He was 36 years old with no job and no plans for the future. Now the company that had recently acquired Immunex was about to lay him off, and the six-figure severance package barely dulled the sting. “It talked about how a lot of chimpanzees aren’t actively being used for research,” LaChappelle explains, “but they’re still languishing in these five-by-five lab cages because there’s nowhere for them to go.” The Discover article further spurred his guilt. Testing on mice was bad enough, he thought, but one day he overheard an employee talk about Immunex potentially contracting out Leukine experiments on chimpanzees. Growing up in a Denver suburb and rural Minnesota, he and his sister reigned over an ark of critters-dogs, cats, guinea pigs, ducks, rabbits, and ferrets. In a room LaChapelle had no access to, Immunex kept mice for testing, which nagged at him. He oversaw the building and renovation of laboratories at Immunex, which manufactured the drug Leukine, designed to raise the white blood cell count of leukemia patients undergoing chemo. When he started at Immunex 11 years earlier he was just out of the Navy, where he’d worked on nuclear propulsion systems and was, he says, the only seaman on his battleship who didn’t cheer when it was announced in 1991 that the U.S. LaChappelle was feeling discarded himself. Keith LaChappelle, who spent $200,000 and six years of his life to rescue the chimps, greets Foxie. He learned how researchers infect hundreds of our closest relatives-chimps share more than 95 percent of our DNA-with viruses like HIV and hepatitis, inject them with unproven drugs, cut them open for organ biopsies, and discard them when they’re no longer of use. The article plunged LaChappelle into the world of captive chimpanzees.
A construction project manager at Immunex, a bioengineering firm on Seattle’s Western Avenue, LaChappelle was thumbing through a year-old copy of the magazine when he came across “An Embarrassment of Chimps,” a story about a sanctuary in Montreal that rescued 15 chimpanzees from a New York lab. LaChappelle read a Discover article in 2003 that changed his life. For Keith LaChappelle, who drained his life savings to create the sanctuary, CSNW culminates six years of labor, during which he was forced to confront the source of his once ample riches. A staff of primatologists serves them fruit smoothies in the mornings, stages elaborate birthday parties involving fruit-filled piñatas, and films their daily antics, especially those of Jamie, a 32-year-old primeval Huck Finn whose knack for outwitting other chimps keeps the staff scratching their heads.įor Sarah Baeckler, who runs the sanctuary with two former Central Washington University classmates, the creation of CSNW came as a bittersweet triumph at the end of a painful and sometimes frightening decade of watching chimps suffer under the cruelest conditions.
Smiling chimpanzee windows#
Their 18,000-cubic-foot “chimp house” includes a roomy two-story play area, four interconnected front rooms, windows that look out onto the Cascade forests, and an outdoor area where the apes swing on the monkey bars of a 15-foot climbing structure. The sanctuary, opened in 2008, is a far cry from the cramped, windowless warehouse basement the animals came from.
Smiling chimpanzee full#
Until a year and half ago, the apes were the wards of a Pennsylvania company that rents out lab animals and had spent decades as medical test subjects-pumped full of drugs and split open for biopsies. The seven chimps at Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest, a 26-acre farm five miles east of Cle Elum, have never had it better.
The ringleader, a chimp named Jamie, throws a tutu over her waist, goes Jackson Pollock with a fistful of Crayolas on a sheet of paper, and spits water at the humans gawking near the playroom gates. Some don mismatched socks on their handlike feet and build makeshift tents out of blankets. And that’s before the residents, back from lunch, come knuckle dragging in to tear up the playroom some more, ripping cardboard boxes, tossing chairs. Scattered Fisher-Price play stations-with all those horns, buttons, and dials-thrown in with piles of brightly colored blocks, troll dolls, pink tutus, and neckties fit for circus clowns. Image: All photographs courtesy Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest