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Chapter 1: What is Sheba's story and its significance?
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Espoon Kolari Korjaamo.
I'm Charlotte Ullenbrook, a zoologist, and you're listening to Sheba, just like us, from the documentary on the BBC World Service. Sheba is a chimpanzee. She was born in a cage, raised in a zoo, and then spent 24 years in a laboratory. As I learnt more about her story, I kept hearing the phrase, we have the need, but do we have the right?
Having studied chimps in the wild for years, I've always found it hard to accept experimentation on animals, especially ones that are so like us. The justifications and counter-arguments have raged for decades, and although attitudes have changed, the debate is still unresolved. In the next hour, I explore our conflicted relationship with the animals we use and the struggle to set them free.
But first, let's meet Sheba.
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Chapter 2: How did Sheba's upbringing influence her life?
Holy moly.
Hi, Sheba. How you doing, girly? What you got around your neck? Sheba is 44 years old. Primate researcher and activist Bob Ingersoll knew her for the first 25 years of her life. But this is their first reunion since 2006, when she finally left a research laboratory and came here to Sanctuary at Chimp Haven in Louisiana. It's a moment of unmistakable joy.
You are really beautiful. How old is she now?
She's 44.
It was emotional and wonderful and joyous. Seeing Sheba just made all my memories of all the Oklahoma chimps rush into my heart. For many years, Sheba had to endure a lot of things that were not fair and were not right and needed to be changed. and Sheba was looking at us, you know, knowing, hey, everything's okay. That's been a crazy journey, huh? You had a long way to come to the promised land.
Listening to Bob talk about Sheba and the memories it brings back of her mother Lily and her father Nim, it's almost impossible to imagine the dark history they all share.
What they knew and understand was I was causing them terror. I was a threat.
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Chapter 3: What ethical dilemmas surround chimpanzee research?
I was hurting them.
It started with a dream. Chimps and other primates are so close to us genetically, so sophisticated in their behaviour. Surely, under the right conditions, we could learn more about ourselves.
There is something different about the look that comes back from a primate, a non-human primate. And they know that you know that they are just another version of us.
And so we are just versions of each other. From the 1960s onwards, a series of medical, behavioral and social experiments took place chasing that dream. But for the animals involved... It turned into a nightmare. Whatever similarities, chimps aren't almost human. They're chimps. The scientific basis of this work was flawed and worse, often meaningless and cruel.
By 2016 in the US, all invasive medical experimentation on chimps came to an end. Other primates, like monkeys, were not so lucky, and experimentation continues. But chimps live a long time, so the problem didn't simply evaporate. As funding dried up from 2011 onwards, thousands of chimps had nowhere to go.
It's a thrill for me to be able to see them here and to know that they are here, they're safe. Yeah, so I mean, it's just nice seeing them living like they're meant to, interacting with other chimps.
This is Chimp Haven in Louisiana, and it was set up back in 1973 to provide sanctuary to laboratory chimps. Amy Fultz is one of the founders.
At the time, I was actually working in a biomedical research facility with chimpanzees doing behavioral research. Back in the late 80s and early 90s, chimpanzees were mostly being used in HIV and AIDS research. And chimpanzees actually didn't turn out to be a great model for AIDS. And so the funding was sort of falling off for that type of research. Chimpanzees are a long-lived species.
They live into their 60s sometimes, and they're very expensive to care for. And so myself and my co-founders wanted to provide a solution to this need for sanctuary for chimpanzees being retired from biomedical research.
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Chapter 4: How did scientific research on chimps evolve over the decades?
The US government provides around 75% of that, so Chimp Haven must raise the rest themselves. Michelle Reininger is the colony director. because it is a huge responsibility. I don't know how much you've seen of wild chimps, but do you think that you have a fairly comparable setup?
Yeah, I think with the chimps that we have here, their behaviors in many ways are like those in the wild. We see the different vocalizations that they use. You know, we've got the pant hoot where they display and then they make, everybody knows the pant hoot, you know, and then it builds up to a big scream. I'm not going to do it because that gets very loud.
My PhD research was on chimp pant hoot. So when you said you were about to do a pant hoot, I thought, yes, come on. So should we do one together? Sure, we can do it together. Okay. Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. Sorry, sorry. I've got a little bit of chimp in me as well. I can't help, but anyone who's spent any time around chimps just can't help but want to vocalize a bit.
