Dedicated champions of chimps
The plight of a starving colony of former laboratory chimps brought Jenny and Jim Desmond to Liberia. The couple soon acquired other chimps in need. New Zealand journalist Britt Mann travelled to the African country where she saw the animals on their road
When she arrived, her weight didn’t register on the scale. The four-monthold had been living on rice, and some papaya. Her balding body, dehydrated in the West African heat, was swamped by a filthy, long-sleeved shirt, and she was screaming.
The infant had witnessed her family’s slaughter by the hunter who had captured her.
Jenny Desmond took the chimpanzee in her arms and thought: ‘‘She is going to die’’.
It has been about six months since Lucy was left with the Desmonds by a woman who tried to surrender the chimp in exchange for cash.
Today, Lucy has a round belly. Her eyes are bright, her body is hairy. She laughs, even in her sleep.
Recently, her climbing has improved. She is, Jenny says, ‘‘just a beautiful little girl’’.
Lucy has a new family, albeit an unorthodox one.
Her foster brother Rudolph is about her age. He was confiscated by the Liberia Forestry Development Agency, from an expatriate who was apparently trafficking chimps.
The youngsters spend their days in an outdoor enclosure under the discerning gaze of a local woman employed to mind them.
In turn, Lucy and Rudy observe older chimps, also orphans, through a chain link fence. Chimp school, Jenny calls it.
When darkness falls, the youngest apes return to the Desmonds’ house – a short hop from their enclosure – to slurp down bottles of formula. Bedtime involves an hour or so of hijinks, cuddling, tickling and giggling before the babies ‘‘conk out’’. If they awake to a thunder clap, Jenny dashes back to the bedroom.
‘‘They’re never, ever left alone, except if they’re sound asleep and they don’t know I’m not in the room,’’ she says.
Sometime after 10pm, the Desmonds head to bed themselves. After giving the babies another bottle, Jenny, Jim and their dog Princess snuggle up next to them.
‘‘Jimmy gets a little sliver of the bed, on the edge,’’ Jenny says, with a chuckle.
When the Desmonds arrived in Liberia a year ago, they didn’t expect to stay. The couple had a job lined up managing the primate sanctuary at Colobus Conservation in Kenya – Jenny as an animal welfare and conservation consultant, and Jim as a wildlife veterinarian.
But in July 2015, The Humane Society of the United States alerted them to the plight of 66 chimps left to starve to death on a series of islands in Liberia. Would they be able to help?
The animals been used for research by the New York Blood Centre (NYBC), a not-for-profit organisation, for about 30 years. When the research programme ended, the chimps were retired to the mangrove islands down the road from the lab.
The six islands, accessible only by boat, have no food or consistent freshwater sources.
For about seven years, the NYBC paid the chimps’ former captors to ferry them food and water every other day. Then, in the midst of the worst Ebola epidemic in history, the NYBC stopped paying.
It had never owned the chimps, it stated. They were the Liberian government’s responsibility.
Those paid to feed the chimps felt betrayed. They had lost their jobs, and struggled to keep the chimps alive with piecemeal donations and their own meagre funds.
Some of them had known the animals since infancy. Now, they were watching them die.
Perhaps the NYBC thought no one would notice. But international scientists who visited Liberia during the Ebola crisis notified The Humane Society.
It was the Desmonds’ first visit to the small West African country, the site of one of Africa’s more grotesque civil wars. The couple had worked with traumatised, orphaned and sickly apes in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. But they had never seen anything like this.
The chimps were scrawny, their coats were patchy, their eyes were dull. They fought over food. They were desperate.
Jenny recalls that first trip to ‘‘Monkey Island’’ – ‘‘We were both in tears.’’
The Desmonds planned to stay in Liberia for five weeks. A year later, they are still there. They turned down the job in Kenya, with the house by the beach and weekends off, to oversee the Liberia Chimpanzee Rescue (LCR) project on behalf of The Humane Society.
‘‘We don’t take days off, we don’t take hours off,’’ Jenny says.
‘‘We knew it was going to be the most challenging thing we’d ever done.’’
Princess was the deciding factor.
The rescue dog, who has befriended stricken critters across seven countries, was a nonnegotiable part of the deal. If she was allowed into Liberia, and could be evacuated in an emergency, the Desmonds would return.
That November, the trio moved to Charlesville, a 75-minute drive from Liberia’s capital, Monrovia.
Today, the Desmonds are custodians of two groups; the retired lab chimps on the islands down the road, and rescued orphans on the mainland.
