Dr. Carole Noon Passed From Pancreatic Cancer

Dr. Carole C. Noon, a primatologist whose passion — and compassion — for her subjects led to her founding of Save the Chimps, the organization that provides the world’s largest sanctuary for captive chimpanzees, died Saturday in Fort Pierce, Fla. She was 59 and lived on the sanctuary grounds in Fort Pierce.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said her sister Lee Asbeck.

Save the Chimps, a privately financed nonprofit organization with an annual budget of about $4 million, currently cares for 282 chimpanzees, providing a kind of retirement home for chimps who were rescued from biomedical research or the entertainment business or who had been sold and raised as pets. Founded in 1997, it has two locations, the primary one the 150-acre tract, a former orange grove in Fort Pierce, just inland from the Atlantic, where 148 animals, divided among a series of three-acre islands separated by artificial waterways, can roam freely, cared for and fed by a staff of 46.

Its other “campus,” once home to the Coulston Foundation, a notorious biomedical laboratory in Alamogordo, N.M., houses 134 more chimps. There they live in cages that have been modified — enlarged and made more comfortable — from those that existed when the site was owned by Coulston and they were largely storage bins for animals awaiting use in medical research.

The chimps still in Alamogordo, many traumatized by their earlier treatment, are in the process of being socialized before being transferred to Fort Pierce. After the chimps’ years of captivity and essential isolation, the sanctuary’s operators say, they need to be introduced to one another and to get used to getting along in groups in order to survive with other chimps in the semi-wild environment of the Florida refuge.

“The introductions have to happen one at a time; it takes a long time,” said Jen Feuerstein, Dr. Noon’s protégé and the interim director of the sanctuary.

Dr. Noon, an anthropologist, was inspired by Jane Goodall, the groundbreaking primatologist who studied chimps in Tanzania for more than four decades. She founded Save the Chimps after the United States Air Force, which had begun using chimps as part of the space program in the 1950s and continued leasing them out to research laboratories, decided to leave the chimp trade altogether. Most of the remaining Air Force chimps — “surplus equipment,” they were called — were headed for Coulston, where a well-documented history of animal welfare violations testified to its institutional indifference to their suffering.

Dr. Noon, with the support of Dr. Goodall and others, sued the Air Force for custody of the Coulston-bound chimps,at the same time raising the money to start the Fort Pierce sanctuary. After she and the Air Force settled out of court, the sanctuary’s first residents — 21 Air Force chimps — moved in in 2001.

The next year, the Coulston Foundation declared bankruptcy, and with a grant of $3.7 million from the Arcus Foundation of Kalamazoo, Mich., Save the Chimps bought the laboratory land and its buildings and took over the care of its 266 animals.

“Carole Noon was a true friend of chimpanzees,” Dr. Goodall said in an e-mail message. “She campaigned tirelessly on their behalf and helped so many move from bleak laboratory prisons to a joyous life in a sanctuary surrounded by those who love them.”

Carole Jean Cooney was born in Portland, Ore., on July 13, 1949. Her father, William G. Cooney, was a lumber company executive and something of an adventurer who, when his three daughters were small girls, moved the family to an island in the South Pacific, where he ran a ship salvage operation. Eventually, the girls and their mother, Dorothy, moved to Honolulu, and from there, after a divorce, to Cleveland, where young Carole Jean went to school. She was an animal lover — and animal rights activist — from an early age.

“I can tell you exactly when we knew,” said Ms. Asbeck, who recalled that her sister showed her true colors at the movies, during a screening of the 1955 animated film “Lady and the Tramp,” which told the story of a romance between a high-class cocker spaniel and an outcast, a mutt. “When the Tramp got carried to jail” — actually the dog pound — “she was sobbing so hard we had to carry her out of the theater,” Ms. Asbeck said.

Ms. Noon earned a bachelor’s degree from Florida Atlantic University. She often said her career path was set when she heard Dr. Goodall give a lecture in 1984, and she went on to earn a master’s degree in anthropology and a doctorate in biological anthropology from the University of Florida. Her specialty was the socialization of captive chimpanzees, and over the years, she did much of her field research at the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage in Zambia.

An early marriage, to Michael Noon, ended in divorce; her middle initial derived from her maiden name, Cooney. In addition to Ms. Asbeck, who lives in Boca Raton, Fla., Dr. Noon is survived by another sister, Kay Shelton, of Leesburg, Fla.

Dr. Noon said she was often asked why she spent so much time and energy caring for chimpanzees when children were going hungry.

“I’m always taken aback by the question because I don’t view the world in two halves — eating chimps and starving children,” she said. She added, “Except for a few percent of DNA, they’re us.”

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