by Sheri Speede
The next day, we built a wooden bed off the ground and put the legs in buckets of kerosene so the ants couldn’t climb up. I cursed myself over and over for not doing it sooner, but we hadn’t wanted to risk causing damage by moving him. The day after the attack, Pepe started moving one of his arms again, but he was no longer moving his legs. Even before the attack, we hadn’t been completely successful in preventing pressure sores. Now the ants had caused new wounds that were limiting the positions in which he could comfortably lie. Broad-spectrum antibiotics weren’t controlling the infection, and analgesics weren’t controlling the pain. Pepe stopped eating, and one morning he turned his head away again and again when I tried to give him water. When his eyes met mine, all I saw in them was suffering. I considered starting intravenous fluids, but I no longer had hope for Pepe recovering. He was giving up, and I needed to let him go. A few days after the ant attack, all I could do was help him die.
Once I decided to end Pepe’s life, I felt an urgency to do it quickly, to not let him suffer another minute. Akono was with me at the cage, and I knew I needed to take the time to explain my decision to him and Assou, Pepe’s main caregivers. They had seen much of suffering in the villages, but they had never seen or even considered euthanasia. The idea wasn’t part of their culture, and I didn’t know how they would react. I asked Akono to run and collect Assou and Agnes as quickly as he could, while I said my good-bye to Pepe. I caressed Pepe’s hand and held it to my tear-streaked cheek. Even the day before, with my hands supporting his elbow, Pepe had used his fingers to groom my face. Now, through all his pain, he didn’t try. “I’ll make it end, my darling friend. It’ll be over soon.” After I explained to Agnes, who already knew I might make this final decision, she found the best words to explain to the caregivers. Akono cried, but neither he nor Assou tried to change my mind. I asked Agnes to explain to the other volunteers, too, so they wouldn’t learn about it after Pepe was gone. Free to move forward, I ran to my little veterinary clinic, drew up the thick, pink euthanasia solution, and raced back to Pepe’s side. I was no longer crying. I had to do this last thing for Pepe to the best of my ability without hurting him unnecessarily or upsetting him. I looked into his eyes one final time but fought my impulse to hug him, as it would have only been for me and might have caused him more pain. I asked Akono to groom Pepe’s face and speak softly to him while I injected the euthanasia solution into his vein. By the time I looked from the injection site to Pepe’s face, he was gone. My grief was suddenly overwhelming, but it was mixed with a sense of relief that this beautiful chimpanzee who had taught me so much wasn’t suffering anymore.
All the chimpanzees who had lived with Pepe were still in their satellite cage when we wheeled his body past it that morning. They all came to the front of the cage, and I realized that somehow they knew immediately that he was dead. There were no loud barks of protest to us taking him out of the cage, as I might have expected. They met us mostly with silence, except for a single mournful cry from Becky. Her particular gut-wrenching vocalization, like none I had heard from any of them before, was an unmistakable expression of grief over the loss of her friend, her “brother.” A gardener I had hired from the village was cutting grass with his machete a few yards from the cage. He hadn’t been around the chimpanzees much, but hearing Becky’s cry, he groaned reflexively and shook his head in sympathy.
In weeks to come, I blamed everyone for Pepe’s suffering—the volunteers who knew the ants were bad that night, the irresponsible little shit of a caregiver who left his post, and most of all myself for not protecting Pepe. All my fury was channeled into killing ants—not in revenge exactly, but to protect the chimpanzees from further attacks. I shipped in several different ant poisons from the United States and spent weeks looking for ant nests. The ants moved in narrow columns during the day, and at night, they spread out hunting for animal protein. It was a bad year for ants, and I found these columns every day around the enclosures or on the road when I was driving. I coated the moving ants with poison of one kind or another, always hoping they would take it back to their nests, to their queen. Agnes told me, correctly I would later learn, that protein-eating ants were an important part of the ecosystem—controlling other insects by eating larvae, and controlling diseases by eating dead animals from the forest floor. If I were to succeed in killing them all, it would likely be an ecological disaster. I told her I would take my chances with whatever other insects or plagues descended upon us.
