For over a decade, a chimpanzee named Booee had lived in 5'x5'x7' cages including his 1995 barren home at the New York Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates (LEMSIP). Booee was not considered an independent "chimpanzee being"; rather, he was research property - not revered for his individual qualities or features, but for his involuntary role in biomedical hepatitis experiments.

Twenty-five years earlier, in a much different type of chimpanzee research, Roger Fouts taught Booee sign language. After 16 long years apart, Dr. Fouts had an opportunity to visit his friend at LEMSIP. Surprisingly, displaying what Professor Peter Singer called "that flash of recognition that there is a thinking being there," Booee remembered the signs he learned a quarter century ago.

He recollected the name sign for Dr. Fouts, who appeared astonished to discover that Booee had recalled who he was and the signs Dr. Fouts had taught him: "Oh my God," exclaimed Dr. Fouts, "That's my name. That's what he's calling me." Dr. Fouts noted during this reunion last year, arranged by and aired on the ABC news program 20/20, that working with chimpanzees and teaching them sign language allows humans to get "a window into their mind." Far too many humans, however, refuse to acknowledge the importance of language development in nonhuman primates and the important affinity between great apes - including both humans and chimpanzees.

The remarkable link between us - genetically, biologically, behaviorally and emotionally - makes chimpanzees prime research subjects in laboratories the world over. As Roger and Deborah Fouts note in their contribution to The Great Ape Project: "[chimpanzees are our closest living relatives. In terms of biochemical similarities based on blood research and genetic similarities chimpanzees are actually closer to humans than they are to gorillas, even though all three primates are within one percent of each other." These same similarities cause one to consider whether humans have the right to enslave these innocent creatures for our own curiosity and potential scientific progress.

Though the ethical debate over using chimpanzees and other great apes in experiments could easily absorb all pages of this magazine and volumes of additional text, one can briefly discuss chimpanzees' nature, the ways in which they are used, and what responsibility humans have to establish a high standard of care for these animals regardless of one's position on our right to use them in the first place.

The Common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) and smaller Pygmy chimpanzee or Bonobo (Pan paniscus) inhabit the closed-canopy, humid and fruit-producing forests of west and central Africa and have a lifespan of approximately 50 years. They are mainly vegetarians but will occasionally consume insects and small animals. Chimpanzee communities, although looser than other ape species, travel together and number anywhere from 15 to over 100 individuals. Although estimates vary, approximately 200,000 Common chimpanzees and Bonobos remain in the wild throughout the world. The meager number of wild individuals face numerous conservation and welfare threats including habitat destruction, slaughter for the cruel bushmeat trade, and use in medical testing facilities.

For decades, investigators such as Roger and Deborah Fouts have worked to refocus the nature of captive chimpanzee research, concentrating not on harmful invasive procedures but instead working to show that these magnificent creatures share enough human traits - specifically language aptitude - that humans have an ethical obligation to treat them with a heightened sense of moral recognition.

Though serious work on interspecies communication between the great apes (recognized in The Great Ape Project as human beings, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans) began as early as the 1930s, one of the significant breakthroughs evolved decades later with a chimpanzee named Washoe, who changed the fundamental way humans communicate with other great apes and, in fact, the way these apes engage in dialogue themselves.

The Fouts have established that chimpanzees can actually communicate with humans and even other chimpanzees, using a mutually expressible language, American Sign Language.

Washoe, initially raised by Drs. Allen and Beatrice Gardner "as if she were a deaf human child," understands hundreds of signs and even taught many of them to her adopted child, Loulis - sometimes by demonstration, other times by actually taking the child's hands and forming them into the appropriate sign. The Fouts describe one instance in which Washoe took Loulis' hand "and moulded it into the sign for FOOD in an appropriate context," and another in which she "placed a small toy chair in front of Loulis and then demonstrate(d] the CHAIR/SIT sign."

The Fouts have undertaken numerous studies with these chimpanzees to understand how they behave together and the ways in which they communicate when humans are removed from the visible environment. They note one study in which "over 5,200 instances of chimpanzee to chimpanzee signing" occurred. Chimpanzees in the study were even observed to talk out loud to themselves. In humans, private, outward expressions of such thought are explained as "thinking aloud." If the same is true with chimpanzees, centuries of philosophical and physiological reasoning contending that only humans are capable of an independent thought process would be debunked; so, too, would the subsequent assertion that these sentient creatures do not deserve greater compassion and better conditions than they currently receive. Similarly, there are many who remain unconvinced that chimpanzees capable of feeling pain and distress or suffering the emotional and mental debilitation resulting from scientific imprisonment should not be cruelly confined and used at the whim of their human captors.

