In December 2022, the chimpanzees of Furuvik Zoo escaped when a staff member tending them accidentally left one of their enclosure’s doors open. In this riveting but heartbreaking Guardian read, Imogen West-Knights recounts the chaotic 72 hours it took for the zookeepers and park staff to contain the chimps in their ape house. Be warned, though, that this is far from a happy tale. In fact, it’s distressing. But West-Knights reconstructs the incident from minute to minute in a brilliantly reported piece.
It’s not uncommon for animals to escape from zoos, and all zoos have protocol to deal with this eventuality. The precise response, however, depends on which animal has escaped. In 2022, a king cobra escaped from its enclosure in the reptile house at Skansen Aquarium, a zoo in Stockholm. The week-long hunt for the snake involved calling in X-ray operators from Stockholm’s main airport, who used equipment typically used to scan suitcases for narcotics to X-ray the reptile house for the shape of a snake hiding in pipes or air vents. (The cobra, now renamed Houdini, returned to its enclosure on its own, in the end.)
Seven chimpanzees on the loose require a very different approach. Chimpanzees are big and smart, they are adept climbers and can move at up to 25mph. For the humans catching the chimps, the experience can be emotionally challenging, even existentially confusing, in a way that returning an escaped cobra to its cage is not. Great apes, the name given to large primates like chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas, are so like us. They hold hands, embrace and kiss one another, and the meanings of these gestures seem to be the same as when we do it. They express fear, delight, surprise, affection. And yet they are not us. The Dutch zoologist Frans de Waal, who has more than 50 years of experience with chimpanzees, suggests in his seminal book Chimpanzee Politics that we cannot help but feel a sense of unease around the animal. How should we relate to them, these creatures we know to be wild, but who look like we do? Last month, I stood with a zookeeper at a zoo in the south of England, watching a group of chimpanzees sun themselves in their enclosure. “I find them terrifying,” she admitted. “They’re so human. Who is looking at who?”
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