Certainly, logic was not my master during those sad weeks after Pepe’s death. I didn’t care about being responsible, and I didn’t care what anyone thought. I’m pretty sure the villagers thought I had gone mad, and I probably had, temporarily. I was heartbroken and guilty and pissed off and scared the ants would get another chimpanzee. It was probably fortunate that my ant-killing rampage was indeed a fool’s mission. The nomadic ants were endless.
Although I told people outside of Africa about Pepe’s fall, and attributed his death to it, several years would pass before I could speak of the ant attack. It was too terrible to discuss; I was too ashamed that I let it happen. Even years later, when I could speak of it, casual questions about “the chimp who died by ants” cut me like a knife. How could people speak so lightly of the unspeakable thing that happened to Pepe? The suffering in his eyes, trusting me to give him relief in the final moments of his life, haunts me still.
Sixteen
Heroes
By mid-2003, Jacky and Nama had been leading their small group of chimpanzees for almost three years. Each morning when the group left the satellite cage after breakfast, before disappearing inside the forest, they typically walked around the perimeter of their enclosure with Jacky in the lead, followed by Nama. On the opposite side of the fence, I loved following along with them.
Then I began to notice that Nama, not Jacky, was often taking the lead position. Jacky was following closely behind her, and if he found himself in front, he stopped and waited for Nama to go first. The caregivers began to laugh that Nama was wearing the pants in Jacky’s family. I was confused about his odd behavior, until one day I figured out the reason for it. Like the other chimpanzees, Jacky loved his daily chewable vitamin, and he was always happy to pop it in his mouth after I handed it to him. When he accidentally dropped the dime-size, dinosaur-shaped orange tablet one bright July morning, it landed on the floor of his satellite cage. It was clearly visible to me, but I realized that Jacky couldn’t see it. He eventually located it, but only after fifteen seconds of skimming around the ground with his hand. During an eye examination under anesthesia, I diagnosed cataracts, which were severely compromising Jacky’s vision. Looking through my ophthalmoscope, I could barely see the retinas behind the cloudy lenses of his eyes. I believed he could still see light, shadows, and movement, but little detail.
Immediately, with Edmund’s help back in the United States, I began searching for an ophthalmic surgeon to come to Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center and remove the cataracts, but I knew the search would take time. For Jacky’s safety I would need to keep him inside the cage until I could find help to restore his vision. The next morning when we let his group out, but closed the sliding door with him inside, he banged the door furiously for over an hour and then fell on his back on the floor in a screaming tantrum. That Jacky’s capacity for leadership had survived decades of lonely isolation in a small cage was nothing short of miraculous. Given the opportunity, he had become a dignified alpha male—so different from the pitifully neurotic chimpanzee, the “mad chimpanzee,” I had met at the Atlantic Beach Hotel. To see him writhing and screaming in anguish on the floor of his cage broke my heart and challenged my resolve to keep him inside. Up to this point my relationship with Jacky had been defined by respect. To a large extent since we brought him to the sanctuary, he had been able to make his own decisions about where to go and when. He had acquiesced freely to our routine of going out to the forest during the day and coming in at night. To force him now to stay in th
e cage when he objected to it so strongly and emotionally seemed terribly wrong, but I couldn’t knowingly risk his life. In the following weeks I kept Jacky inside the cage, but I almost always kept Becky or Caroline, or occasionally Dorothy and Bouboule, inside with him so he wasn’t alone. With no alpha male, Nama became the leader of the small group so I couldn’t keep her inside with Jacky. As the weeks stretched to months, Jacky went completely blind.
In the late fall of that year, my dear friend Susan Labhard, an advanced-practice nurse I met when she was a client at my veterinary clinic in Portland, Oregon, was aware of my effort to restore Jacky’s eyesight when she traveled to San Diego for her Navy Reserve service. On my behalf, she knocked on the door of the navy’s ophthalmic surgeon Dr. Jim Tidwell, and after a brief introduction to the work we were doing at Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center, she asked him if he would be willing to travel there to perform surgery on a chimpanzee. Dr. Tidwell had performed many cataract surgeries in remote areas around the world as part of the navy’s humanitarian medical service. He liked new challenges and new places. The idea of performing what was probably the first cataract surgery in a chimpanzee, and most certainly was the first in a chimpanzee in Africa, held some interest for him, quite apart from his desire to help a chimpanzee.
