The Nature of Things

There are two main groups of chimpanzees aside from the 4 babies and partially paralyzed Ghaa in quarantine. The island has 37 chimpanzees and the mainland group has 8. The mainland group is comprised of chimpanzees that have at some point or another found their way out of the island, most on multiple occasions. It is also home to two that cannot be let outside at all until they can figure out how to contain them, they are Jack (the current leader of the mainland) and Bankim. Collectively they are hugely stubborn and cause more issues with the keepers than their island counterpart but there are relatively few issues between the chimpanzees themselves.

Then there is the island. The island is home to a wide range of personalities. There is Suzanne who is the matriarch, and the oldest member of LWC, she was a resident of the zoo before it was the sanctuary and is thought to be somewhere in her mid to late twenties. She is identifiable at a distance because she is the only blonde chimpanzee we have, it is not genetic, it comes from old age, the stress of having spent her early life in a very small cage and pretty horrific circumstances and having plucked or rubbed off most of her hair at some point. She looks like a matron now and plays the part well. If she stamps her foot, everyone stops what they are doing and the offender is often attacked in some manner by a large portion of the group. Aside from the violence, its kind of cute because she’s old and moves relatively slow. She is also the foster mother to a three year old chimp named Po-Po whose mother died last year.  

There are some young chimpanzees, just a few years old, some older. There are about 7 that rarely or never go outside including my grooming partners and an older chimp named Mac who really likes when you jiggle his huge belly. And there is Carlos.

Carlos is an anomaly in many ways; most of the workers here either have a guarded respect or outright fear of him. One of the volunteers here told me that being alone in a room with him was her worst nightmare, that just the threat of it would cause her to have a heart attack and die before he even entered the room. I can’t say I blame her.

He is the tallest chimpanzee we have, even on all fours he stands about 4ft tall. Most striking are his eyes. Unlike humans, most if not all primates do not have whites to their eyes, outside of the iris is a brownish black that fades into a paler brown and almost white at the extreme edges. Carlos though, he has eyes like we do. So in the morning before everyone gets let out, you are greeted with varying amounts of aggression by a huge chimpanzee with human eyes. Its oddly disconcerting. Fortunately much of his aggression and dislike is focused on men. Carlos is our chief poo flinger, and some staff will only come to the island in the morning with a stick to keep him at bay. When chimps throw poo, they don’t mess around, their hands are huge and they fill them, and it never seems to be with the solid stuff…

He is also our most aggressive towards other chimpanzees. It wasn’t until our newest volunteer came in that I was really made aware. She had volunteered here before, and had asked about a chimpanzee named Jackson. Having gone through all the files I knew he had died at the hands of Carlos, but I did not read the full report. I pulled it up and read it, then went to the keepers for some clarification and details. What was apparently a fight over a female, the low ranking Jackson became the object of Carlos’ aggression. It does not appear to have been much of a fight, Jackson had just rejoined the group after having been fairly sick. Carlos pounded his head into the ground and ripped most of his face off until he died. During the post mortem it was noted that there was no blood in many of the organs, most of it coating either him or the floor.  He then paraded around with the body. Yup, you read it right, held him up like he was a parade leader and pranced around with the now lifeless and faceless Jackson in hand.

I feel like a kid who just found out Santa isn’t real. It is easy to be around these guys and forget what they are capable of. Jane Goodall went through the same progression (She’s the chimpanzee lady from England who studied in Tanzania, not the Gorilla lady from the US who was macheted to death in Congo, that was Dian Fossey). She thought that chimps were better than people because they seemed so much gentler—then her group split into two and one annihilated the other. It was silly of me to put them on the same pedestal. Perhaps it was because all of them had suffered so much at the hands of humans. But they suffer just as much, if not more, at the hands of each other sometimes. Nature is not a beautiful calm. There is no such thing as a peaceful forest, I say it all the time, but apparently I forgot. Forest systems are classified as a dynamic equilibrium, they need a certain amount of disruption and chaos to continue to develop (come to think of it, so do we). There are fires and wind storms, there is death and suffering. Everything gets eaten, everything dies. Aside from possibly trees, there is no such thing as dying of old age in nature. You are alive until something stronger finds and eats you. I got caught up in the stories and forgot this. I remember now. Wild things are beautiful and wonderful, but nature is harsh and sometimes cruel and there is no escaping it.