We always joke when we're caregivers that when we talk to people, we talk chimp first half the time. Like we greet small babies, we're holding out our hands and just like, we've got to get out more. We've got to get with people more.
Hugo in this group, he's kind of looking at us. He is, yeah, yeah, I see you. I know, I'm about to tell a naughty story of yours. I know. There's a chimp in this group named Queenie B. And she is this really long, lengthy, dramatic queen. And he loves to antagonize her. He'll grab like a stick or even just with his finger, he'll just touch her on the back. Very lightly actually.
And she will start screaming like it's the worst day on earth. She'll kind of do a tantrum on the ground like a toddler would and then you can literally see him giggling to himself and then she'll run away from him and he'll sneak up behind her while she's starting to calm down and he'll do it all over again just to set her off.
Today, there are 1,142 chimps in havens like this in the US. Yet 143 remain in labs, either waiting to be released or used for behavioural research. But there are still over 100,000 monkeys in biomedical research labs in the US, UK and the European Union. So the fight for people like Bob and Amy is far from over.
That day I realized everything's not cool and everything is not good and something needed to be done and I was determined to do something about it.
With modern technology now able to imitate human biology, do we still need to experiment on non-human primates? There are stark differences of opinion.
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Chapter 5: What happened to chimpanzees in biomedical research after 2016?
There's been so many examples of how the animal research basis has just transformed lives. I'm not saying that that gives us the right to do the research, but I'm just saying that that research, with as few animals as possible, has been transformative on the way medical science has progressed. I heard about the chimps in 1974.
This young man, who was a graduate student in my zoology lab, walked in and he started talking about, there's these chimps in Oklahoma that are using American Sign Language to talk. And I'm like, no way. And so I was intrigued.
Bob Ingersoll was a student at Oklahoma University, studying to be an orthopedic surgeon.
And he brought out a chimpanzee named Allie and a female named Vanessa. They came over to me and hugged. And as we're hugging, it was like a flash in my head. I don't want to be an orthopedic surgeon anymore. I want to do whatever this is. These are my people. And I didn't even, I'd never even heard the word primatology. And I knew I wanted to be whatever that was.
I think what we were trying to do was communicate with the chimps and let them learn something that we teach them so that we could have conversations and that sort of thing. You know, I just was looking to communicate with a chimp.
This innovative project set out to see if human language could be learnt by chimps. Sheba's story also starts here in Oklahoma. Sheba's mother was a chimp called Lily. She arrived at the Institute for Primate Studies with her owner, Elise Moore.
Elise drove up in her van and she steps out of the van and goes around to the other side and opens the door and Lily steps out. And Lily's a chimp. And she's about six, seven years old at the time. And she jumps up into Elise's arms and Elise carries her on, you know, on her hip and walks over and
We introduced ourselves, and Lily had been purchased by Elise when Elise was a teenager, I think 17 or 18 years old, out of the back of a magazine, which I thought was crazy. I mean, COD, let's just order us a chimp. And that's what she did, and that is how I met Elise and Lily.
Lily and Elise settled in well at the Institute for Primate Studies. At first, you know, I was just a caretaker.
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Chapter 6: What role do sanctuaries like Chimp Haven play in chimpanzee welfare?
About two months after I was there, I was essentially running the place. Lily was with the other chimps. During this period, she had started to stay with the chimps more. Even at night, I thought it was really good for her. It was growing up, you know. She wasn't a kid anymore. She was going into adolescence. Life was good.
Soon after, an infant chimp called Nim arrived. He had been part of a world-famous sign language experiment. His arrival was going to change Bob's life forever.
In September of 1977, Nim came from Columbia University with a group that was working with Nim in New York. Later on that day, we actually went on a walk before the New York people left because it was going to be the last time they saw Nim. And that's when it clicked in my head. This guy's going to need a little friend and I'm going to be it.
Yes, at four years old in the wild, a chimp would still be constantly with their mother. So what kind of relationship did you form with Nim?