“It was something different,” he told me later, as an explanation of his initial interest.
In January 2004, we paid Dr. Tidwell’s airfare and he took two weeks of his vacation from the navy to travel with his expensive surgical microscope from San Diego all the way to the Mbargue Forest of Cameroon. His goal was to remove Jacky’s lenses, rendered completely opaque by cataracts, and replace them with transparent lens implants made for a human. He had worked in all sorts of difficult circumstances and wasn’t daunted in the slightest by our working or living conditions at Sanaga-Yong Center. I was prepared to coddle the California doctor in every way I could possibly manage within the confines of our rustic camp, but Jim was easy to accommodate. He fit right in with us from day one.
In case something was to go wrong that might be prevented another time, Jim opted to perform surgery on one eye at a time, with a week between the two procedures. Although we would soon install electricity in the veterinary clinic, we didn’t have it then. To run Dr. Tidwell’s microscope, we rigged up a solar panel and battery on the ground just outside the clinic. It worked perfectly. After the first surgery, mine was the first face Jacky saw with his new good eye. His gaze moved from my face to the forest outside his cage and back to my face again. His spark of recognition was unmistakable. Jacky could see again!
During the week between Jacky’s first surgery and his second, Jim and I made a tour of the villages, performing eye exams. He had brought enough lens implants to perform surgeries on three people besides Jacky. We found seven elderly people with cataracts, so he had to determine which three people needed surgery most urgently. It was disturbing to realize that the people we didn’t choose might never have the opportunity for surgery, but at least we could restore the sight of a few. We scheduled the surgeries of two women and a man, who were almost completely blind, in our small, one-room veterinary clinic.
Madame Jacqueline was the courageous first patient who allowed herself to be led to our clinic by her nephew Mvoku Samuel, who was working as a caregiver for a group of our baby chimpanzees. The day after the surgery, we went to the village of Bikol 1, where inside Madame Jacqueline’s tiny house, leaving the door open for sunlight to enter, we took off her bandages.
When Jim asked if she could see, she joyfully exclaimed, “I see my pot!” She was referring to her cooking pot on the dirt floor of the room that had very little else in it. In this impoverished community where most people had no things, Madame Jacqueline’s pot was something she treasured and almost surely hadn’t been able to use in a long time. She would be cooking again soon.
Madame Awa from the village of Mbinang was the second person to have the surgery, and hers, too, was a success. Sadly, the very elderly Mr. Theodore from the village of Meyene didn’t show up for his appointment. Like other people of his age in the village, he didn’t read, and he spoke only Bamvéle, his tribal dialect. If he had ever heard a radio or seen a television, he could not have understood the spoken words. It wasn’t so surprising that he hadn’t been able to trust what we offered, but we were disappointed for him and sorry we didn’t have time to schedule someone else who needed the surgery. For several years afterward when I saw Mr. Theodore being led around in the village, I wondered if we might have said or done something else to inspire his confidence.
Jim also brought some reading glasses to give out to people who had become far-sighted with age, and many people were delighted to receive them. One man who got a pair of Jim’s glasses was Chief Bernard of the village of Meyene. After determining that the chief was having problems seeing objects that were close to him, Jim showed him a page in an open book and asked him if he could see it clearly, anticipating his negative reply. Afterward, Jim handed the chief a pair of glasses and told him to put them on.
“Can you read it now?” he asked the chief.
“No,” the chief replied.
Jim chose a stronger pair. When the chief had them perched on his nose, peering through them at the page of print, Jim asked again, “Can you read it now?”
“No,” the chief replied again.
Puzzled, Jim asked, “Do you see it better than you did before?”
“Yes,” Chief Bernard replied. “I see it very well now, but I still can’t read it.”
Jim and I cracked up at the chief’s deadpan joke, and through his own chuckling he said he would be happy to keep the second pair of glasses.
