Por Ana Mengotti
Miami (EFE).- Human beings have to understand that no matter how well we take care of a chimpanzee and no matter how much it resembles us, it must live with its own, primatologist Andrew Halloran, head of a Florida reserve of four chimpanzees living in the garage of an Airbnb.
Halloran traveled to Union Ridge, Ohio to pick up Anna, Lucy, Cash and April, who have been on the Save the Chimps reservation in Fort Pierce, Florida for just a few days.
“No matter how good you are with a chimpanzee, you won’t be able to provide it with what it needs. They need a place like this where there is hundreds of acres of space and lots of chimpanzee friends and companions so they can live like chimpanzees,” he says.
In the Save the Chimps reserve, an organization that is supported only by private donations and needs help to fulfill its mission, live 230 chimpanzees, primates whose DNA matches 98.6% with that of humans.
Good intentions can hurt
Most come from laboratories, where they were previously used to test drugs and treatments, or from the entertainment industry, and others were pets of people who in many cases had “good intentions,” says Halloran.
Founded by primatologist Carole Noon in 1997 and located on a 150-acre farm some 125 miles from Miami, the reserve is a chimpanzee’s paradise lost.
For the endangered chimpanzees that live in the wild in central and western Africa, that paradise has also been lost or is being lost due to deforestation and the invasion of their habitat by humans.
Anna, Lucy, Cash and April still cannot freely enjoy the meadows and wooden jumping and swinging structures on the reserve, nor the company of the other residents, as Halloran, director of Save the Chimps for what has to do with the behavior of animals and their care.
The four will spend a period in quarantine, which can be 30 days or more, housed in a large covered space but with walls made of a mesh through which the air circulates.
“They are very skilled, very social, and we think they will really do well here, where they will be able to live in a five-acre (2-hectare) island habitat with 14 or 15 other chimpanzees,” the primatologist emphasizes.
Chimpanzees living in the garage of an Airbnb
The reserve has twelve islands surrounded by canals and on each one lives a group of chimpanzees, which are chosen to live together by specialists based on various criteria.
Before being turned over to Save the Chimps, the four lived in an enclosed space the size of a two-car garage and with very little light in a house that was rented through Airbnb, where there were other animals that served as entertainment for the children. guests.
They had access to a small cage outside, but in Ohio it was too cold for them and they didn’t go out for several months.
“When they got here it was raining and one of the females, Anna, just laid out in the rain, which she probably hadn’t felt in a long time,” Halloran says.
“They seemed very, very happy,” says the primatologist about his arrival at the reserve and explains that if he is going to be separated from the others for a while, it is to ensure that they do not have diseases that could be contagious, but also because of the need acclimatization to their new environment.
“Being introduced to a large group of chimpanzees can be very, very stressful,” he stresses.
In Halloran’s view, there have been some “big victories” in the last 10 to 20 years in the fight for fair treatment of chimpanzees.
“One,” he says, “has been that chimpanzees are no longer used in biomedical research, and another thing that’s really good is that Hollywood has generally stopped using chimpanzees in movies.”
Although chimpanzees are getting harder to buy, Halloran complains that some people still keep them as pets.
The primatologist believes that their resemblance to humans is a “curse” for chimpanzees, because “it has made them use them for anything.”
“They are a truly magnificent species, they are unique, they are so much more than close to looking human. There are species in their own right and there are some really key differences between humans and chimpanzees,” she asserts.