The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary by Andrew Westoll

The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary considers what we owe to the thousands of chimpanzees that have been used in the biomedical industry in America. Told through his experiences as a writer invited to the sanctuary, Andrew Westoll works as a volunteer alongside people who have been there from the very beginning and begins to slowly build relationships with both the people and the chimpanzees. The flow of the book follows his time there, beginning with his first day and ending with him returning home, but it continually switches from Westoll’s own experiences to past events, illustrating the buildup to the creation of the sanctuary by Gloria Grow and the lives of the chimps before they were retired to Canada.

Each of the back stories are important in order to understand the consequences of the invasive studies, and the amount of effort and heartache that went into trying to fix the damage that had been done to the chimpanzees. Tom, the chimp-face of Project R&R and the Great Ape Protection Act (GAPA), was riddled with the physical damage of a long career in a lab where he was repeatedly infected with different strains of HIV and hepatitis-B. All of the chimps suffered from emotional trauma from decades in the lab.

Rachel was one of the two chimpanzees diagnosed with complex PTSD by Bradshaw and her colleagues. When Rachel mauls her own fingers, she is exhibiting something called ‘floating limb syndrome,’ in which traumatized animals mutilate their own
limbs, believing them to be foreign objects.  The main emphasis in The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary is the moral question ‘at what point do the results of a medical study justify the trauma caused to the test subjects?’ Westoll reminds the reader of several studies conducted on humans in the past that were done in the pursuit of medical advancement:

Consider the Fernald School experiments of the 1950s (in which institutionalized young boys were fed radioactive oatmeal) or the Holmesburg Prison study of 1960 (in which convicted criminals were exposed to radioactive isotopes and chemical weapons) or the Tuskegee experiments that ended in 1972 (in which hundreds of impoverished African American men suffering from syphilis were denied treatment).

While it makes sense that if you are looking to cure a human disease, human test subjects will give you the best results, but gratefully society recognizes that the trauma sustained by human test subjects would be too great of a cost in exchange for a possible medical break through.

Westoll lists recent studies that have shown that chimpanzees have the emotional capabilities that rival our own, and that their reactions to their treatment in an invasive laboratory setting are the same as those seen in people who have been tortured or imprisoned. With these studies in mind, he presents a 2005 report stating that, “researchers had successfully grown the hep-C virus entirely in vitro, in human-cell culture. In contrast to the studies involving chimps, which have yet to produce a workable vaccine after decades of trying, this study is a genuine breakthrough in hep-C research.” If better results can now be gained through the use of human cell culture, then where is the justification for the trauma caused by the continuing use of chimpanzees?

One thing that was made clear while reading this book is that while one may not agree with all of the views that Gloria holds, her goals are understandable, even admirable. Near the end of Westoll’s time at the sanctuary, he accompanies Gloria to Washington DC to participate in the presentation of GAPA to Congress. While the bill, which proposes the ban of invasive research on great apes, gained considerable backing, the congressional session ended before it could be debated and voted on. Higher priority had reasonably been given to the global financial crisis. GAPA does, itself, save the US taxpayer a considerable amount of money. Westoll sates that if all of the government-owned biomedical chimps were retired to sanctuaries, the American taxpayer would be saved $173 million over the lifetime of said chimps.

Westoll and the people at Fauna are fighting to see all biomedical chimps as free as possible, but they recognize that releasing them into the wild would be a death sentence since they never learned the skills required to survive. Sanctuaries seem to be the best option for them and Fauna has shown that while emotional trauma may not be able to heal completely, and physical damage may require regimented use of medications, chimpanzees are capable of regaining a high quality of life after leaving a lab. If there is one thing we owe laboratory chimps, it is the chance to replace their bad experiences with good ones.

Reviewed by Jennifer Campbell

The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary by Andrew Westoll
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011
Cloth. 288pp. $25.00
ISBN-13: 9780547327808