Encyclopedia of animal rights and animal 156

Chimpanzees in Captivity | 113 the primate collection of Madame Rosalia Abreu in Cuba By the 1930s, Yerkes was successfully breeding chimpanzees in captivity The colony that he began with four chimpanzees in New Haven, Connecticut, moved to Orange Park, Florida, and ultimately to Emory University in 1965 with 66 chimpanzees It now exists as the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia, and has produced five generations of captive chimpanzees Early studies of captive chimpanzees were designed to provide basic physiological and behavioral information that would aid in the maintenance of captive populations Researchers sought to understand the nutritional needs of chimpanzees and their reproductive habits, as well as to learn about their development, their intelligence, and their distinctive personalities Yerkes was very clear that while it was important to investigate chimpanzees in order to understand them better, that understanding was ultimately in the service of bettering “man”—in his words “to contribute to the solution of our intensely practical, medical, social, and psychological problems.” (Yerkes, 1916, p 233) To that end, chimpanzees in the early years were used in a variety of experiments including lobotomy research, infectious disease research, radiation exposure, organ transplantation studies, and drug and alcohol addition studies Infant chimpanzees were also used in deprivation studies that involved removing them from their mothers and depriving them of human contact, contact with other chimpanzees, and natural stimuli including light, sound and, in at least one case, all tactile stimulation In the 1950s, chimpanzees were being used in military experiments which involved crash tests, exposure to extreme G-forces, decompression, and radiation Before sending humans into space, NASA and the Russian Federal Space Agency began sending animals into space, and chimpanzees were among the early space explorers In 1953, the Holloman Aeromedical Field Laboratory’s Space Biology Branch in Alamogordo, New Mexico imported more than 60 chimpanzees from Africa to use in biodynamic and aeronautical research The chimpanzees were similar enough to humans that it seemed reasonable to use them to reveal the suspected effects of space travel, and they were smart enough to be trained in complicated tasks similar to those that astronauts would need to perform in flight Because of their similarity to humans, chimpanzees were shot into space on test runs before humans went On January 31, 1961, Ham, a trained three-and-a-half-year-old chimpanzee, was the first chimp-o-naut Only after Ham returned did Alan Shepard become the first American to travel in space The second chimp-o-naut, Enos, a five-anda-half-year-old, was sent up on November 29, 1961 and, following her success, John Glenn orbited the earth three times in 1962 As biomedical research on chimpanzees was rapidly increasing in the 1960s, so too was our understanding of chimpanzees as smart, sensitive, and highly social animals Jane Goodall began her groundbreaking study of chimpanzees in the wild, and behavioral researchers in the United States began teaching chimpanzees to use human language and other symbolic communication techniques to reveal their intelligence Having seen an early film of researchers from the Yerkes colony attempting to teach a young chimpanzee, Viki, how to speak, Allen and Beatrix Gardner, psychologists at the