The Cle Elum Seven
Aug 26th, 2008 by admin
Negra, top, and Jody are two members of the Cle Elum Seven, seven chimpanzees who had been leased out to laboratories over 25 years to be subjected to medical research. Today they live at Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest in Cle Elum, Washington, a beautiful place where they are loved and respected. The story is hopeful, beautiful, inspiring. I read about the sanctuary yesterday in the Seattle Times.
The person who built the sanctuary built it with $200,000 of his own money. He had done construction management for Immunex in Seattle, and when it was sold, he was laid off and given a chunk of money. He’d read an article about chimps used in lab research and was moved by what he read. In the ’80s and ’90s, chimps were widely used in AIDS and hepatitis research that, in the end, contributed very little to medicine or to the understanding of either condition, so the labs stopped using the chimps, leaving them to languish for years in cages in the facilities that once leased them. Because chimps are an endangered species, they could not be euthanized without a fight, and they can live 45 to 50 years. Just as most human beings couldn’t survive being released to the wild to fend for ourselves, neither can chimpanzees after growing up in cages.
The guy who built the sanctuary, Keith La Chappelle, had seen a chimp named Billy Joel in a sanctuary in Montreal. Billy Joel had a lab history that included 50 biopsies of his liver, bone marrow and lymph nodes. There was something about the look in his eyes that moved LaChappelle. He returned to Washington and built the 18,000 cubic foot sanctuary on 26 acres outside of Cle Elum. Today the Cle Elum Seven live in interconnected rooms that include a large play area and catwalks. They swing, play, climb and roam. LaChapelle has just completed a 20 by 30 foot outdoor play area, and the chimps are scheduled to go outside and enjoy it for the first time today . Food is donated to the chimps daily by the local Safeway store; they eat vegetables, fruit, rice, oats, cereal.
Cle Elum was chosen as the location for the sanctuary because of of its proximity to Roger and Deborah Fouts, two researchers at the forefront of behavioral studies involving teaching chimps sign language. There are all sorts of interesting projects going on in the sanctuary, including a new project of attempting to locate the children of the chimps. One, Foxie’s daughter, has already been located and it has been learned she is on her way to a sanctuary in Florida.
There are 10 chimp sanctuaries in the U.S. and Canada housing 575 chimps, but there are still 1,200 chimps living in research labs. The United States is the only country in the world that continues the large-scale use of chimps for invasive research and testing.
Watching the videos made available by the sanctuary, it was painful to envision them stuffed in cages to be periodically and repeatedly stuck with needles, cut open, having parts of their healthy bodies removed, to be tested with drugs and endless invasive procedures, then returned to their cages. The chimps paint and color with crayons, they eat cereal out of bowls using spoons, they take blankets and make beds for themselves, they groom one another, they play with toys, they are social and above all, self aware.
None of this impresses Dr. Stuart Zola of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University, who is quoted to have said: “I see the retirement community as simply another ploy by the animal rights community to reach their eventual goal of abolishing the use of animals in research. I’m not opposed to it. But I think it is being driven by an animal rights point of view.”
And of course, we can’t have that.
Jane Goodall Urges Broader Animal Rights
Heart
I look at the pictures of these chimps and I see….
US!! What more needs to be said.
This is so sad, but inspiring. I was really interested in caloric restriction research, until I saw videos on YouTube of poor little monkeys living their ENTIRE LIVES in a stark little metal box and barely being fed. It’s torture, that’s what it is.
Hi Heart,
I just wanted to let you know I love your animal posts. I notice they don’t typically get a lot of comments and I hope that doesn’t discourage you from posting on this topic.
I don’t often comment on these posts because I have nothing to add– you do such a fabulous job yourself! I’m left humbled and somewhat heartbroken by man’s inhumanity towards animals.
Thank you for these posts. Please keep them coming!
Gayle,
What a great post! Thank you for taking the time to put it together and share some of your own thoughts on the subject. There are a lot of good people doing good work for chimpanzees, and I think the tides will turn for them in the coming years. Having people like you help to tell the stories of individuals who have been in research is exactly what is needed. I would love for everyone to know about the Cle Elum Seven. They have been unknown for far too long.
Diana
Director of Outreach
Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest
Hey, Diana! What a privilege to have you commenting.
Actually, I wrote the post and I’m Heart.
Thanks for your AMAZING work and your encouraging words!
Heart