…As we left LEMSIP… I was overwhelmed by shame. Ally and Nim weren’t suffering because they knew sign language they suffered because they were chimpanzees. That was the tragedy of putting these social creatures in solitary cages that dangled above the floor.

Each of them had the same deep need that you or I would for the comfort of physical contact and affection. All of the chimps felt the same pain of loneliness and a terrible fear about their strange new surroundings. Or between Manny, who had two signs - COME HUG - and Ally, who had 130 signs. …In my eyes, there was no difference between Pan, who couldn’t sign at all, and Booee, who knew thirty signs. We heard from visitors that Booee, Bruno, Ally, and others kept asking the techs in ASL for food, drinks, cigarettes, and the keys to their cages…. …the chimps did not stop signing, though the technicians didn’t understand them. Roger Fout’s account of chimpanzees once used in pioneering sign language studies, but ultimately abandoned to LEMSIP (from his book Next of Kin): Chimpanzee mothers were bred repeatedly to churn out babies for research, yet never allowed to raise their children past one year.Infant chimpanzees were taken from their mothers and raised by human caregivers to accustom them to being handled for procedures.Adult chimpanzees were given little enrichment.While his reasoning is suspect, he also apparently gave little thought to how this might affect their mental health or sense of well-being. Moor-Jankowski believed that this would limit their germ exposure. Chimpanzees were denied any outdoor access.Even though it was removed regularly from the large plastic sheaths, it still forced chimpanzees to breathe in fetid odors day in and day out. In reality, the cage design caused a permanent foul stench from excrement beneath cages. Moor-Jankowski theorized that allowing feces and urine to fall out of the cages would maintain a healthier environment, rather than hosing down the cages, causing dampness - a contributor to the widespread upper respiratory problems in captive primates. Most of the chimpanzees were housed singly in small, steel lab cages that hung above the floor.Along with facing the most invasive of biomedical research, chimpanzees at LEMSIP were subjected to a myriad of miserable conditions: Yet despite the goodwill towards animal advocates and attempts at humane considerations for the chimpanzees and other primates, the realities of laboratory life were quite cruel. LEMSIP’s veterinarian, James Mahoney, had concerns about using animals that led him to encourage lab employees to work towards enriching their lives before enrichment was required. As a result, the lab became well-known to animal protectionists in the 1980s. Unlike most animal researchers, Moor-Jankowski was willing to interact with those critical of the use of animals.

Jan Moor-Jankowski, MD was LEMSIP’s founding director and remained in that position until shortly before it closed. Michael Nichols, Brutal Kinship A paradox in care It’s a cinderblock room, so if they really got going, slamming the bars of the cages, they could create a deafening sound. The first time I was in that AIDS facility, it was horrifying because a stranger had entered, the chimps screamed and spat and threw feces. There was no outdoor holding or exercise area. The chimps could see one another, but were too far apart to have any contact. Six cages lined opposing walls of a windowless building the cages were elevated for easy cleaning.

Chimpanzee sanctuary northwest