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A R T I C L E S
From the Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, FL)January 31, 2001, Wednesday, Broward Metro EDITION SECTION: LIFESTYLE, Pg. 1E Boynton Beach Primatologist Nears Completion of Sanctuary for Former Lab Animals by ROBERT GEORGE, Staff Writer Carole Noon turns away from the landscape and squints against the wind sweeping across her unfinished sanctuary, over the moat and onto the island she dreams of filling with chimpanzees for her to watch. She can look at chimps for hours, and she has, for days on end. She's groomed them, picked the mud out of their hair, and they've groomed her back. She's photographed them, written about them and traveled across the ocean to help them remember how to form a family. It was when she decided to rescue some of them from the U.S. Air Force that things got hard. The chimps will arrive in just a few months. The buildings are standing. The island has tunnels and tires for them to play in. A half-dozen workers are hammering and bolting the cages together. Noon is in charge of everything, and now the landscaper is telling her there is yet another blueprint she has to look over. "Every time somebody says something like that I get sick in my stomach," she says, chewing on a piece of nicotine gum that's supposed to help her quit smoking, but isn't. "The money, the decisions, the lawsuit, everything." What Noon really wants to do is watch a family of chimps for so long that she forgets they're one species and she's another. They can be funny, as loving as any mother, or selfish, or sad. But instead of working among them, Noon, a Boynton Beach primatologist, has spent the past three years as a fund-raiser, bureaucrat and administrator. Now she is nearly finished with her sanctuary west of Fort Pierce. "This wasn't my dream," she says. "My dream was putting oranges in chimps' hands and sitting down and watching them for five hours at a time." She used to be a wife and a businesswoman, running a carpet cleaning business. After a divorce, she sold the business and took a trip to Africa. She spent a year driving across the United States in a van and thinking about her life. It wasn't until the mid-1980s, when she was past 30, that she decided to become a wildlife biologist. The first time she worked with chimps in particular was shortly after a lecture by famed primatologist Jane Goodall at Florida Atlantic University. Noon felt at home among the chimps right away. She's not sure why, only that they made her laugh. One of them even played a trick on her, looking intently over her shoulder and laughing when she turned to see what he was looking at, which was nothing at all. And imagine this, she says: If they trip over their feet, they'll look indignantly at the ground as if there's a stick or a rock that made them stumble, not their own clumsiness. After a fight, two chimps might mope around all afternoon, but watch, she says, and before the sun goes down, they'll make up. Chimps never go to bed with a grudge. What she admires most about them, though, is how they are able to overcome the suffering that humans put them through. For her doctorate project at the University of Florida, she worked in Africa gathering the orphans of chimps killed by poachers and mixing them with adult chimps who were pets abandoned by their owners. Her job was to slowly introduce the chimps, many of whom had been abused, to each other, and then help them form groups that would be released onto large private sanctuaries. "They can live in a cage for 40 years, never having seen another chimp, and still end up in a family," she says. Three years ago, just as she was finished writing her thesis, she learned the Air Force had deemed its space chimps to be surplus inventory. There were more than 100 of them, descendants of the pack captured in the wild 40 years ago and used to make sure rockets and space travel were safe for humans. To see how much gravity a human could endure, the Air Force spun the chimps around in a centrifuge until they passed out, or put them in a decompression chamber and squeezed them into unconsciousness. It rocketed two of them into space, and when both survived, human astronauts followed. When the Air Force no longer needed them for space research, it gave them a new assignment: "hazardous mission environments." To test seat belts, for instance, the Air Force would strap a chimp to a sled, accelerate the sled down a track and then slam on the brakes, bringing it to a jolting stop. In the 1970s, the Air Force started to lease the chimps to medical labs, and three years ago decided to get rid of them for good. Rather than give them to Noon, who had a nonprofit organization called Save the Chimps but no actual sanctuary, the Air Force gave them to a New Mexico research lab. Noon got Goodall on the phone and persuaded her and other famous primatologists to serve on her board of directors. She raised nearly $2 million. When the Air Force still refused to give her custody, Noon got animal rights groups to back a lawsuit. In a settlement last year, she got 21 of the chimps. She bought 150 acres of an orange grove. Once construction started last August, she was so busy she had to move out of her house in Boynton Beach and into a camper she parked at the sanctuary. The chimps were born in captivity and grew up in captivity, Noon says. They don't know how to groom, how to play, how to fight. Nor do they know how to make up, or how to love, or how to play jokes, or any of the other traits that are not as distinctly human, she says, as some humans would like to think. Once they arrive from the New Mexico lab, they'll have to live in separate cages until they get to know each other through the mesh. Then they'll be put in groups of two, then four, then eight. Once the chimps form a stable group, they will be free to roam the island. Sometimes it takes a few months, sometimes more than a year. Noon looks past the small compound she has built. It uses up fewer than 15 of her 150 acres. She has learned she's just as good at fund-raising as she is at helping chimps make a family, and there are still more than 100 space chimps in need of rescuing, and hundreds of others in labs across the country. She chews her gum and walks over to the landscaper to look at his plans. Soon, she'll be hiring a staff. She figures they'll be the ones who hand out the oranges and have all the fun. She'll have to spend her time in the administration building, raising more money and building more islands. For more information about Save the Chimps visit its Web site at savethechimps.org, or call 772-429-0403. Robert George can be reached at bgeorge@sun-sentinel.com, or 954-356-4727. | |||||||||||||||
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