A daughter's dark tale of abuse at the zoo chimp show: how kids and apes suffer together

Performing for humans, Detroit zoo, 1950s

It’s never a good time to beat a chimpanzee, even if it happened years ago and you can try to make some weak excuse for it, that people didn’t know better then, that those were the old days when we were only partly human.

But people always know better. We know better now and still do things we shouldn’t do. That’s human nature.

Years ago the Detroit zoo had a chimpanzee show that was cute for its time and would still be cute today by some people’s standards.

One of the trainers was a troubled man named Arthur. Not long ago I started chatting with his daughter Dawn Forsythe on the Facebook network I have for people around the world interested in apes and wild animals.

What an inspiring story that would be, I thought, to be a child raised by a chimp trainer. That would show real humanity and a child would have a unique perspective on apes. I had just written a blog about how orangutan moms were better than tiger moms and now I could talk about the great chimpanzee dad.

But something was wrong. Dawn hinted there was a darker side that I might not want to know. In the end it was one of those stories you hear before you can absorb it all fully and then realized you have been a bit tainted just to have listened.

But Dawn had a need to tell the story and I had a need to hear it. You can’t be fully human if you ignore the cruelty of life and want only romantic images to make you feel good.

This is a survivor's tale. It tells the ugly story of the abuse of chimps in a way that gives us a personal connection to what happened. It is easy for human beings to ignore the abuse of apes -- including keeping them confined and in captivity against their will without having committed a crime -- because apes are "just apes," different from us, apparently without the greater sensitivity to bad treatment that we have, apparently somehow able to tolerate abuse better as "animals." But  apes  are part of the same evolutionary family tree as we are, with similar thoughts and feelings. 

Arthur training the chimpanzees in the 1950s.

The story of this woman as a child puts the abuse in a startling light: we have to consider that the same abuse is being given to human and ape alike and might feel the same. An ape suffers like a child suffers.

“When other kids had an ailing grandma staying at their house,” Dawn told me, “my family had a recuperating chimp in the basement. My aunt also owned a chimp. Keepers took animals home with them in those olden days.

“I can still remember the first time I held a chimp’s hand. I can remember the leathery feel of his palm and fingers, the thrill of connecting, a real, physical connection.”

The background is hazy from her childhood. She is not sure about the details of her father, Arthur. The family whispered that he was in the marines for a few weeks until he got kicked out and maybe had a chance at redemption, by the fluke of getting a job at the zoo, seen “in newspaper articles and in family pictures, surrounded by adoring chimps.”

“The most favourite times of my young life was when I went to the Detroit Zoo chimp shows. Oh, the thrill when the chimps zoomed onto the stage, in their little electric cars, or on their bikes. They were so cute, and I was so proud to see my dad there.

The wild, wild west in old Detroit

“In the 1950s, the zoo had three 30-minutes shows daily. They would dress the chimps in cowboy outfits or sailor suits or striped prison garb. The chimps would pedal a bike or ride in little electric cars, or they’d walk on stilts. One of the chimps rode a motorcycle. Little Tarzan mastered the pogo stick. The chimps actually rode Shetland ponies! I think it was during a Davy Crockett skit. I also loved it when they would pretend to be a band, which each one playing a fiddle or drums.”

One day, when she was five or six, she was backstage at the chimp show, close to the chimps, the professional performers.  “I was in heaven. No grills or cages or walls between us, so close that I could reach out to touch them when they went by. I felt like I knew them personally. Sort of like they were my stepsisters and stepbrothers. After all, we kind of shared the same dad. I imagined they must have been having a wonderful time. I thought that chimps stayed darling forever.

“Dad always talked with pride about Jo Mendi II, how he was so smart and good. When dad wasn’t happy with the bunch of us kids arguing, he used Jo as the example of a perfect child. It’s hard to live up to that!

“To outsiders, it looked like the chimps were one big happy family. What the zoo visitors didn’t realize was that, until 1971, the entertainment chimps lived in small individual cages, without normal social interaction. I don’t remember ever seeing them on natural ground. It was all tile and cement and cages.”

  
The shows stopped years ago. In 2003, the Detroit Zoo’s anniversary publication admitted that animal shows were “a practice that today we would consider cruel ... The animals succumbed out of fear...Too many of the animals in the Detroit Zoo's shows, it is now believed, were intimidated, prodded, even beaten."

“It all makes sense now,” says Dawn. “At home, dad was a brutal man, often punching my mother and my little brother. I got the belt a lot. He was an alcoholic and, mom told us later, took “street drugs,” whatever they were. He would flare at any moment, reaching out to grab or punch or slap, or verbally abuse. At one point, he chased my mother out of the house and down the block, waving a gun at her. He thought it was okay to use violence to “teach” his kids and “discipline” his wife.

