Sheba: Just Like Us?
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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.
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.
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.
There are 300 chimps here and it costs about $29,000 to keep just one for a year. That's nearly $9 million to provide food, medical care, enrichment and all their basic needs.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Sheba's story and its significance?
0:00–1:49
2
How did Sheba's upbringing influence her life?
1:49–3:17
3
What ethical dilemmas surround chimpanzee research?
3:17–6:08
4
How did scientific research on chimps evolve over the decades?
6:08–9:33
5
What happened to chimpanzees in biomedical research after 2016?
9:33–12:16
6
What role do sanctuaries like Chimp Haven play in chimpanzee welfare?
12:16–15:59
7
How do advances in technology impact animal research ethics?
15:59–19:25
8
What is the future of animal experimentation in scientific research?
19:25–51:34