Behind the scenes at a Chicago zoo, chimpanzees who spent years entertaining humans are learning to befriend their own kind.
It was a rainy morning at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, and at the chimpanzee exhibit, it was the children who were hooting and hollering. The apes themselves were placid, ignoring their rowdy audience as they foraged for leaves and swayed in small hammocks.
But hidden behind the scenes, out of public view, lived another group of chimps who were far less sanguine about strangers. And when they spotted two unfamiliar visitors, they rushed over to the edge of their enclosure. Eli, a gentle young adult, approached with his hair standing on end. Then Susie, a small but strong-willed female, spotted a photographer and began to shriek.
“She might be upset at the cameras,” said Jill Moyse, the curator of primates.
Eli and Susie had spent much of their young lives in front of cameras. Before arriving at the Lincoln Park Zoo in 2020, the pair had worked in Hollywood, racking up a long list of credits, including TV shows, music videos and commercials.
Captive chimpanzees were not protected by the Endangered Species Act until 2015, and even now, there is no blanket federal prohibition on private citizens owning chimps or raising them as pets and performers. The practice can end in tragedy, as the recent HBO docuseries Chimp Crazy makes clear: The series depicts full-grown chimpanzees, which are highly intelligent and social creatures, living in small basement cages and acting like the wild animals they are, sometimes gravely injuring people.
“Chimp Crazy exposed exactly how dangerous and cruel this pet primate trade is in a very visceral way,” said Kate Dylewsky, assistant director of government affairs at the Animal Welfare Institute, a nonprofit lobbying for a national ban on keeping nonhuman primates as pets.
For years, primatologists and animal welfare groups have been trying to end the private ownership of chimpanzees. They have managed to move many former pets and performers to sanctuaries, and their efforts helped make Eli the last great ape to work in Hollywood. But nearly 80 chimps remain in private hands, according to Project ChimpCARE, a Lincoln Park Zoo initiative to keep tabs on the nation’s chimpanzees.
And many former pets and performers still have long lives ahead of them, with pasts that could prove difficult to shed.
“The effects are so long-term,” said Maureen Leahy, vice-president for animal care and horticulture at the Lincoln Park Zoo. “We’ve worked four years now with Eli and Susie to have them become chimpanzees again.”
Chimpanzee children
Much remains unknown about Eli and Susie’s early years. But both chimps were born at the Missouri Primate Foundation, the commercial breeding facility featured in Chimp Crazy. It was once one of the nation’s leading suppliers of pet and performer chimps, according to the animal rights group Peta.
But in 2017, Peta sued the primate centre, saying that its chimps lived in “cramped, virtually barren enclosures” littered with waste and had little access to the outdoors. One chimp, Peta claimed, was caged alone, in what amounted to solitary confinement. “This treatment is not just unacceptable, but wildly cruel,” said Brittany Peet, general counsel for captive animal law enforcement at the Peta Foundation.
The lawsuit dragged on for years, with twists that are documented in Chimp Crazy, but ultimately resulted in the closure of the primate centre and the transfer of its chimpanzees to an accredited sanctuary.
Even well-meaning private owners simply can’t give chimpanzees what they need, experts said. “All of the scientific research that’s been done agrees that the most important thing to good quality of life for a chimpanzee is other chimpanzees,” said Katherine Cronin, a primatologist and the director of the animal welfare science programme at the Lincoln Park Zoo. And rehabilitating chimps like Eli and Susie means helping them find their place among other apes.
In the wild, chimps live in large, dynamic social groups and remain reliant on their mothers for years. But commercial breeders typically separate infants from their mothers shortly after birth. (“Babies sell better,” Dylewsky said.) Young chimps are often raised as human children, experts said, with limited opportunities to express natural chimpanzee behaviours or interact with others of their own kind.
And while captive chimpanzees can live into their 60s, they have much shorter lifespans as pets and performers. “They quickly become very strong, very unpredictable, and people realise that they’re out of their depth,” Dylewsky said. “Owners will often then keep these primates in cages full time or force them to undergo unnecessary procedures like tooth extraction.”
Others send their adult chimps to breeders or unaccredited animal attractions, like roadside zoos.
That’s what happened to Eli and Susie, who were initially raised by unknown caretakers before landing at a company that trained animals for the entertainment industry, according to the Lincoln Park Zoo. By 2018, 12-year-old Susie was retired and 9-year-old Eli was beginning to assert his independence, said Tanner Kling, a director and producer who worked with Eli that year.
Eli would do what his trainers asked, “but not without a lot of hooting and hollering and jumping around,” said Kling, who is making a docuseries about Eli called The Last Chimpanzee. Safety became a major concern. “By the end, he was relegated to only green-screen productions,” Kling said.
In late 2018, Eli and Susie were sent to an unaccredited wildlife sanctuary where conditions were spartan, said Moyse, who visited the premises while the chimps were living there. “They were just in a very small cage,” she recalled.
