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Chimpanzees?
Not in my neighborhood
How
would you feel about the possibility of the federal government investing
hundreds of millions of dollars to build a new research facility in your
community — one that would bring in about 500 new jobs and an estimated $6
billion dollars into the local economy over the next 20 years?
Sounds
like a no-brainer, doesn’t it?
Of
course, there is almost always a downside to every “too good to be true
gift” from
You
might have second thoughts about having these deadly organisms in your backyard,
even if you had authoritative assurances that every reasonable precaution would
be taken.
If
you lived in Butner, a few miles north of
Similar
emotional questions are an important part of the plot of a novel released a few
days ago by
Who
would object to having these “cute” human-like animals being taken care of
in a nearby facility?
As
the novel discloses, lots of people object when, notwithstanding locked gates
and electric fences, several chimpanzees escape and the neighbors learn that the
animals are strong and can be fierce and dangerous when confronted by humans.
That risk is compounded by HIV infection in some of the animals, the lasting
result of some of the medical experimentation.
The
“not-in-my-backyard” factor is only one strand of a richly complex tapestry
that Wesselmann’s novel weaves. “Captivity’s” central character, Dana
Armstrong, is the director of the South Carolina Primate Project. Her passion
for the welfare of chimpanzees comes from a traumatic experience with a
chimpanzee in her childhood. As a part of an academic experiment, her father
brought a chimpanzee into the family, where she was treated as Dana’s little
sister. Movie cameras were installed throughout the house to record the process
of adaptation of the animal to the family.
Dana
and Annie (the chimp’s name) learned to communicate with each other using a
modified American Sign Language. The experiment showed that Annie could function
much like a human. She came to have many of the kind of feelings and attitudes
that we think of as “human.” Dana came to love Annie, not as a pet,
but rather as a sister.
But
when a sisterly fight turns mean and Annie bites Dana and severely injures her
arm, Annie is sent away.
To
where?
That
question haunts Dana throughout her life. She knows that Annie whatever happened
to Annie, probably medical experiments and certainly confinement in cages, was
horrible for a creature that had been raised as a human. Dana blames herself for
Annie’s fate, whatever is was.
As the director of the primate refuge, Dana seeks to atone for the guilt she
feels. Caring for a group of chimpanzees is a complicated challenge. Returning
them to their African homeland and releasing would be a death sentence since
they are totally unprepared to survive in the wild. Keeping them confined in
cages would be cruel, but some are too dangerous to let out of a small confined
area. Dana develops a program to prepare the animals to live together in the
“semi-wild.”
Undoing
the results of man’s intervention in nature’s order proves to be a
complicated and confounding process. For Dana, there is an extra challenge. Not
only did her close relationship with Annie make Annie like a human. It also made
Dana think and feel like her “sister” — like a chimpanzee. In her work,
she found herself at every turn thinking of her charges as kinsfolk rather than
animals.
Wesselmann’s
clear description of the challenges Dana faced, together with a story of family
turmoil, romance, crime, academic politics, ambition and treachery kept me
riveted until the end.
(D.G.
Martin is the host of UNC-TV’s