Joan, the wife and mother, was a manic-depressive and spent years later in psychiatric wards. Why did she put up with the abuse? She had no way, says Dawn, of taking care of five children her own. After the chimp trainer, she  led an unsettled life, marrying and divorcing six or seven times. 

Arthur with the "adoring" chimpanzees. He was later fired.

So, in a way, the chimps were an extension of a dysfunctional human family. “It must have been really bad for the chimps under his control," says Dawn. "In later years, mom would hint that dad had been abusive with the chimps, but she never came out and admitted it.

“Dad was fired sometime in the late 1950s, after someone saw him throw a young chimp against the wall. I’m betting it wasn’t the first time.

“I had such a strange relationship with my father. I loved seeing him with the chimps, and hearing his stories when he came home from work. His stories about the zoo would make me laugh or gasp with amazement. He had a huge scar across his chest, and he told us that an elephant had tried to crush him and that’s how he got the scar. Wow, such a brave man. The true story is that he sliced himself, intentionally, with a knife. I don’t know if that was before or after mom found him with a gun pointing at his head, rigged up to fire when his toes pulled a piece of rope.

“When I was 14 years old, dad had been unemployed for a couple of years. He spent several months at Pontiac State Hospital, originally named Eastern Michigan Asylum.  One February night in 1964, I was watching television. Dad started throwing papers into the fireplace, producing a blazing fire. Then he punched a mantel clock, bloodying his fist. He ripped his shirt off and wrapped his fist. I went and woke my mother and returned to the front room. And then I just sat there. Mom asked dad what he was injecting into his arm, and he said “vitamins.” She knew better, and ran for the phone. He hit her, and shoved her against the wall. Then he drank the mixture. It was cyanide. Mom sent me out of the house, and told me to go to where my kid sister was babysitting. As I walked out into the night, dad yelled at me to “tell the neighbourhood what a lousy dad you have.”

It’s all old history now. The cruelty of the man towards others was also self-destructive. 

Dawn, born in Detroit in 1952, left home at sixteen, then later joined the army. She has been a legislative analyst, political consultant, lobbyist, and public affairs director and lived in Chicago, Honolulu, and South Lake Tahoe. Married and divorced twice, she works now for the NOAA in Washington, D.C. and has a dog and four cats. 

Did her childhood leaves scars? She says the hatred of her father did -- and the chimps would have suffered mentally and emotionally too. The family hid the suicide and Dawn felt a terrible guilt. She tried to commit suicide twice in her twenties and then says she realized he had to forgive her father to find a release for herself. "So I did."

The Detroit zoo stopped using chimps in entertainment shows, but the practice continues elsewhere in different parts of the world. Orangutans are used in boxing matches in Thailand and I saw them used in an entertainment show at Universal Studios Hollywood theme park in 2004. Dawn says it is a practice that appalls her. "I won't watch shows or the ads. I won't even buy any greeting cards with the 'funny' chimp faces."

Detroit Zoo program from 1948

What happened to the chimps? Jo Mendi II retired from his theatrical career in 1953 after eight seasons on the boards. He stayed on the zoo under the rank of “trained chimp emeritus.” Others were sold as “cage animals.”

In 1956, the zoo sold Mike to an animal dealer, who sold him to a New York nightclub owner for $500. After he went on a rampage in New York city, the zoo brought him back, then sold him to the federal space program when it was cheaper to risk the life of a fellow ape.

Mike became a test pilot for acceleration tests. That's because human beings want to travel faster and faster and get away from their planet and got Mike to help. But going faster or leaving the planet are not necessarily a solution to what ails us, as any chimpanzee knows. 

As for Mike, too bad we didn't know him better. He was a chimpanzee.

Postscript: Within days of this blog being posted, Dawn Forsythe set up her own blog to explore the intersection of the lives of human beings and chimpanzees beginning with her experience years ago. It should be an amazing journey and will make a fascinating book in the end. You can follow Dawn's story at her blog site linked to this Intimate Ape blog site  www.chimptrainersdaughter.blogspot.com

Is a red ape a Communist?

Does the word "red" signal "Communist" to the American mind?

I had a flash of paranoia yesterday at the U.S. border when I thought my Red Ape licence plate had got me into trouble.

I was grilled by a female officer with the personality of a piece of granite and my car was searched with mechanical dispassion.

