A Little Monkey Business

In case you haven’t noticed, we have a thing for animal stories here at KCTS 9 Connects. Not the typical “baby ducks crossing the street” or “waterskiing squirrel” stories you’ll find on the local news, mind you; but some of the more interesting, overlooked animal annals of the Pacific Northwest.

Over the past year, we’ve put together stories about the thousands of feral cats prowling Seattle, Orcas captured from Puget Sound and Elephant insemination projects at the Woodland Park Zoo, just to name a few.

So when the story of a new chimpanzee sanctuary in Cle Elum surfaced, well… it was a no-brainer.

We had to do a story on the chimps.

In case you didn’t know, chimpanzees are routinely used in biomedical research. Chimps are about a 98% genetic match with people, which, according to some doctors, makes them well-suited to test potential cures for human diseases. Frankly, I was slightly surprised to learn about this. I, of course, knew that all kinds of animals are used in medical and product testing – rats, rabbits, rhesus monkeys -- but for some reason, I hadn’t imagined that chimpanzees were on that list.

I suppose it’s because I grew up thinking that chimps were cute and cuddly, mischevious but friendly – an impression formed no doubt from watching Lancelot Link Secret Chimp, or Cheeta from the old Tarzan movies. (Cheeta, by the way, is still alive at the age of 76 living on a sanctuary in Palm Springs.)

As a kid, I remember wondering why we didn’t all have chimps as pets, instead of silly old dogs or apathetic cats.

My intuition about chimps apparently wasn’t so far off. While they might make nearly ideal test subjects, opponents of medical testing say their genetic kinship with humans is precisely what makes it so cruel.

They claim the animals are susceptible to the same emotional distresses as we are – namely pain, anxiety, and boredom from being locked in a small cage for their entire lives.

The new sanctuary in Cle Elum was opened as a place for chimps that have been saved from the medical testing world.

Producer Terry Murphy was contacted by the sanctuary folks after they saw her story about elephant breeding.

“They were about to receive seven retired chimps from a lab in Pennsylvania, renamed The Cle Elum Seven," Terry says.

“Their new home in Washington State is so different from the small cages where they spent decades of their lives. In addition to the huge indoor area, a beautiful outdoor play yard was completed this past summer. My hope is that this story will create awareness about the cruelty of experimenting on animals, especially ones--like the chimps--that are so highly evolved.”

You can see our story about the Cle Elum chimp sanctuary Friday night (Jan. 23) at 7:30 p.m.