I was kind of surprised that the New York people had so much trouble controlling them and he was biting everybody and that sort of thing. It didn't occur to me that I was going to have any trouble at all. And And in no time, we were rough and tumble playing and doing the kind of things, you know, you have to be a chimp to be with a chimp.
You can approximate the relationship that chimps have with one another if you're willing to roll around and tickle and play and that kind of stuff. So that's what I did.
So can you tell me a defining moment in your life when something snapped and your life as an activist began?
I can. That was a day that I'd spent out with the chimps all day, and I'd taken four or five chimps out and came back, and we had squared them away, got them back in their cages, and I had walked out to my car to drive away and come home.
And as I was getting in my car about to close the door, I looked at the chimps all lined up in their cage and they were looking at me behind the bars and I was going home. Air conditioning, a TV and that sort of thing and a refrigerator with whatever I wanted in it. And they were in that cage at the mercy of whatever it was that we provided for them. And that's it. They couldn't get out.
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Chapter 7: How do advances in technology impact animal research ethics?
It's like prison, but worse. Thrown in the back of a truck, driven to New York. You wake up in that room. The one thing that did happen to him, he got a tattoo on his chest, number 37. But Nim wasn't there very long because I raised a big stink and some friends of mine and I contacted the New York Times and the Boston Globe and 60 Minutes and any other news outlet. And Nim was famous.
And so using Nim's fame got him out. I, unfortunately, was banished because I had stood up. And so I didn't even get to see Nim when he came back. And I was, yeah, I was a mess. I'll try to say it without getting mad. This is the hardest thing for me to do without anger. LEMSET was the medical facility that pulled all the gems from small institutes like ours. They pulled our grants.
They had a multi-billion dollar deal with the government and acquired all our gems.
Lemsip was known for invasive biomedical research on chimps and other non-human primates. Doug Cohn started working there in 1988, fresh out of veterinary school.
And I was very fortunate to actually wind up doing something that I dreamed about doing when I was a 10-year-old.
And tell me why you first joined Lemsip.
I wanted to get involved in a field called laboratory animal medicine, which is a specialty in veterinary medicine. And when a position came up at LEMSIP, I jumped at the opportunity to go there. And I was just astounded that I could actually work with monkeys and chimpanzees involved in infectious disease research. And I felt this was the place I needed to be. And I was there for nine years.
And what was your main research there?
When I came on board, this laboratory was celebrated because it was involved in the creation of the first hepatitis B vaccines that were used in human beings. And there was also a relatively new project to create the first AIDS vaccine for humans. And the HIV vaccine was able to live in human beings. and chimpanzees, and those are the only two species.
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Chapter 8: What is the future of animal experimentation in scientific research?
And is it something you subscribe to?
This is a commandment, if you will, an unofficial commandment. It was actually developed by two scientists in Great Britain in 1959. Birch and Russell were interested in the ethics of animal research. So they came up with these principles of reduction, refinement and replacement. Can this research with animals have a reduction in the number of animals?
Can it be refined to reduce or eliminate pain and distress? And finally, can it be replaced by non-animal methods?
And do you think that animal rights campaigners have actually played a really positive role because by pushing for better animal welfare, there's much more rigorous oversight and that's led in many cases to better science?
No question about it. The animal activists of years past and in today have been instrumental in improving the life of research animals. The conditions that animals are in today are better. I mean, a number of amendments have been made to the Animal Welfare Act, and those in part were made because of influences of animal activists on the United States Senate.
Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel, who would play a part in Sheba's life, also began her career in biomedical research at LEMSIP. I was going to be a scientist.
And if you want to be a scientist and you're in the United States, well, there are no free-ranging primates in the U.S. And so that meant I went to a primate lab. It was in upstate New York, called the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates. a lab where we experimented on monkeys and apes.
My responsibility was three young chimpanzees who had just been born a few months before I started. Regis, Kareem, and Digger. These boys, they'd all been taken from their moms. They were in the nursery. You know, they were a few pounds. They were balls of energy and curiosity and clinginess and neediness and But they were in a lab. They weren't in a chimp society. They had no chimp mother.
In Oklahoma, another baby chimp was about to be born who would also be taken from its mother. Lily had become pregnant with Sheba, and Sheba's father was none other than Nim. Elise Moore remembers the day Sheba was born.
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