The male officer at the crossing post had commented on my Red Ape licence plate and then with few questions sent me to be searched with a form scrawled with the words "RED APE" in bold letters. It was at that moment that I panicked at the thought that the word "red" can have inflammatory connotations in the United States that it doesn't elsewhere.

This is a country that got uptight that the universal health care bill of President Barak Obama was the kind of subversive socialism that is found in Cuba, a country which, as Fidel Castro pointed out last year, had universal health care for its people half a century earlier. In Canada, socialism and universal health care are so perfectly natural that we don't question them. We call it democracy. (Canada was founded as an almost-sovereign state in 1867, the same year that Marx's Das Kapital was published, purely by coincidence.)

But the real reason why I got grilled and searched at the border was a tale of misunderstood love. Apparently I am visiting my girlfriend Wendy too much.

My red ape keeps watch on humanity from my car

Somehow it is suspicious that a grey-haired university professor would be visiting his girlfriend regularly in a humble but efficient black Subaru wagon loaded with books and clothes and a big stuffed red orangutan in the back. 

I have been searched many times before in airports in the U.S. and other countries, and accepted it like you would locker room humour. It is rite of passage. It was always cheerful, but efficient, professional in a friendly way.

But this was different. It had an air of ill will and cold suspicion that left me troubled overnight. They make you feel guilty and suspicious even when you aren't.

I wondered why I was affected so much, because I accept the need to be screened and checked and I was never bothered by being frisked at the airport.

I think it was because the female officer seemed to take whatever I said as sinister and incriminating. The truth was no longer plausible and I felt that I was being criminalized. In all the years I worked as a journalist covering police and prisons I never experienced this side of the law personally, although I certainly heard the tales.

Yes, border agents, Wendy exists.

I have to say that these are tough times to be idealistic and romantic, when good intentions are apparently not credible any more.

Officer Granite had a lot of probing questions. Income? Mortgage payments? Rental income? Clothes kept at Wendy's? Why take summer clothes across the border now? What is the value of the clothes and books being left at Wendy's? Engaged? Why no engagement ring on my finger?

The officer had trouble with the $25 silver ring from Bali on my left little finger. "What is a Bali ring?" she asked when I called it that. "A ring I got in Bali," I said with a smile, "a place I like very much." Now I can talk about Bali, I thought, but the officer wasn't interested in that enchanted isle. She wanted to know why I didn't move the Bali ring to my left ring finger -- where it wouldn't fit, as Wendy reminded me later. Wendy thinks more practically than I do when being interrogated. She also warned me later to be totally serious at the border with my poker face, although I don't have a poker face.

"What will I find in the car when I search it?" the officer asked yesterday. I was so annoyed I wanted to say "enough guns and cocaine to keep the Pacific Northwest happy for a while," but said the truth instead, "A lot of cereal, plus books." I explained that there is a type of cereal I like that I can't get in the U.S. so I was bringing a summer supply down early. I think I brought 12 boxes. You can never have enough cereal. But the border guards seemed baffled by someone who thinks ahead.

Won't eat expired dog biscuits from Canada.

I also had some dog treats in the car for Wendy's sweet dog Emo and wondered if I needed to declare them too. Wendy pointed out later, that, practically, the dog treats had expired, so they might kill a fragile old pooch like Emo. I felt guilty about that too.

While my car was being searched, and everything unzipped by the thorough female officer but not zipped back again, I sat with two ordinary-looking men who didn't have much to say. I told them that I was being searched for visiting my girlfriend too often, as a way of asking them indirectly why they were being searched. It didn't work. They looked like people who had eaten expired dog biscuits.

Usually when I cross the border there is some sort of discussion of orangutans. It is so much a part of my life and work and I am ready to seize any opportunity. I had a bit of a chat with a female immigration officer in the Seattle airport the time I was wearing a bright orange shirt emblazoned with the words "Orangutan appreciation day," like something a harmless crank would wear. This officer liked animals and was a big fan of the San Diego zoo. We connected about animals. I can be the harmless crank for orangutans.

But my last time through the Seattle airport I was grilled about whether I was engaged, whether a date had been set for marriage and had I started the "paperwork," which it took me a while to figure out might mean immigration papers. The male guard seemed like he was taking the time to type into the computer a novel about my relationship with Wendy. I thought, this is a  guy without a girlfriend.

And then yesterday I got the criminal treatment for romantic Canadians.

It bothered me more than I realized at first. It was so easy to break the sense of trust that I have always had about Americans just because of the nasty cynicism of a female officer.

The Marijuana Nation flag?