A reasonably new and relatively unexplored discussion, concerns what we as humans should do with chimpanzees when a scientific project is completed. Currently, they languish for years or even decades in small cells, many singly housed even though they are social creatures in the wild. Professor Singer contended in the 20/20 interview: "I think that in another 30 or 40 years, people will look back with shock and horror on the fact that these sensitive, intelligent, caring social animals, the chimpanzees, were locked up in small laboratory cages." Hopefully by then, humans who use these animals against their will will have long-since recognized their moral obligation to "retire" them with dignity and as much comfort as is humanly possible.

The federal Animal Welfare Act provides minimum standards that should be met by research facilities that use various species in medical testing. It mandates space requirements for the animals' primary enclosure, environmental enhancement "to address the social needs of nonhuman primates of species known to exist in social groups in nature," and environmental enrichment "by providing means of expressing noninjurious species-typical activities such as perches, swings, manipulable objects and various food items." The Act does not mandate any better conditions when the experimental work performed on them is complete.

Dr. Roger Fouts and Deborah Fouts, co-directors of CWU Chimpanzee and Human Communications Institute, with chimpanzees Moja, Washoe and Tatu (left to right).

Currently, sanctuaries exist throughout the country which can serve as retirement homes for many of these animals. Such sanctuaries include the Los Angeles Wildlife Way station, which agreed to accept Booee and other chimps, the Texas sanctuary, Primarily Primates, Inc., which has worked diligently to raise the funds necessary to house 12 chimpanzees previously owned by the Buckshire Corporation that had been used for antibiotic, hepatitis B and pharmacology studies, and the facility run by the International Primate Protection League in South Carolina.

A national sanctuary similar to these would prove vital to the widespread peaceful retirement of chimpanzees currently used in medical testing. At the request of the National Institutes of Health, the National Research Council itself is studying the best way to provide for the long-term care of research chimpanzees.

To assist in reaching that end, the Doris Day Animal League and other animal protection organizations have joined in Washington, D.C., with consultant J. Michael McGehee to work on a legislative proposal to create such a sanctuary. The newly created "National Chimpanzee Sanctuary Task Force" has on its Scientific Advisory Committee, among other notable primate protection pioneers, Jane Goodall, and Roger and Deborah Fouts.

The Task Force "is intended to fundamentally alter the concept of long-term care to one of research retirement for chimpanzees... through legislation creating a system of annual appropriations from the government in combination with private fundraising to allow for the research-retirement of as many chimpanzees as possible," according to McGehee.

During the closing days of the 104th Congressional session, report language was added into the Senate Appropriations bill on the subject of chimpanzee retirement calling for important information from the National Institutes of Health, including a cost-estimate for such a retirement program. Hopefully, this information will show the fiscal potential for realistically developing a sound chimpanzee retirement system.

In his chapter in The Great Ape Project, a founder of the Committee for Conservation and Care of Chimpanzees in Washington, D.C., Dr. Geza Telecki notes: "In the United States, where captive census data are readily available, about 2,000 of 3,000 confined chimpanzees exist in biomedical facilities. It is indeed a sad statement on human values that the very institutions which proclaim a dedication to alleviating suffering and pain in humans cause so much distress to chimpanzees. "

The potential government funded research-retirement program for chimpanzees will provide these intelligent creatures the life they deserve after involuntarily serving humans in the laboratory. The captive chimpanzees involved in research in the U.S. deserve to see a permanent end to their suffering and should not endure the remainder of their existence deteriorating in their laboratory cells.

In 1987, the New York Times Magazine printed, "A Plea for the Chimps," written by eminent scientist and champion of chimpanzee conservation, Jane Goodall. She notes that [c]himpanzees are capable of empathy and altruistic behavior." Surely it is time that their human counterparts exhibit these same characteristics and treat chimpanzees and other great apes with the compassion and respect they deserve.

Editor's Note: The DDAL is a long-time supporter of the Friends of Washoe. If you would like to help support the Chimpanzee and Human Communications Institute (CHCI), please contact:

Animal Guardian Volume 9, No. 4, 1996, p. 8-10.

Reprinted with permission from the Animal Guardian, Doris Day Animal League
http://www.ddal.org