Almost Human. Alfred Fidjestøl

big question on everyone’s mind was how to proceed with integrating Julius back into the chimpanzee community. Edvard and Billy knew they needed help. They had seen the fallout resulting from a previous miscommunication between a new chimp and the community. A small chimpanzee, Skinny, who had been imported from Denmark together with Bølla in 1977, was murdered by the group in Kristiansand. Skinny and Bølla had been the only two chimpanzees in the Danish zoo. They had thus never learned how to interact and communicate with other chimpanzees.²⁷ On top of that, Skinny had been captured in the wild and must have lived with humans for a period before arriving in a zoo. She had never learned the proper chimpanzee language and behaviors and instead used simple gestures and movements that she had picked up from humans, gestures that her fellow chimpanzees in Kristiansand interpreted as aggressive challenges. Lotta was particularly angry at Skinny and once bit off two of her toes. The toes were not completely severed but remained hanging from her foot. The veterinarian Gudbrand Hval and Billy Glad decided to operate. They brought Skinny home to one of the keeper’s apartments and put her under anesthesia by placing a cloth with trichloroethylene over her mouth. Using pliers from the zoo’s janitor, which they boiled in water on the stove and disinfected with alcohol, Billy Glad was able to perform a successful operation. In order to protect Skinny in the future, the keepers created a small shutter door leading away from the common chimp enclosure into an individual pen where Skinny could retreat to safety whenever she felt threatened. However, a keeper had forgotten to leave the shutter door open one evening, and when the staff arrived back at work the next day, June 30, 1978, Skinny was dead. “Presumed killed in the group,” stated the note in the formal annual animal review issued to the Ministry of Agriculture.²⁸ In fact, Dennis had hoisted her up and slammed her against the cement wall. The autopsy report revealed a fracture on her skull and profuse bleeding in Skinny’s brain.

      Being killed was one possible fate that might await Julius upon his return to the group. One step out of line, and he wouldn’t stand a chance. Glad and Moseid pored over international studies on chimpanzees and contacted other European zoos requesting assistance. In 1980, they went on a whirlwind research trip to Switzerland and the Netherlands to speak with some of the leading experts in the field. They visited zoos in Zurich and Basel in Switzerland and the Royal Burgers’ Zoo in Arnhem in the Netherlands. Basel housed around twenty to thirty chimpanzees, and the park had recently completed a successful reintegration of what Glad and Moseid later learned to call a “hand-raised” chimpanzee. The Arnhem zoo in the Netherlands had forty chimpanzees and a wealth of experience reintegrating chimpanzees that had formerly been outcasts. This zoo also boasted practical and scientific facilities that boggled the minds of the two Norwegians. There were examination rooms, operating rooms, individual sick rooms, quarantine rooms, a lab and two full-time biologists. In addition, the thirty-one-year-old, soon to be world-renowned zoologist, Frans de Waal, was at the park every day.

      At the time of their visit, de Waal was in the middle of writing what would later be one of the most widely-read chimpanzee books of all time, Chimpanzee Politics.²⁹ Frans de Waal studied the social structures within the Arnhem community, sitting on a stool for thousands of hours while observing and taking notes. Inspired by the political theories of Italian Renaissance philosopher, Niccolò Machiavelli, de Waal analyzed the intricate power play between the chimpanzees, interactions that he dubbed “chimpanzee politics.” One example from the book portrays a fight, which occurred in the summer of 1976. It began when a chimpanzee named Luit challenged the alpha male, Yeroen, by taking sexual matters into his own hands and openly mating with one of the female chimps without permission from Yeroen. After this, Luit began challenging the alpha male using a variety of subtle tactics aimed more at winning over Yeroen’s previous allies to his own side than in seeking a physical confrontation. Luit suddenly began to spend much more time together with the females who had previously supported Yeroen. He cuddled with them, groomed their fur and began playing with their young—not unlike a U.S. presidential candidate kissing babies on the campaign trail. Luit taught himself to climb one of the enclosure’s more difficult trees where he was able to pick fresh leaves that were popular among the chimpanzees. He would then distribute these coveted leaves magnanimously amongst his “supporters.” The decisive strategic turning point came when Luit won approval from the most important male chimp, Nikkie, a sort of second in command or vice president. On the seventy-second day after Luit had initiated his challenge, Yeroen admitted defeat. He greeted Luit submissively for the first time, thereby installing Luit as the new leader of the chimpanzee community.³⁰

