What kind of people would give a Chimpanzee Lit cigarettes? Aren't they "suppose" to be for the welfare of the animals? This is a Safari Park, which most of the time is Pseudo for the animals. It's not as if there's not enough education out there regarding what smoking cigarettes does for your health. To purposely give any animal something that is going to endanger their life, to me is animal abuse! Shame on you zookeepers! Why were you doing this? To get the public there to watch the smoking chimpanzee? EGH................
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Beijing - Zookeepers in northern China have stopped giving cigarettes to a captive chimpanzee and are using dumplings and music to distract her from a 16-year nicotine habit, state media said on Wednesday.
Ai Ai, a 26-year-old chimpanzee from the Qinling Safari Park in Shaanxi province, began scavenging cigarette butts left by visitors in the late 1980's after her first mate, Jian Jian, died, the official China Daily newspaper said.
Zookeepers eventually began giving Ai Ai cigarettes of her own and lighting them, the paper said. She was smoking between eight and 10 cigarettes a day before zookeepers decided in August to help her kick the habit.
The paper said Ai Ai tended to smoke more when she was lonely or depressed, including after the death of one of her two children in the mid-1990's and the death of her second mate, Da Hu, in 1997.
Chinese meat dumplings, pop music and walks have been used to distract Ai Ai from her cravings and to keep her from begging noisily for cigarettes, the paper said.
"In the first few days, she squealed for cigarettes every now and then, but as her life became more colourful, she gradually forgot about them altogether," a zoo employee whose name was not given was quoted as saying.
The paper said one of the zookeepers had been putting his Walkman headphones on Ai Ai and exposing her to pop music in an attempt to keep her mind off cigarettes.
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