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A R T I C L E S By TYLER TREADWAY TC Palm - St. Lucie County tyler.treadway@scripps.com February 22, 2006 266 apes will populate 'chimp city' west of Fort Pierce FORT PIERCE - When it comes to moving apes cross-country, the folks at Save the Chimps don't monkey around. Faced with transporting 266 chimpanzees almost 2,000 miles from a former medical research lab in Alamogordo, N.M., to a private rescue facility set amid orange groves west of Fort Pierce, Save the Chimps staffers moved 17 apes in a van capable of carrying only two or three at a time before deciding their game plan was bananas. "With that van, we'd have to make 88 round trips," said Carole Noon, the Save the Chimps director. So the organization invested in a custom-made trailer that can carry up to 10 apes at a time, meaning they can accomplish the largest-ever chimp relocation project with just 24 more trips. After a 37-hour trip, the first 10 trailered chimps (Peggy, Carrie, Melissa, Jake, Alice, Ebony, Christie, Garth, Tony and Mikey) arrived in Fort Pierce late last week. And they arrived in style: The 38-foot trailer has air conditioning, a heater and a window seat for each sightseeing simian. "The trailer worked perfectly," Noon said. The next trip to New Mexico to pick up 10 more chimps will be in March. After that, trips will be scheduled as staffers in Alamogordo can relocate to Fort Pierce. Noon said all the chimps should be in their new home sometime next year. That home is a "chimp city" of 11 brightly colored buildings, each connecting outdoors to its own 3-acre island where platforms, rope bridges and other amenities give the chimps plenty of room to climb and play. It's a far cry from the dungeon-like cages where the chimps had been housed at the laboratory of the Coulston Foundation, which closed in 2002 because of violations of the Animal Welfare Act. The New Mexico chimps join 27 others already in Fort Pierce, apes that Noon obtained from the Air Force after they had been used in early NASA space flights. Noon has enforced strict rules since bringing her first chimps to Fort Pierce in 2001: The facility is not open to the public, and staffers minimize their contact with the animals. Because many of the apes spent their whole lives as research subjects, Noon wants them to live their new lives with as little human interaction as possible. For more information about Save the Chimps, including ways to donate toward the relocation project, check out www.savethechimps.org, the organization's Web site. | |||||||||||||||
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