Caretaker saves one-time lab chimpanzees
MONKEY ISLAND, Liberia — All was quiet when the motorboat puttered to a stop. Saltwater lapped at the narrow sandy shore. Mangrove leaves fluttered in the breeze. Then the man in a blue life jacket cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted: “Hoo hoo!”
Like a secret password, the call unlocked a hidden primate universe. Dozens of chimpanzees emerged from the brush, hairy arms extended. They waded up to the rusty vessel with the nonchalance of someone fetching the mail.
“Time to eat,” said Joseph Thomas, their wiry guardian of 40 years, tossing bananas into the furry crowd.
This colony of 66 chimpanzees, which never learned to survive in the wild, eats roughly 500 pounds of produce each day, plus a weekly batch of hard-boiled eggs for protein. They rely on money from a charity abroad and the devotion of men who’ve known them since they lived in steel cages.
“That’s Mabel,” said Thomas, the captain of that small crew, pointing to a 100-pound female. “Look! She likes to wash her food in the water.”
As if on cue, Mabel dunked her banana in the mud-brown river.
Thomas, 60, met the chimp, 36, when she was a baby who pressed the soft black pads of her fingers into his open palm.
At 20, Thomas became a caretaker at the laboratory in Robertsville, a remote town about 20 miles from the capital, Monrovia. He fed the animals, cleaned up after them and got to know their personalities.
The chimps were infected with hepatitis and river blindness, an eye sickness caused by a parasite, as researchers developed vaccines.
Conflict surged into the 2000s as militants fought for control of Liberia, and public pressure to end testing on chimps snowballed. The New York Blood Center halted tests in 2004, sparking a big question: What would they do with all the animals?
Putting them back into the nation’s forests wasn’t an option. They could spread disease to others, and they didn’t know how to pick fruit or hunt insects.
“The only way to hold them was to put them on an island,” Thomas said.
There are six islands in the Farmington and Little Bassa rivers. These makeshift sanctuaries on the Atlantic coast became known collectively as Monkey Island.
Thomas and the other caretakers collected funds from New
York to deliver buckets of bananas and lettuce, among other goods, to the chimps every two days.
By 2015, as the Ebola virus ravaged the country, the New York Blood Center notified the Liberian government that it could “no longer divert funds from its important lifesaving mission here at home,” a spokeswoman said in a recent statement.
Thomas went with the other caretakers from fruit stall to fruit stall, seeking donations. The men gathered enough food to keep the chimps alive for a few weeks.
During that period, Thomas remembers pulling up to islands and seeing frantic, desperate animals. They screamed and fought over scraps. It wasn’t enough.
He told the story to whoever would listen, he said, and eventually found a sympathetic ear with connections to the Humane Society in Washington.
The nonprofit has since bankrolled the care, spending about $500,000 annually on Monkey Island. Meals now happen twice a day.
The caretakers dream of building an animal hospital on one of the sanctuaries, as well as a proper security system to keep people away. As of now, one man sits on a small dock off each island, telling onlookers to scram.
No one can get as close as Thomas. Photos show him standing knee-deep in river water, hugging the chimps he sees as family.
He greets them by name: Mabel. Stuart. Juno. Ellyse. Annie.
“I’ll be doing this,” he said, “until they die or I do.”