But Canada is a small nation and often misunderstood. It is something we live with. I remember the time on the enchanted isle of Bali when a cab driver insisted that Canada's red maple leaf flag is marijuana. He was totally convinced that Canada was a liberated country flying the symbol of the great weed openly and wouldn't take the word of an actual Canadian that it was otherwise. Everybody who went through his taxi for years must have learned from him that Canada is Amsterdam North. It took some time to persuade him of the truth. He looked terribly disappointed in the end. Canada will never be the same for him, nor crossing the border for me.

Why orangutan moms are better than tiger moms

Orangutans are no tiger moms. Nu-nu with her 10-day-old infant in the Taipei zoo...... Photo by Shawn Thompson

We’ve heard a lot lately about the philosophy of tiger moms, which is the Chinese version of tough love for your child and not the sort of thing that the liberated westerner wants to hear.

Yale University law professor Amy Chua explains in her 2011 book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom that western parents have weakened their children by making them self-satisfied and indulgent under-achievers.

Is tiger mom Amy Chua right?

By contrast, the tiger mom cares for her children more deeply, in a more respectful way, through toughness and discipline, giving the child strength, confidence, aspirations and accomplishments. That, in turn, makes the child happier.

The fault, says Chua, lies in poorly adjusted western parents. Chua says in her uncompromisingly blunt way, “Western parents have to struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement, and try to persuade themselves that they are not disappointed about how their kids turned out.”

If ever there were a taboo that needed to be prodded and poked, it is what Chua is doing, criticizing  the already parentally insecure westerner where it hurts us the most. We know that differences in parenting styles are a big issue in a marriage that can inflame the tension between a couple and contribute to a divorce.

I have seen myself the same tensions in orangutan circles, where those caring for orphan orangutans clash over different styles of looking after "the kids," with tempers and outrage flaring in the same way.

But there is a part of me that understands the unpopular notions of Chua and that feels that westerners find it hard to listen to easterners because it puts us on the defensive about ourselves. It is a strange and different way of looking at life that challenges our basic notions of who we are.

Amy Chua and her daughters

I know what Chua is talking about and see some value in what she says. I see the difference in the attitude between my Chinese students and the western ones in the university courses that I teach. The westerners have been raised to value independence and self-esteem, and they question authority, which are important qualities that we should encourage. But sometimes the same qualities raise up the barriers of egos and create a battle with authority that gets in the way of learning. There are times when I wish the western students would accept more tiger in their teachers.

But how, as a teacher, do you decide what is right and natural in teaching your students?

As a parent, how do you decide what is right and natural in raising your children? There is so much advice and who really knows?

For an answer I turn to orangutan moms, who have been raising children for millions of years more than the Chinese tiger mom, longer even than we have been a species, and their rain forest children are happy and well adjusted. Orangutans become dysfunctional when human beings interfere with them by separating mother from child and putting them in a sterile environment.

Photo by Shawn Thompson

In the tropical rain forest, the orangutan mom spends eight years with one child teaching that child how to be an orangutan. Without that eight years with the mother, the orangutan becomes dysfunctional and does not know how to socialize, raise a child or survive properly in the jungle.

And orangutan moms are not tigers. (The predators have also disappeared from their forests in Borneo and Sumatra over time. where orangutans are the only Asian great ape.)

Orangutans are patient and gentle, probably more so than the average western parent. They rely on the initiative and curiosity of the child to learn, when the child wants to learn, at the pace the child wants to learn. The child is rewarded by its own curiosity and initiative.

And whether it is genetics or cultural, orangutans have an enormous natural curiosity and a strong desire to observe, learn and do new things. Their curiosity and initiative have not been damaged by the patience and gentleness of their mothers. That is something I find missing in my university students, who want the reward of marks for whatever they do. They basically want to be paid to learn. Such is the society we have created. Scientific studies have shown that the same result happens to the initiative of apes when they are rewarded for doing something. The material reward takes away the initiative to do the thing for its own sake.

It may be hard to believe that orangutans may have some stronger common abilities than we do, and it may be too humbling to human pride to consider that we could learn something from observing orangutans.

One of our limitations is that we think that orangutans are only a biological machine without choice and the ability to think and change as an individual, according to individual differences like us of personality, inclination, temperament and aptitude. We think they are merely dominated by biology. That is a convenient way for us to think and removes some of our sense of responsibility toward a fellow species.

But I saw a remarkable incident at the Taipei zoo that reminded me how much different orangutans are and how considerate they are as parents.

It was a cool, drizzly day in old Taipei. I was standing at the orangutan enclosure at the Wildlife Rescue Center of the Taipei Zoo. Beside me was a smart, intuitive and somewhat romantic keeper named Yang Chiang Lan.

