Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute - The captivity controversy

[Guest guest]

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/20020907woc2.htm

 

Tony Lee Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

 

It's like a looney-tunes game of snakes and ladders, or the crash site of an

alien spaceship--three 15-meter-high metal climbing frames with platforms,

ladders and ropes strung every which way.

 

For the 14 chimpanzees at Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute

(PRI) in Inuyama, Aichi Prefecture, it's home sweet home.

 

Tetsuro Matsuzawa, the head of PRI's language and intelligence section, says

the reason for the ramshackle appearance of the 1,000-square-meter compound

has nothing to do with style.

 

Chimps spend more than half their lives above ground level, he says, and

indeed, despite the baking midsummer sun, they cluster on the platforms,

grooming each other.

 

An infant measures his way commando-fashion across the gap between towers,

teetering precariously above an artificial river that winds its way through

more than 400 trees.

 

However, despite its size and enriched environment, the facility is not

ideal. Roger Fouts, a U.S. researcher who has worked extensively with

Washoe, the first chimp to learn sign language, says that both the Inuyama

enclosure and his own similarly scaled facility at Central Washington

University's primate center are " like prisons " compared with the best

conditions for chimps in the wild. " Free-living " chimps, he says, can range

up to 10 kilometers in a day and build nests 50 meters high.

 

He goes even further. " We treat them like prisoners--sometimes

well-cared-for prisoners, but prisoners nonetheless. "

 

But Matsuzawa, the winner of a Jane Goodall award for his work with Ai and

Ayumu, is mindful of the big picture. " Chimpanzees in the wild are sometimes

quite miserable, " he says, pointing to the dearth of protected national

parks in Africa and the threat of encroaching farmland to many chimps

outside protected areas. " You shouldn't have the image that all chimpanzees

are like the wild chimps on TV. That's only one extreme. "

 

For Matsuzawa, the real prisoners are caged in poorly administered zoos

under horrifying conditions that can lead to aberrant behavior like eating

feces. More than half of all chimp mothers in zoos refuse to rear their

infants, he says.

 

To the extent that studying chimps is a necessity, PRI's enclosure is the

best available, Matsuzawa says.

 

Fouts says his center will not breed its subjects. Matsuzawa, however,

envisions further generations of chimps at PRI, allowing better study of

family relations.

 

He hopes to increase the size of the captive community at PRI until it

reaches the size of communities in the wild--he's aiming for 16 to 23

members. Mothers normally conceive every five years, so eventually he will

be able to deepen his study of family interactions to include sibling

relationships.

 

" But as a whole, " he says, " my efforts should be on running this faculty and

doing my best to make it closer to the environment in the wild. That's how

you treat captive chimpanzees humanely and that's the only way to really

assess their cognitive abilities. "