Story-
Sarah Grile
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Updated: 10:35 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 21, 2009Gogi lives a serene existence on a 3-acre island in western St. Lucie County, a place where a rescued chimp can roam and forage, swing on a hammock, even paint for leisure.
She has a doting staff, three meals a day, an array of treats refreshed each afternoon. And peace.
She has come here — a sprawling collection of islands that is part of the largest chimpanzee sanctuary in the world — to be served. It’s her turn.
Forty years ago, Gogi served the Air Force’s space program. They put her in a spacesuit and strapped her into a restraint chair. They forced her to breathe carbon dioxide-enriched air. They shut her inside a rapid-decompression chamber. She was 5 years old at the time. All this after poachers captured her in the wild, in her native Sierra Leone, and after her mother was shot and killed.
Those were her dark, caged years in a world away from her home at the Save the Chimps sanctuary. Now, Gogi, age 43, lives on Air Force Island, one of a dozen moat-lined islands that make up the Florida sanctuary that is home to 159 chimps transported from a former research lab-turned-shelter in New Mexico. Air Force Island houses 16 of the survivors, and descendants of survivors, of the space program.
“They deserve a proper retirement home. And, of course, Florida’s a great place to retire — as someone who retired here, I know,” says Robert Crippen, retired NASA astronaut and shuttle commander who piloted the first orbital test flight of the space shuttle Columbia in 1981.
The Palm Beach Gardens resident, 72, paid homage to the descendants of his fellow space travelers during a visit to Air Force Island in April.
“These animals, especially the ones that supported our space program, have done a lot for us. They opened the gateways for us,” he says.
Leading better lives
Air Force Island is home to Marty, an African-born chimp who is 50-plus years old. Captured in Africa and sold to the Air Force, Marty was used in data acquisition flights and electroencephalographic, or EEG, studies. That was just the beginning of Marty’s life as a lab monkey. He went on to be used for biomedical research and breeding purposes.
His life now is a far cry from his dim days in the lab. He lives in a setting of wide-open spaces, hammocks, rope bridges and jungle gyms, daily scavenger hunts for fresh fruit, sugar cane, seeds and raisins. Here, where orange groves once blossomed, life is a gentle pattern of meals, afternoon foraging activities and relaxation.
This pattern is replicated throughout the other islands, where chimp “families” — ranging in size from a handful to a couple dozen — have access to brightly colored shelters in addition to large, free-roaming areas.
The sanctuary — which is divided between this location and a New Mexico shelter until all the chimps can be sent here — reflects the life’s work and dreams of its founder, primatologist Carole Noon, who died in May of pancreatic cancer at age 59.
Noon’s drive was legendary. She was the woman who waged a monumental battle to create a safe retirement haven for chimps once confined to lives of abuse and experimentation.
Because she dreamed of creating a stress-free environment where abused chimps could retire in peace, Noon issued a cardinal rule from the start: The sanctuary is closed to the public. Access is granted by invitation only. And, for safety reasons, nobody — not even the caretakers — comes in direct contact with the chimps.
You can peer at them from a guarded distance, but nothing more. For all the attempts by the entertainment industry to portray chimpanzees as cartoon characters and pets, they can attack humans quite viciously when provoked. Veterinary staff must sedate the chimps before treating them.
With one another, the naturally social chimps are usually quite peaceful and forgiving.
“If they get into an argument, they usually apologize to each other,” says Jen Feuerstein, the sanctuary’s new director, as she circles the grounds in a golf cart on a recent afternoon. “They hug. Hugging is a big thing.”
Feuerstein divides her time between the location in Alamogordo, N.M., and the sanctuary’s permanent, 150-acre home in Fort Pierce. She took over after Noon died.
On the morning she died, the chimps were just getting up and making noise. It was probably the last thing she heard,” Feuerstein says.
She turns to glance at the modest white house where Noon lived at the sanctuary, overlooking the very first chimps she saved.
“She was just so passionate about chimps.”
Noon was her mentor, the woman whose mission inspired Feuerstein to volunteer at the New Mexico sanctuary and eventually leave her job at a research lab.
Leaving the lab for the sanctuary was like stepping into sunlight. Feuerstein says she saw some pretty dark experiments at the lab.