Yang learns by watching orangutans intently and intuiting what they want and need, which is similar to the way he wooed his reptile keeper wife Chiu Zo Jing, even taking a job at the Taipei zoo because he knew she would want to work there someday.

Yang Chiang Lan in the Taipei zoo.... Photo by Shawn Thompson

It took sixteen years to woo his wife, but Yang is a persistent and patient human being, the qualities he also needs to succeed with orangutans, along with flexibility and a sense of humour.

On this drizzly day I made the morning rounds for three hours with Yang of cleaning the night cages and feeding the orangutans. Yang took the time to commune with the German shepherd dogs that protect the zoo animals from wild dogs. Then Yang had time to stand and talk by the orangutan enclosure.

Yang had put out huge banana leaves for the big male Ahyong because he thought the orangutan might be a bit angry that a visitor like me was monopolizing Yang's time that day and upsetting the regular schedule.

But what happened next was expected. We witnessed a rare and remarkable family drama.

The female orangutan Shouquaytow and her son Neanzer were released into the enclosure with the father of the child, Ahyong, after a month-long absence that apparently left the female in Shouquaytow pent up with desire.

The female orangutan Shouquaytow and her son Neanzer... Photo by Shawn Thompson

Shouquaytow was munching on a big banana leaf as she decided what she wanted to do next.

I was talking to Yang through a translator. I told the translator that I felt like an orangutan in Taiwan because I understood none of the words of the language and had to watch the body language and expressions of people to make sense of what was happening.

But we stopped talking when we realized what a miraculous and complex event was unfolding.

Yang squatted by the mesh totally absorbed. He said in all his years at the zoo he had never seen anything like this.

The female orangutan and her two-year-old son had begun vocalizing rapidly back and forth for a few minutes in some kind of intense conversation. They played with each other tenderly by their mouths and fingers.

The male drew closer because of the conversation and the female took the initiative in an obvious attempt to seduce him. She lay back and spread her legs while still holding the child.

Ahyong accepted the invitation without hesitation and dragged Shouquaytow to a quiet corner. He is touchy about being watched by human beings he doesn't know.

But the child didn't like this lovemaking and there was a three-way conversation between male, female and child. 

The child started slapping and pushing against the male, who was strong enough to overpower both female and child, but didn't. Instead of behaving "like an animal," he relented to the discomfort of the child, who was peeing profusely out of stress.

The male, to vent his frustration, went to a corner and pulled and banged on the fire hoses used for climbing.

Meanwhile, the female tried to soothe her child with tender play, but he continued to voice his displeasure.

But the adult orangutans had listened to the child.

The mother didn't get the sex she wanted; the male surrendered his chance for the satisfaction of a romp with a willing partner; and the child prevailed as the cold drizzle fell everywhere in Taipei that day.

The parents had listened to a child who had been raised with the gentleness and patience that an orangutan mother gives. It is a way that orangutans have spent millions of years perfecting without needing to unleash the tiger within.

---

Feel like more of a chimpanzee mom than an orangutan mom? Check out the poll on this blog site about which kind of ape best matches your personality.

My interviews at the Taipei Zoo were made possible by the kind assistance of Ming-Chieh Chao, the general curator of the animal department. 

I help Yang inside the Taipei zoo.

Musical apes: Should we be surprised that they can get the beat?

Chimpanzees at the Taipei zoo  Photo by Shawn Thompson

We take our appreciation of the arts very seriously and may not want to share it with the apes, but maybe it is time to admit that we are not the only species that can swing to a beat.

I thought I had great musical ape stories, like the time I took a professional French horn player into the jungles of Borneo to play for orangutans. Then I got a phone call from Chicago from a bluesy, fifty-two-year-old guitar player with sweet attitude and a warm, husky voice. His name is Harry Hmura. He created a group called Musicians for Apes and he has seen his music move the apes.

One time Hmura took his guitar to the Fauna Foundation sanctuary for apes outside Montreal, Quebec. The facility is Canada's first for apes who are refugees from laboratory experiments.

Hmura told me that he never gets stage fright as a musician, but he didn't sleep the night before. He was nervous how a crowd that had been abused by human beings like him in "very notorious laboratories" would receive him. He thought he might even "break down" with emotion and be overwhelmed. He said he asked himself, "Would I be able to deal with that as a person and be able to hang with them? How were they going to perceive me as a stranger because they have dealt with strangers in the laboratories all their lives?"

But the reception was as warm and boisterous as it was for Johnny Cash's revolutionary Folsom prison concert. If chimpanzees had been in Folsom prison with Johnny Cash, they would have loved his rhythm and wanted to dance. Music sounds even sweeter in captivity and it is a great liberator.