After Jacky’s second surgery, his vision seemed perfect. When I placed his vitamin or peanuts on the floor in front of him, he could see them and pick them up instantly. The juvenile boys who had been sneaking some of Jacky’s fruits and nuts for several months were quite surprised when his accurate fist and vocal rebuke delivered the somewhat painful and clear message that henceforth he would be keeping all his food. He went back into the forest, and life for him and his group returned to the way it had been before, with him leading.
By April 2004, we had completed a big, new enclosure complex where we would have a lot more space to integrate Jacky’s group of older chimps with juveniles from our nursery. This new enclosure encompassed twenty acres of forest, and its satellite cage was four times the size of the first one we had built. One at a time, we moved the eleven chimpanzees in Jacky’s group the three hundred yards from the old enclosure to the new. The four adults—Dorothy, Becky, Nama, Jacky, in that order—each voluntarily entered a transport cage when I asked and allowed themselves to be carried over to the new enclosure. The caregivers and I were able to carry over in our arms five of the maturing juveniles, who were by then between five and seven years old and hadn’t been held by a human in over two years.
We had to give light doses of anesthesia to only Caroline and Mado. When I entered the cage to carry Caroline, now eight years old, she hugged me sweetly, but I suddenly knew she wouldn’t be carried over easily. She would insist on going back to camp, messing around with the solar system, and there was no predicting what other mischief. I didn’t have time for it. I injected her quickly by hand when she wasn’t looking and then tried to fool her by looking around the air and acting fearful like a nasty bee was in our midst. I doubt if she believed me, but she turned her attention to her discomfort at the injection site. I sympathized and said I was sorry by grooming around it. Six-year-old Mado was more difficult to read. Her ordeal in a Cameroon biomedical laboratory before she came to us had destroyed her ability to trust humans. When I tried to carry her over, she panicked as I walked out the door of the cage and bit me several times during her forceful descent from my arms. She chose to return to the cage rather than flee into the forest. I was left with nasty bruises on my face and arm, but nothing more serious. In the end, I had to anesthetize this frightened litt
le prepubescent girl with a blow dart in order to move her. So as not to traumatize her more than necessary, I crept to her cage in darkness, while she was sleeping, and blew a dart of anesthesia into the muscle of her thigh. Agnes Souchal worked with me late in the night to unite Mado with her group.
In the new enclosure we integrated other juveniles, eventually expanding the group to twenty-six under Jacky and Nama’s watch. Conflicts among the maturing juveniles never escalated, and younger, smaller babies were never in danger with the two of them around. We introduced babies as young as two years to the group, and if ever a bigger juvenile or teenager played too roughly, Jacky and/or Nama could sort it out with little effort. From a seated position, Jacky with his hair on end could interject with a single bark, as if to say, “Don’t make me get up!” That was usually all it took.
Older juveniles often referred to Jacky with frequent glances in his direction to make sure their behavior was acceptable. Less respectful conduct could elicit harsher discipline. When Jacky puffed up and stomped over to the transgressor, sometimes actually stomping on him, screams of fear were soon followed by apologies to Jacky. Even though Jacky could get tough, his gentleness was most striking. When Mado gave birth to Njabeya in 2007 (my tardiness in performing a vasectomy on Moabi resulted in the birth of this baby girl whose name means “gift” or “treasure” in one of Cameroon’s languages), she trusted Jacky to touch her precious newborn. To him, Mado bestowed the privilege of holding Njabeya’s foot. Tenderly cradling the tiny, soft appendage in one of his huge hands, Jacky fingered the minuscule toes with his other, an expression of awe on his face.
Most of Jacky’s acknowledgments of me were subtle. When I approached his big satellite cage in the early mornings after breakfast, whether he was lounging in a grass nest on the floor of the cage or dangling his legs from a platform above my head, he acknowledged me by extending his foot in my direction, often without bothering to actually look at me. When I extended my hand to grasp his foot, always grateful for his acknowledgment, he invariably squeezed my hand affectionately, making good use of his opposable big toe (a useful anatomic feature, our loss of which is lamentable). This “handshake” was our hello. I felt that Jacky delivered as much warmth with the minimal gesture as another chimpanzee might bring with a big hug.