The Most Vulnerable Primate
Why chimpanzees would probably be better at adapting to covid-19 than me.
BY: NOAH FARBERMAN
Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich via Pexels
Lately I’ve been feeling trapped. Whether it’s through my routine, or my inability to do work anywhere besides my cramped bedroom, or just because of the general state of the world, I feel like I’ve lost my freedom. I also know that I need to stick it out, that if I try to reclaim my social lifestyle I run the risk of losing it for an even longer-term. So here we are, sacrificing, in varying amounts, for the greater good. How am I getting through it? Ha.
Near Montreal, Quebec, there exists a chimpanzee sanctuary called Fauna. Fauna is the home to around thirteen chimpanzees, each of whom used to work as scientific test subjects. That means that each of the chimpanzees living at Fauna were used for anything from makeup trials to being injected with multiple strains of HIV which, as a result, has left these animals traumatized, incapable of behaving how chimps under normal captivity situations might exist. Now of course, the irony being that chimpanzees should never have a “captive normal” because “normal” for chimpanzees, is the wild. And yet, as research has shown, chimpanzees will adapt and create a new normal, no matter their circumstances.
I’m sure you can see what I’m trying to say, that just like Pan troglodytes of the old world, I, as someone facing undeniable (yet admittedly not at all that bad) feelings of being trapped, all I need to do is adapt. And honestly, that’s going to be the depth of my answer. I’m trying to adapt. The thing is, adapting has a problem in itself. The term adapting implies that there is something changing from one thing to another, although I’m sure that’s already clear. Therefore, in order to adapt, I need to be accustomed and subsequently given a strong enough reason to change my habitual behaviours, habitual behaviours of course referring to actions we repeat and teach intergenerationally, for squirrels it could possibly be choosing to store nuts in their mouth or for me it’s choosing to avoid peanut butter because it gets stuck at the top of my mouth. That is also to say, for adapting to become something we need or choose to do, there probably has to be a good reason, and a lot of the time those reasons strong enough to motivate change are, well, painful.
Photo by Francesco Ungaro via Pexels
Let me use another old-world example. In a study done by Tatyana Humle (all the chimpanzee facts in this paragraph can be found in her book “The Chimpanzees of Bossou and Nimba”), we are shown examples of how, depending on the types of ants a chimpanzee is attempting to eat for lunch, a chimpanzee’s method of ant retrieval is immensely different. Chimpanzees have this wicked way of retrieving ants for lunch called “ant-dipping,” a meal-making strategy where chimps will shove a stick into the ground near an ant farm and then pull it out and eat all the ants that stuck themselves to the stick. What’s extra neat about this lunchin’ munchin’ is that the chimps will change position and stick length depending on the type of ant they’re retrieving. Humle’s research found that chimpanzees from the Bossou region would eat either epigaeic ants, the type of ant that bites back, or an intermediate species of ant known to retreat or bury itself deeper. When attempting to catch the intermediate ants, Bossou chimpanzees would chill on the ground and use shorter sticks, however, when presented with the gnarly dangers of epigaeic nests they would hang off the ground and use a longer stick.
Now of course, not wanting to be bitten is a pretty obvious motivator, heck, I catch my ants with a stick, too. What I find most interesting is that instead of opting to exclusively look for non-violent ants, chimpanzees instead adapt and find ways to keep up their same routine in a functional way. In a similar vein, I’ve been experiencing a lot of neck pain as a result of too much time spent in front of my computer screen. Normally my solution to this problem would be to visit a coffee shop or work out of another room for a bit, but those aren’t really options as stores are frequently closed internally and my family now works from home. Therefore, like with chimpanzees, instead of moving away, I am forced to find a solution within my current ecology. My solution: Finding a secondary keyboard and propping my laptop up on a pile of books. This way my neck to laptop ratio is proper and my wrists are not raised above my shoulder. It’s a simple fix, although it did take two visits to the chiro to figure it out, but in this case, adapting was both feasible and reasonable.
Back at Fauna, adapting is a bigger task. Where chimpanzees in the wild have to adapt to changeable habits, Fauna chimps are expected to outgrow traumatic experiences, often having been diagnosed with PTSD (post-traumatic-stress-disorder), a disorder often associated with war veterans or trauma survivors. In one example given by Andrew Westoll in his novel “The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary,” we are shown how the entire chimphouse, what they call the part of the sanctuary that houses the chimpanzees, reacts when a food delivery truck makes the same sound as the cart that would deliver their medicine on days when knock-out darts were used at the LEM-SIP test facility. In cases like that, the reactions are involuntary, and while completely rational and reasonable, they are painful to hear about. Unfortunately, for the time being, there is no cure for PTSD in chimpanzees.
While I can’t relate to PTSD or any other form of trauma response, I do experience reactions I wish I didn’t have. Since I’ve been living with my parents during covid, I’ve been acting embarrassingly immaturely during meals, often refusing to eat something if we’d already had the same food earlier that week. A couple days ago my mother texted me asking to stop being so hurtful towards her cooking. It took me a moment to fully realize my behaviour; I had assumed that because I was feeling trapped, repeating meals made the feeling of being trapped that much worse, but because I never communicated that to my mother, all that our exchanges portrayed to her was an unappreciative son. My solution: I explained this to her. Since then, we haven’t had a bigger variety in meals, but the order in which we eat them has been spaced out.
I do want to acknowledge, again, that I am in a pretty lucky situation. Being stuck in a home where I have a room to myself is something to be appreciated, especially in these uncertain times. That said, even though I am in a pretty lucky situation, it doesn’t mean I can just ignore my emotions and suck up everything. The fact is, we all have different lived experiences and attempting to compare pain or trauma is impossible. Having lost my father at a young age created a completely different kind of trauma than what my mother felt by losing a husband. To ignore our own pain won’t help ourselves. In turn, I suggest that acknowledging our emotions, and better understanding them, will help shine light on solutions that will affect yourself, and in turn, affect those around you.
I opened this essay by explaining how I’ve been feeling trapped. I tried to search for answers in the old world and even found a few. The main reason humans experiment on animals is to either better understand the animal, or to better understand ourselves. Was it fate that chimpanzees, and so many other species, have already spent so much time in their own quarantine that when we as humans face a similar life we already have some of the answers we needed? Or is this just another chance for humans to get a taste of their own medicine? In order to prevent further unnecessary death in humans, we kill non-humans. In order to better understand the health and well-being of our own bodies, we inject diseases into the bodies of others. I’ll close things off with this question: Would we rather put an end to animal testing or, as chimpanzees learn and adapt alongside humans, would we rather need to find solutions to chimpanzee suicide? I know the question is very sci-fi but a lot of the information we have today was considered sci-fi only a decade in the past. And to go even further, the behaviours I fear in chimpanzees, a desire to end pain, is already present.
Maybe it’s all the months I’ve spent inside, but this is the conclusion I’ve gathered: it is time to revisit those traumatized chimpanzees and begin testing on them again, testing cures for chronic emotional pain. Because, right now, that is an important concern for Homo sapiens and Pan troglodytes alike.