At first, chimpanzee eyes were staring at Hmura and there was "loud hooting and banging." Hmura was shaking from the emotion of meeting chimpanzees who have been abused. "I felt beyond terror and sympathy for these folks," he told me. He felt appalled by what human beings have done.

Hmura took some time to let the chimpanzees see him from the other side of the steel grate. He helped prepare food for them. A little later he got out his electric acoustical guitar to play to a lone chimpanzee named Toby. The history of Toby is that he is thirty-two, after spending his first twenty-four years in zoos. Toby took the loss badly of the death a close chimpanzee friend of his in the zoo, but now has a great friend in the chimpanzee Rachel. 

Hmura started playing a simple rhythm and Toby liked it. "I just started playing a rhythmic, upbeat, chordal thing, slapping the guitar and strumming. As I started strumming, all of the sudden Toby starts moving a rope back and forth as his head starts swaying back and forth to the rhythm of the strumming. And as he's swaying back and forth and bopping his head, he purses his lips out looking like the bell of a horn and begins to sing ever so lightly, woooing, and he's holding a melody to himself. He was trying to do a pitch. It was relatively the same pitch as mine. He was expressing himself."

Hmura played for another lone chimpanzee, a troubled soul named Billy Jo, who has since died at the age of thirty-seven. Billy Jo was employed with his sister as an entertainer for fifteen years, until he got too big and strong and had is teeth knocked out by a crowbar. Then he was sold to a laboratory for fourteen years. After living like a human being, Hmura told me, these chimpanzees had to endure the next decades of their lives being exploited by science and human beings. "So, Billy was quite confused. He didn't like males very much."

Hmura was with a female staff member that Billy Jo liked and she talked to Billy Jo to introduce the stranger with the guitar. Billy Jo was staring at Hmura with chimpanzee fists clenched on the grating. "I start playing this rhythmic pattern again. He starts swaying his head back and forth to the rhythm and accepting me as who I was with my guitar and enjoying the music. He grooved to the music." Hmura thinks that the chimpanzee who hated males accepted the music from him as an act of friendship and companionship.

Afterwards, Hmura fixed his signature spaghetti sauce from garden vegetables for the chimpanzees, who love spaghetti. The sauce had tomatoes, bell peppers, zucchini, carrots and garlic. "They love garlic," Hmura says. After lunch Hmura sat on a stool inside the chimpanzee house and "played quietly for everybody." The staff remarked that it was calm and quiet, a sign of acceptance.

Another time Hmura played for two adolescent male orangutans, Chuckie and Radcliffe, at Patti Ragan's Center for Great Apes in Wauchula, Florida. Chuckie, now twenty-five, was born in a zoo, then sold to a circus, where he was castrated, never a pleasant experience. He may have a few circus "issues" now. The tall, thirty-one-year-old Radcliffe is Chuckie's good pal. Radcliffe has some TV experience and worked with Chuckie in the circus, where he too went under "the knife." The pair were reunited at the Florida sanctuary after sixteen years of life "on the circuit." They play together and share food. Chuckie knows how to whistle too. Like Lauren Bacall once said, "You just put your lips together and blow." It's the same for apes.

Chuckie and Radcliffe reacted differently than chimpanzees to the music, which suits the differences in character between the two species. Orangutans are the engineers and problem solvers of the ape world, fascinated by how things work and are put together. They like to take things apart and put them together again and are ingenious at untying knots.

Harry Hmura, a musician for the apes

Hmura started to play a "pseudo-African song," a melodic ballad that he had composed, but with a slower tempo that would be more suitable for orangutans. "That's when I got their attention." The pair came closer and stretched out on the ground to sit intently and listen. "It was the most serene, beautiful moment that they were so taken by the tempo. They were immobile. Very rarely would they ever look up at me. They would look at my eyes for a quick second and look right back down at my hands with intensity. I showed them the guitar up close because I could see the way they were looking at it. You could see the pleasure in their eyes afterward."

Hmura went to a group of male and female chimpanzees. The males started to bang whatever they could to assert themselves. Then Hmura started to play. "It didn't take but a few seconds for everybody to calm down. Everybody just sat and listened." Hmura switched to a more upbeat melody and moved to an enclosure with three chimpanzees, a male, female and child. "The young one started to jump and bop up and down to the rhythm. The adult, Jessie, was nodding her head up and down to the music. The male, Bubbles, Michael Jackson's chimpanzee, was just watching. I'm sure he was reminiscing from his younger days being around Michael Jackson."

