movies. In between jobs I pursue my passion of visiting sanctuaries for endangered animals. I have made documentaries for a wild horse sanctuary in northern California and I have traveled as far as China to photograph panda bears at a nature reserve in Sichuan.

My job has now brought me to beautiful, yet hot and humid, Shreveport where I am working on "The Great Debaters" which Denzel Washington is directing. This lush climate is perfect for chimps and Caddo Parish was good enough to set aside 200 acres of forest for a chimpanzee sanctuary. In April 2005 Chimp Haven became a refuge for retired chimps in Keithville.

Chimp Haven is a sanctuary for over 100 chimps that have been retired from medical research. Most of the chimps here have spent 30 to 40 years working as research animals. They come to Louisiana to enjoy the last years of their lives.

The sanctuary wants to keep the space it has available for up to 100 more chimps when they are retired, so it attempts to keep the chimps from reproducing. Their methods usually work, but in the case of Teresa and Conan, the vasectomy failed. That is why they now have 5-month-old baby Tracy.

Teresa, age 45, is one of the few chimps here that was born in the wild and spent a few years of her youth in her natural habitat before spending about 30 years in medical research facilities. Now that she once again has trees to climb and a forest to roam, she is teaching her baby how to live more naturally.

Chimp Haven gives the chimps their choice of where to live. They can choose to build a nest in the woods or they can stay indoors. Since some of the chimps here were born in captivity and have never lived in an environment other than concrete and steel, some of them are only comfortable in the man-made world. "Even when they go outside some of the chimps like to keep one hand touching the concrete building at all times," according to Rick Delahaya, media relations director for Chimp Haven.

According to Amy Fultz, a behaviorist at Chimp Haven, the hope is that the few wild-born chimps will eventually teach the others how to live in the forest. Some of them have already discovered that they can get some of their food naturally. They like to eat the naturally growing elm, oak and sweetgum.

In order to speed up the process, the scientists at Chimp Haven use some tricks to teach them. They place bananas and other goodies high up in the trees to entice the chimps to climb. They have built fake termite mounds and filled them with food products that the chimps enjoy like peanut butter and applesauce. The chimps find a stick to put in a hole and pull out the food. This mimics what they would naturally do, except in the wild the stick would become covered with yummy termites.

Chimp Haven is still in its early stages of growing and becoming an internationally renowned educational center. It is open to the public the second Saturday of every month, except July and August. Go to www.chimphaven.org for more information.