On the 16-hour ride from Louisiana, Bo looked out the window, took in the scenery, dozed and relaxed.
He was traveling with five other male chimps from the New Iberia Research Center in Lafayette, La., where they had been members of a colony of nearly 200 animals kept for biomedical and other research.
During the ride, some of the other chimps hooted, restless and unsettled. Not Bo. “He's the best,” said the driver of the truck.
The animals arrived at Project Chimps, a sanctuary at the southern end of the Blue Ridge Mountains about 100 miles north of Atlanta, at 6:30 a.m. one day last spring. As the sanctuary staff began to open the truck and move the chimps' cages inside the facility, the occupants hooted and screamed, anxious and uncertain about what was going on.
The first cage was opened into a sort of antechamber, and a chimp named Jason was first to explore his new home, rushing with what seemed like nervous energy through a small door into the large habitat.
Called a villa, the enclosed space is built like an extremely large metal cage, about 1,500 square feet and two stories high, with metal platforms at different levels.
Jabari, the second arrival, slowly joined Jason to explore the new enclosure, but they kept their distance from each other. Lance was third in line, hesitant to leave the small antechamber. The staff waited about a half-hour for him to build up his nerve.
Then, hoping to encourage Lance, they decided to let in Bo, the group’s dominant chimp.
Bo knuckle-walked, casually and confidently － knuckle-swaggered, you might say － into the large enclosure. Lance followed immediately. And then the group hugs began.
Eddie and Stirlene, the last two chimps, came through the entrance to more hugs. The group’s relief and happiness was so infectious that all the humans smiled. The chimps lip-smacked and held one another’s genitals.
“That’s normal reassuring behavior,” Jen Feuerstein, the top administrator at the sanctuary, told me.
Bo was in the house, and all was well.
It probably will stay that way in the long run: The era of biomedical research on chimpanzees in the United States is effectively over. Given nearly 100 years of history in experimenting on chimps, the changes seemed to come fairly quickly, once they began.
In 2011, the director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, declared that the N.I.H. would fund no new biomedical research using chimps, which he described as “our closest relatives in the animal kingdom” deserving of “special consideration and respect.”
His comments were both stunning and obvious. Jane Goodall, the famed primatologist, and others already had shown the world the richness of chimp intelligence and social life; molecular biology had revealed that humans and chimps share 98 percent of their DNA. But the biomedical scientific establishment had long emphasized the importance of animal research.
Dr. Collins’s decision reflected widespread ethical concerns among scientists about the treatment of such social, intelligent animals. But on about practical level, the care of chimps is costly, and they aren't always a good model in which to study human diseases. They're also a magnet for public concern.
By 2015, the N.I.H. had gone through several stages of decision-making and concluded that it would retire all chimps it owned, retaining none for potential emergency use － in case of a human epidemic, for instance. The agency owns about 250 chimps outside of those now in sanctuaries and supports another 80, which will also be retired.
That year the Fish and Wildlife Service classified all chimpanzees as endangered, removing a longstanding exemption for captive chimps that had allowed biomedical experiments. The decision made such research illegal without a permit requiring that any such experiments benefit chimpanzees. Privately funded medical research on privately owned chimps also was effectively banned in the United States.
Currently, about 577 chimps are still held at research institutions, according to ChimpCARE, a site that tracks all chimps in the United States.
Some of them are owned or supported by the N.I.H., and some are owned by research institutes like New Iberia, which is part of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
All the government chimps are headed to Chimp Haven, a sanctuary in Keithville, La., where they will have a full social life and room to roam outdoors.
Some critics say the process has been unnecessarily slow, but both Chimp Haven and the N.I.H. say transfers are moving more quickly now. The sanctuary has accepted 14 chimps in the past two months and is expecting more before the end of the year.
Then, hoping to encourage Lance, they decided to let in Bo, the group’s dominant chimp.
Bo knuckle-walked, casually and confidently － knuckle-swaggered, you might say － into the large enclosure. Lance followed immediately. And then the group hugs began.
Eddie and Stirlene, the last two chimps, came through the entrance to more hugs. The group’s relief and happiness was so infectious that all the humans smiled. The chimps lip-smacked and held one another’s genitals.
“That’s normal reassuring behavior,” Jen Feuerstein, the top administrator at the sanctuary, told me.
Bo was in the house, and all was well.
It probably will stay that way in the long run: The era of biomedical research on chimpanzees in the United States is effectively over. Given nearly 100 years of history in experimenting on chimps, the changes seemed to come fairly quickly, once they began.
In 2011, the director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, declared that the N.I.H. would fund no new biomedical research using chimps, which he described as “our closest relatives in the animal kingdom” deserving of “special consideration and respect.”
His comments were both stunning and obvious. Jane Goodall, the famed primatologist, and others already had shown the world the richness of chimp intelligence and social life; molecular biology had revealed that humans and chimps share 98 percent of their DNA. But the biomedical scientific establishment had long emphasized the importance of animal research.
Dr. Collins’s decision reflected widespread ethical concerns among scientists about the treatment of such social, intelligent animals. But on about practical level, the care of chimps is costly, and they aren't always a good model in which to study human diseases. They're also a magnet for public concern.
By 2015, the N.I.H. had gone through several stages of decision-making and concluded that it would retire all chimps it owned, retaining none for potential emergency use － in case of a human epidemic, for instance. The agency owns about 250 chimps outside of those now in sanctuaries and supports another 80, which will also be retired.
That year the Fish and Wildlife Service classified all chimpanzees as endangered, removing a longstanding exemption for captive chimps that had allowed biomedical experiments. The decision made such research illegal without a permit requiring that any such experiments benefit chimpanzees. Privately funded medical research on privately owned chimps also was effectively banned in the United States.
Currently, about 577 chimps are still held at research institutions, according to ChimpCARE, a site that tracks all chimps in the United States.
Some of them are owned or supported by the N.I.H., and some are owned by research institutes like New Iberia, which is part of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
All the government chimps are headed to Chimp Haven, a sanctuary in Keithville, La., where they will have a full social life and room to roam outdoors.
Some critics say the process has been unnecessarily slow, but both Chimp Haven and the N.I.H. say transfers are moving more quickly now. The sanctuary has accepted 14 chimps in the past two months and is expecting more before the end of the year.