Michael Jackson aside, how natural is it for chimpanzees to dance and for other apes to respond to music? Is this wishful thinking on our part or is something really happening here?

Hmura is saying that apes have a sense of rhythm and get pleasure from it. This sounds like an aesthetic pleasure, maybe the beginning of art and culture. Scientists accept that apes, who have the same basic thoughts and feelings that we do, have a rudimentary form of culture too.

Others, like Jane Goodall, say they have observed rhythmic swaying and stamping in wild chimpanzees and interpret it as a form of dance. Goodall observed these “rain dances” in chimpanzees during rainstorms and near waterfalls. Marc Bekoff of the University of Denver's Institute for Human-Animal Connection says that he and Goodall were told at a chimpanzee sanctuary near Girona, Spain, that a chimpanzee named Marco does a trancelike dance during thunderstorms.

The anthropologist Jill Pruetz of Iowa State University also made similar observations of chimpanzees dancing near grass fires in Senegal. Pruetz said that the chimpanzees made a peculiar vocalization at this time that she has not heard at any other time and that they showed expertise at predicting what the fire would do.

And so on. It is all anecdotal and interpretative, as much of life is.

I haven't seen any of this yet myself and would like to judge for myself some time, but I do reflect that how willing we are to accept the interpretation of events like these depends upon how willing we are to believe that apes are akin to us and share rudimentary things with us.

We can indulge in wishful thinking that something is true just as much as we can indulge in wishful thinking that it isn't true.

Do apes really respond to music? That is a tough question to answer. An individual ape could be responding in a social way to the presence of a person or perhaps even showing signs of captivity in anxious, repetitive motions.

But there is video of apes picking up the rhythm of music, such as chimpanzees at the Chimp Haven sanctuary in Keithville, Louisiana, swaying and bobbing to the beat of drums. And the musicians Peter Gabriel and Paul McCartney have jammed with bonobos. Bonobos are said to understand pitch and rhythm in music.

Flute music seems to work well with apes, according to Terri Hunnicutt, a former ape keeper at the St. Louis zoo who now works at the Center for Great Apes in Florida. Hunnicutt told me that a particular CD of Native American flute music that she played at the zoo “would always calm everyone.” The apes listened to it, which took their minds off other things. “When this one CD was played all of the apes, even the younger chimps and gorillas, would just sit or lie. I once played it and watched a young male gorilla and his dad lying next to each other on their backs, feet up in the air, both patting their feet in time to the music. The kid was laughing as he did it.”

I know for sure that I don't have any musical ability myself and I can't dance worth a hoot, but maybe chimpanzees and gorillas can pick up a musical rhythm and go with it. I bet that Johnny Cash would have enjoyed playing to a crowd like this.

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Online Links:

Harry Hmura’s Musicians for Apes

Chimp Haven music video

Chimp Haven
The Fauna Foundation 
Center for Great Apes

Jill Pruetz and the fire dance

Check out my own Youtube video Orangutan music video

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The perfection of life with orangutans: Are you getting what you need too?

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A moment between man and ape at the Singapore zoo. 
Photo by Shawn Thompson

I don't know whether I am imagining it or not but there seems to be a perfection in the life of orangutans and the people who open themselves totally to the creatures.

I have noticed that in zoos. I feel sad for the captivity of apes in a zoo and I feel my own captivity more when I am there with them in a zoo. But I am also amazed at the relationships that people and apes have in captivity and I feel a strange sort of liberty myself in a zoo that I do not feel outside the walls in the city. 


And maybe I am not the only one, which is what I discovered in the zoo in Singapore.

I spent a week at that zoo, exploring the lives of the orangutans there, in the horrendous tropical heat where the only relief would be sinking into a coma for the day. Some times I was with individual orangutans, feeding bits of small fruit into their soft, gentle mouths, sitting beside them and being ignored, letting Ahseng, the two-year-old son of Miri, touch me gingerly.

Miri tolerated my presence. She is not a moody and temperamental orangutan like the other mother, Anita. "She doesn't mind who you are," I was told. She saw that I was the friend of the keepers she knew and trusted. The other orangutans don't like Miri because her congenial temperament means that she spends more time with human beings and gets more rewards, like the mulberry leaves she loves.

I talked with keepers about the wonders of orangutans. I learned how one female orangutan devised an ingenious escape from the enclosure by teaching herself to float across the moat - since orangutans don't swim - and then grabbed plants to hoist herself out. She was cautious enough to make sure she wasn't observed and the curator had to discover the ruse by hiding in the bushes.