“The worst I saw at the lab where I used to work was — well, I saw a lot of things,” Feuerstein says. “I’ve seen baby monkeys taken from their mothers, put in a black box, where no light could come in. Or sometimes their eyes were sewn shut. I’ve seen chimps pulled from their families for a vaccine study. They returned a shadow of their former selves — fearful, thin, traumatized.”
No doubt, it is a difficult memory. But it is one that now floats in against the tranquil backdrop of the sanctuary she directs. If not for her time at the research lab, she might never have encountered the mother and son chimpanzees that first stole her heart.
The son, a young, rogue chimp, managed to grab a screwdriver and tear across the place, wielding the tool recklessly one day at the research lab. Seeing this, Feuerstein picked up an orange and, through the gate that divided chimps from humans, she offered it to the young delinquent’s mother.
The chimp mother went over and swiped the screwdriver from her boy’s hands and came back to Feuerstein. She outstretched both hands, one clutching the tool and the other one open skyward, as if waiting for the orange.
“But she had a death grip on the screwdriver,” Feuerstein recalls. “So I took back the orange and said, 'No, you can’t have it.’”
Just then, the mother opened her hand and released the tool, taking the orange and scrambling off. And when she did, the world tilted for Feuerstein.
“She was just brilliant,” Feuerstein says. “That level of communication with another species is just amazing.”
Noon vs. Air Force
It was America’s so-called chimponauts, those once used in the Air Force’s space program, that prompted Noon to launch her rescue. Then a Boynton Beach resident, she founded Save the Chimps in 1997 when the Air Force announced it would auction off its flight-training chimps. Although the chimps had been phased out of the space program 25 years earlier, they had been leased out to research labs where they were poked and prodded, doped and crash-tested.
The Air Force awarded most of the chimps to the Coulston Foundation, the New Mexico biomedical research facility with the nation’s worst record of animal abuse — the lab was charged four times by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for violating the federal Animal Welfare Act.
So Noon sued the Air Force. After a yearlong battle, she won custody of 21 of the space chimps.
The victory set Save the Chimps on a fund-raising streak. With a philanthropic grant from the Arcus Foundation, Noon purchased the Fort Pierce property, where the climate resembles that of the chimps’ native African habitats.
Then, after she heard Coulston lost its federal funding and filed for bankruptcy in 2002, Noon took her mission to New Mexico, where she acquired the decrepit facility and its 266 chimps with $7 million from Arcus, which finances conservation and social justice projects.
Since then, the chimps have been transported to Fort Pierce in sporadic groups of 10.
The families are formed upon arrival from New Mexico, when chimps are socialized in the sanctuary’s “Introduction” center.
“When chimps meet each other, they have a gang mentality in a group. But one on one, it’s different,” Feuerstein says. “It can take months, even a year, for families to form.”
This is one of the reasons why the “Great Chimpanzee Migration,” as they call it, has taken so long — you can’t rush the introduction process. The other reason for the delay is cost. It costs $25,000 to transport one trailer-load of 10 chimps. With three drivers and one chimp caregiver, the sanctuary transports its charges aboard a customized 38-foot trailer that offers each chimp a window view.
Feuerstein accompanied the chimps on the first road trip from Alamogordo in 2003. Forever engraved in her memory is the image of the transported chimps walking into the outdoors and touching the grass for the first time in most of their lives.
There are 123 chimps still left in New Mexico, but Feuerstein says she expects to have them in their new island homes in 2011. Next up on the migration schedule is Bobby, a 26-year-old chimp who endured so many biopsies, rounds of anesthesia and years of solitary confinement that he became a self-mutilator.
When Noon took custody of the Coulston residents, she found Bobby gaunt and depressed, his arms riddled with self-inflicted bites. He was living in the cage that came to be known as “the dungeon.”
But those days soon will be behind him forever. Bobby and 29 other chimps will be transported to Florida in three separate trips, in groups of 10.
Sanctuary staffers are beginning to clean and prepare “Bobby’s Island,” where the new arrivals will live, says Triana Romero, Save the Chimps’ director of development in Fort Pierce. Their job will be made easier by the fact that these particular chimps already know one another.
“The introductions have taken place,” says Romero, who expects the migration to be well under way before the end of the year. “They’ll arrive on separate trips, but they will make up one family.”
The chimp who lived alone in a barren cage for nearly 20 years will now headline his own island, a spacious, sunny place crawling with other chimps, a bountiful land where he can dwell in peace.
Note: Even after all of this, NASA is now starting a new radiation program with monkeys!
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