The Desmonds and the orphans live at the lab chimps’ former residence: the Liberia Institute for Biomedical Research.
The cages which imprisoned the animals for decades stand rusting in the compound.
LCR has re-employed many of the men who’d kept the chimps alive on the islands. It is an opportunity for reconciliation, even redemption.
Dressed in white uniforms from their days at the lab, the men throw food to the animals they once kept captive.
Fruit and vegetables are sourced from farmers and markets across the county; other food is delivered to the compound, or collected from riverside villages during the daily, five-hour round trip to the islands.
The food costs US$200 a day. The project’s total operating costs hover about US$20,000 a month, covered by a patchwork of grants, donors, and fundraising.
For a US$50 donation, visitors can tag along as the produce is delivered by motorised dinghies, manned by at least three of LCR’s 32 staff. These days, the caregivers keep their distance from the chimps. The animals are not aggressive, but they are strong. For the most part, they’re wellbehaved.
‘‘Now, the chimps are just sitting there. They’re grooming or they’re playing – they don’t stop what they’re doing because the food’s coming, they know the food’s going to come,’’ Jenny says.
‘‘It’s a really beautiful thing to see.’’
The animals bear few physical signs of what they endured at the research facility, the nowdisestablished Vilab II.
The chimps, captured from the wild or bought from pet traffickers, had seen their families killed.
As research subjects, they were infected with hepatitis and the parasite which causes ‘‘river blindness’’, among other pathogens. They underwent liver biopsies, countless blood tests, and had lung infections that would not heal. Some had been anaesthetised upwards of 400 times.
Gaining their trust took a long time.
Jenny says the nature of chimp research is inhumane, even if it isn’t malicious. Others view the experiments as a necessary evil. The NYBC website states more than one million lives were saved through vaccines and stem cell therapies developed at Vilab II.
The NYBC maintains it owes no ongoing responsibility to the chimps. It has ignored Fairfax’s requests for comment.
The abandoned chimps continue to enjoy the support of Congressmen, celebrities and a 200,000-signature strong petition, calling on the NYBC to pay its dues.
The Humane Society reports the NYBC has more than US$475 million in assets, and annual revenues of more than US$300m.
‘‘It is more than capable of continuing to provide lifetime support for the chimpanzees in Liberia and had previously promised to do so.’’
Recently, the organisation changed its website copy to read: ‘‘NYBC is willing to discuss these issues with any legitimate animal rights organisation’’.
‘‘I think they’re realising this is not going to go away,’’ Jenny says.
‘‘They can either continue to fight it, or they can step up to the plate and do something about it. The second they want to do that, we’re ready to speak with them. We’ve never closed that door.’’
It was not chimps that brought Jenny and Jim together, but beer. The couple, raised in California and Maine, respectively, met at a brewery in Boston.
As newlyweds, they backpacked around the world. The animal lovers visited local wildlife at every opportunity, securing a volunteering gig at an orangutan sanctuary in Borneo.
Jenny says she had been working in sales and marketing – ‘‘which I loved’’ – while Jim had been working in a lab – ‘‘which he hated’’.
It was in Borneo Jenny had her proverbial lightbulb moment. She didn’t have to be a biologist or a park ranger to work with animals. She could work in rescue.
Jim was inspired by a vet at the sanctuary who was researching disease transmission between humans and animals. Maybe he could retrain.
The couple didn’t mess about seeking career advice. They wrote to internationally-renowned primatologist Jane Goodall.
‘‘I don’t know what I thought,’’ Jenny says. ‘‘Like she’s going to write me back – yeah, right. But she did.’’
To notch up their conservation experience, the couple moved to Uganda to manage the International Rhino Foundation.
One day, they were brought an orphaned chimp. Matooke lived with the Desmonds for many months, Jenny says, and today, he’s the alpha of his group.
‘‘I think that really sealed the deal for us."
The couple returned to the US, where Jim spent five years studying towards a veterinary degree, and Jenny gained a masters in social work.
‘‘That was kind of scary because we had to hope that would pay off, and that we’d be able to come back,’’ Jenny says.
She is honest about the challenges of life in Liberia. Haphazard electricity and water supplies, sourcing the chimps a varied, nutritious diet in a country that can hardly afford to feed its own people.
And yet, the Desmonds are planning the next phase of the project: a stand-alone sanctuary on the mainland, and building infrastructure on the islands. The chimps will have a place to shelter, and receive medical care.
When Lucy and Rudy are about 18 months old, they’ll be integrated with the other orphans at the compound.
One day, all going to plan, the group will have an island to call its own.