Some of the orangutans also defeated the funnel put on trees to stop them escaping. Three orangutans arranged themselves on piggyback to get past the funnel and then the top one pulled the others up. They never did it when they knew the keepers were watching.

The male orangutan Friday found a way to break pieces of concrete, grind them into a powder and then spread the powder over his body to transform himself into the first white orangutan. "It is amazing how they can use their brains," I was told by the curator of animals Alagappasamy (Sam) Chellaiyah.

I learned that one time when the cell phone was ringing in the shirt pocket of the curator an orangutan pulled the phone out and put it to his ear so that he could hear what he saw Chellaiyah listening to all the time. 

Chellaiyah believes that communication will improve between orangutans and us. He says he hears about a dozen different sounds from them, which may also have individual variations, depending on what kind of inflection an orangutan wants to give the sound.

I talked to a scientist doing research about the uses of doubt and scepticism in science, in stark contrast to the discussions with the curator Chellaiyah about spirituality and morality.

After hours at the zoo, it took almost two hours for me to return by bus and MRT to my inexpensive hotel in the red light district of Singapore, where the cheapness of human life struggles for some kind of dignity in bordellos with small altars to the gods and signs warning about the dangers of drugs. The area felt like a tawdry form of captivity where time is cruel and life meaningless.

One morning on the way to the zoo I saw the sun trying to burn through the veil of the early morning haze of heat and a yellow cab flashed by with a big advertisement of the zoo on the side - a photo of an orangutan with the message that they share 97 per cent of our DNA. Around me I felt the futility of existence of people who would know nothing better that life in the streets. People in Singapore have to go to the zoo to see what a frog looks like.

I knew I was leaving for Jakarta and I could feel the sadness of departure rising in me because I was coming to like the zoo and the people here. I was missing my girlfriend in Seattle too.

Then listening to Chellaiyah  it struck me that he has created a small utopia inside this zoo, a temporary perfection with orangutans that stands against the chaos and imperfections of the world outside the zoo.

Of course, that is not the conventional framework for a discussion about zoos and holding animals in captivity, which many of the zoo keepers I have talked to say they regret.

Maybe it was the sweltering tropical heat, but when I listened to Chellaiyah I started to hear how he was a different person inside the zoo and wondered what made the difference. He believes he has become a different man since the zoo opened in 1971 and he started working with orangutans.

He said that he has become a calmer, more patient person and in some ways feels better inside the zoo than outside. He has achieved a kind of perfection with orangutans here that he can't even achieve with his family.

As zoos go, Chellaiyah, with the help of his staff and the administration of the zoo, believes he has created humane conditions for the orangutans, who were either orphans confiscated as pets or born in the zoo.

The orangutans can range freely outside their enclosure through a network of large trees developed for them. Orangutans are an arboreal ape and their minds and emotions may only develop fully when they can live in trees. You can see them enjoy the pleasures of climbing and swinging and I watched some just enjoy the rhythm of swinging. There is enough space here in the trees for them to get distance from people and other orangutans when they need it. "They know this is a safe haven," Chellaiyah says.

The orangutans should be totally free, of course, but it is not a perfect world. The rainforest of orangutans is being destroyed in Borneo and Sumatra; orangutans are being driven to the brink of extinction and brutalized by human beings.

But in an imperfect world that may be beyond our ability to fix it, this zoo feels like a place to come to experience for a moment what perfection might be like. It may be why people enjoy a place like this.

"I know what I am creating in a sanctuary," Chellaiyah told me. He sees contentment in the orangutans and happiness in the people who can see them swing freely in the trees.

He says he respects the orangutans and was outraged one time when a man got too close to a female orangutan and grabbed her breasts to make what seemed like a joke to him. Human beings can be such beasts. He made the fellow apologize abjectly.

"I used to be a very angry man," he told me. The orangutans made him mellower, he said. After he has been away from the zoo for a week, he says his family notices that he is more tense and frustrated, "like I lost something," he explains.

He says he talks to the orangutans in a direct and honest expression of his feelings, encouraging them, communing with them, and then laughs, saying, "Maybe it's too long I have been at the zoo."

Here, he says, "I feel happy. I feel strong. I don't feel old." And laughs again. He turned fifty-nine that year, in 2010.

His wife tells him that leaving the zoo at retirement will "handicap" him.

At home they even notice that he walks with a limp, which disappears on the grounds of the zoo and he has less of an appetite for food when he leaves the zoo.

What has been achieved inside the zoo is what is real, he says, not the cruelty of life outside.

Maybe yes, maybe no. Who knows. In the swelter of the tropical heat in a city like Singapore, you take what small moments of grace you can get.

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Here is video of my moment with Miri: 

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