Before the pair had time to settle in, the facility abruptly closed, leaving Eli and Susie – and 40 other chimp residents – without a place to live. Project ChimpCARE worked with other zoos, sanctuaries and animal advocacy groups to find new homes for all of the chimps, ultimately bringing Eli and Susie to the Lincoln Park Zoo.
And then the real work began.
Learning to adjust
At first, Eli and Susie struggled to feed themselves. Like many human-reared chimps, they had probably been hand-fed – and not the kind of meals a great ape might rustle up in the wild. “Usually entertainment or pet chimps live on a McDonald’s diet,” Moyse said.
Zookeepers weaned them off the hand-feeding slowly, monitoring their weights until they were certain that the chimps had got the hang of foraging. “It took us a long time to get these guys eating vegetables,” Moyse said.
But their problems ran far deeper than their palates. Eli would hug his bedding to his body and rock back and forth, sometimes while screaming. When he became especially upset, he slapped himself.
Scientists have repeatedly documented such behaviours in chimps who were separated from their mothers at a young age or raised in unnatural environments. Stephen Ross, a Lincoln Park Zoo primatologist who founded Project ChimpCARE, found that many chimps raised as pets or performers continued to display abnormal behaviours and had elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol, even after joining normal social groups at zoos and sanctuaries.
Still, the zoo knew that Eli and Susie needed some chimpanzee companionship. The trick would be finding the right friends for two apes that were not conversant in normal social cues. “They did not ‘speak chimpanzee,’” Moyse said.
The zoo started by introducing Magadi, a middle-aged female known for her social savvy. Then it added Patrick and Zachary, who had spent years at a roadside zoo where they had also been castrated, according to the Lincoln Park Zoo. Somewhere along the way, they had also been taught an array of cheeky human gestures, including blowing kisses and pointing at imaginary watches on their hairy wrists.
The five chimps became known as “Eli’s troop,” but Eli himself seemed profoundly unequipped for the rough and tumble of chimpanzee life, in which conflict is common. “If there’s any aggression, he completely shuts down,” Moyse said. “He starts screaming, he starts rocking, he starts running around.”
Susie did not crumble during conflict, but she sometimes sought help from humans to resolve it, reaching out to trusted staff members.
Most of the chimps in the troop, in fact, seemed unhealthily fixated on humans. To encourage the animals to focus on one another, the zoo decided to house them in a behind-the-scenes habitat, where people would be less present.
Off exhibit
The zoo’s task is a deeply paradoxical one, with humans responsible for erasing years of human influence. Helping the animals heal often means keeping them at a distance and ignoring their entreaties. It means declining Susie’s requests for conflict mediation and refusing to engage when Zachary blows kisses.
As Leahy put it: “That push and pull between what they understand a relationship with a human being is and us wanting to encourage them to become chimpanzees again – or for the first time, in some sense – means sort of systematically pulling away from our relationship with them.”
Eli and Susie will never know life in the wild, but at the Lincoln Park Zoo, they have a multilevel indoor-outdoor habitat and the opportunity to forge relationships with other chimps.
“Moving an animal from a roadside zoo or a private home to any accredited facility, including an accredited zoo, represents a massive increase in their welfare and care,” said Peet, of the PETA Foundation.
Chimps are just a tiny fraction of a booming trade in nonhuman primates, experts said. Smaller primates, like capuchins, are still used in Hollywood, and a menagerie of monkeys are available for purchase online. “If you Google ‘buy a primate,’ you’re going to get a lot of hits,” Dylewsky said.
The Animal Welfare Institute, Peta, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums and many other groups have endorsed the Captive Primate Safety Act, which would ban the possession of pet primates nationwide.
Advocates are hopeful that Chimp Crazy might galvanise support for the bipartisan bill; many credit the 2020 docuseries Tiger King, which was made by the same director, with spurring a federal ban on keeping big cats as pets.
“These are wild animals that do not belong in our homes,” Dylewsky said.
Eli’s troop has made real progress. After their initial morning outburst, the chimps quickly settled, sucking on frozen juice balls and foraging for vegetables. “They’re just kind of doing their own thing, and this is exactly what we want them to do,” Moyse said.
Eli has started grooming Zachary, an important bonding behaviour, and has stopped hitting himself. His rocking is less frequent, although it has not disappeared. Susie has connected with Patrick and Magadi, and seems to have assumed a leadership role in the troop.
Eli and Susie could still find themselves rejected by their peers, and they might never be able to live in a public exhibit. No loss, perhaps. After inspecting his human visitors, Eli tucked himself into a small corner alcove, staying mostly out of sight.
“He’s making the choice to kind of take himself off of view,” Moyse said. “He did not have the choice before. He had to participate in acting or a movie or being held by a singer in a music video. And so that is the beauty of it. He can do whatever he wants.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Emily Anthes
Photographs by: Jamie Kelter Davis
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