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A R T I C L E S Sunday, January 18, 2004 Albuquerque Journal Going Ape in Alamogordo by Rene Romo Journal Staff Writer ALAMOGORDO- Caretakers at Save the Chimps sanctuary here said a tear-filled but jubilant goodbye to three of their ape friends Saturday morning as the trio left on a cross-country trip to a new life in Florida. At the end of a 30-hour drive in the back of a truck, the three chimps- Tami, Henrietta and Tarsan- will arrive at the organization's 200-acre sanctuary in St. Lucie County, Fla. There, they will be introduced to a new colony of chimps, and by mid-year they should move to a new island home. After decades living in small, steel-mesh cages with cement floors, the chimps, who until September 2002 were under the ownership of the Coulston Foundation's now-defunct biomedical research lab here on LaVelle Road, will finally feel grass under their feet and get an unobstructed view of the sun and sky. "We're going, we're going. We're getting out of here," said Chance French, a caretaker accompanying the chimps on the road trip, as he knelt down in front of Tarsan's cage to calm the chimp before he was loaded into the back of the truck. "You're going to be running around soon." Save the Chimps, formerly the Center for Captive Chimpanzee Care, acquired more than 220 chimps and the Alamogordo laboratory owned by the late Frederick Coulston in 2002 after a years-long campaign by animal rights organizations to see the primates retired from medical research. Carole Noon, Save the Chimps' tough, sprightly director, says the Alamogordo site is the world's largest sanctuary for captive chimpanzees. But the organization's ultimate goal is to move all of its chimp charges to the Florida site, where Noon is overseeing construction of a chain of 12 three-acre islands, each home to about two dozen chimps. Noon said Saturday she hoped to move about 100 more chimps to the Florida sanctuary in the next 18 months. The three chimps who left Saturday were not the first to go from Alamogordo to the Florida sanctuary- two babies were flown there last year. But Saturday's departures were special and particularly poignant, Noon and other caretakers said, because these were adult chimps, in their 40s, who had lived decades in cramped quarters, mostly alone, and subject to experiments and research protocols. "It breaks your heart, doesn't it?" staff veterinarian Jocelyn Bezner said to Noon as the pair stood among a knot of caretakers watching the chimps loaded into the back of a truck in their individual cages. "I couldn't be happier," said a teary-eyed Noon. Noon noted that it was probably the first time in decades that the chimps had been out of the facility's Building 300, what staffers had dubbed "the dungeon" because of its narrow cells where chimps generally lived alone. The three chimps appeared calm and content as they prepared for their journey. Staffers had provided each with blankets so they could nest inside the cages, and Chance French planned to spend the trip in the back of the truck to comfort the chimps with a familiar face. Caretakers made sure that Tami, a female whose right leg was amputated years before below her knee, had the little stuffed lamb she carries with her at all times. Henrietta managed to do several backflips in her small cage to the delight of her human friends. Tarsan gazed out a window next to his cage, minutes away from a spectacle more varied than anything he had ever experienced in his life. The trio of chimps were to be introduced to a group of nine others in Florida. Ten more will be sent to Florida in the months ahead to form a colony that will live on an island expected to be completed in one month, Noon said. Noon was to fly ahead today to meet the chimps in Florida. After the truck rolled away Saturday morning from the Alamogordo facility, after about a dozen staffers had finished waving their good-byes and yelling, "We love you," veterinarian Bezner said: "Only 217 more to go." | |||||||||||||||
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