      Moseid and Glad listened attentively to all that de Waal and the Arnhem zookeepers told them, particularly their knowledge about the reintegration of outcast chimpanzee babies. A deaf female chimp in Arnhem was constantly giving birth to new chimpanzees, but she was unable to care for them as a result of her handicap. Infant chimpanzees communicate verbally from birth, making small, nearly silent whimpering noises. The deaf chimpanzee was unable to react to these signals and prompts from her young.³¹ Still, the zoo administrators had chosen not to give her a contraceptive implant and instead allowed her to become pregnant multiple times. Each time she gave birth, however, the infant would die within weeks. Eventually, they had decided to remove the babies right after birth and attempt various strategies for introducing them back into the community. In 1979, the same year of Julius’s birth, they had succeeded in teaching another female chimp how to take over caring for a baby and feeding it milk from a bottle. The surrogate mother had first received training in her cage on how to handle the nursing bottle and was rewarded whenever she did it correctly. When the baby was two weeks old, she assumed responsibility for its well-being and proved to be a caring foster mother. She fed the young chimpanzee calmly and lovingly with the bottle and even acted in clever ways they had not taught her, such as lifting the baby upright, allowing him to gulp if he had trouble drinking. After a week with the nursing bottle, the adoptive mother began producing her own supply of breast milk and could soon offer the baby half of its required nourishment. On another occasion, when they were forced to raise another newborn chimp among humans for a few weeks, they reintegrated the infant by employing a female chimp whose baby had died shortly after birth. They rushed to the zoo with the human-raised chimp baby and placed it in the arms of the mourning mother, who immediately began to care for the baby.³²

      Kristiansand Zoo, unfortunately, did not have any of these options for Julius. None of the adult chimpanzees had been trained to feed with a bottle and there were no new mothers who had recently lost their young. As it was, Lotta had her hands full with her own son, Billy. Julius’s mother Sanne apparently did not want anything to do with him and Bølla was too young. Julius would therefore have to remain among humans until he was safe and strong enough to be able to return and care for himself. Safety thus became the highest priority for the coming phase. In the spring of 1980, his keepers would try to provide for his welfare through three different groups: the Glad group, the Moseid group and what might be called the Zoo group, with keeper Grete Svendsen as the key group member. The idea was to get Julius used to spending time with Svendsen at the zoo and eventually moving him into his own cage from where he would be able to watch and hear the other chimpanzees. It was essential that he learn proper chimpanzee behavior firsthand. It was also important for Julius to establish regular eye and sound contact with the other chimpanzee community members. His keepers would have to allow for a sufficient period of time to pass between establishing first visual contact and the moment when Julius would finally be allowed to come into physical contact with another chimpanzee. How long this waiting period might be was anyone’s guess. Glad and Moseid were offered mixed advice on the topic: In Basel, someone recommended they begin establishing first contact when Julius was only six months old. In Arnhem, the advice was to wait until Julius was two years old.³³

       A VISIT TO THE ZOO

      When Billy Glad first returned home from Arnhem, Julius treated him like a stranger. Billy had only been absent for a few days, but Julius now acted afraid of him and clung to Reidun. After a while, Julius again recognized Billy as familiar and became as confident and trusting as he had been before. Julius was developing well both psychologically and physically. At only two months old, he had made his first attempts to crawl and had taught himself to balance on all four legs. By three months of age, he was able to crawl around on the slippery bathroom tiles. And he had even started to walk around on his hind legs. He grew teeth and tried