When Darwin first came to the sanctuary, the staff gave him extra attention and food to help him acclimate. (His former owner later unsuccessfully tried suing to get him back). He ended up in the primate sanctuary in Sunderland, Ontario after local animal control brought him in. He’s being allowed to behave like a monkey as opposed to a human baby,” Daina Liepa, the volunteer executive director of the Story Book Farm Primate Sanctuary in Ontario, told BuzzFeed News.ĭarwin was about 6 months old when he, wearing a coat and a diaper, escaped his owner’s car and got lost in Ikea. Ten years later, Darwin the monkey is living his best monkey life. A photo she took of the monkey balefully staring out the glass door in a little shearling coat blitzed across the internet, and a meme was born: the Ikea monkey. 9, 2012, a woman shopping at an Ikea in Toronto saw an unusual customer: a Japanese snow macaque. Mama herself is a testament to the complexity of animal thinking and feeling, and I believe this video honors her life beautifully.On Dec. I have been outspoken about a need to rethink confining animals to zoos. Sixty years after Mama's capture in Africa, we're in a different era. By all accounts I have read, she enjoyed a fulfilling social life at Arnhem, right at the center of ever-changing chimpanzee dynamics. Mama was born in the wild (estimated year 1957) and confined first to a zoo in Germany then at the Arnhem colony. Nikkie, obviously still nervous, made it up with his opponents." Now that Mama was bringing him with her, nobody resisted anymore. Then she climbed down again with Nikkie following close at heel. Mama slowly climbed into the tree, touched Nikkie and kissed him. After about a quarter of an hour, the situation changed. Each time he wanted to come down, some of the others chased him back. In the end, the usually so impressive Nikkie sat high up in a tree, alone, panic-stricken and screaming. "The most convincing demonstration of her reconciliatory role came on an occasion when the whole group had turned on Nikkie.This time, all of the apes, including Mama, had given chase screaming loudly and barking. "Instead of resorting to physical violence at the climax of their confrontation, the rivals run to Mama, screaming loudly." "Many a time I have seen a major conflict between two males end up in her arms," de Waal writes in the book. He described Mama as the oldest female in the colony even then.īut it wasn't her age that made Mama famous in primate-behavior circles, it was her acute awareness of, and ability to, intercede effectively in male political struggles. Thirty-five years ago, de Waal published his groundbreaking book Chimpanzee Politics about the social strivings and power alliances among the Arhem chimpanzees. student, the now-eminent primatologist Frans de Waal (I have written at 13.7 about de Waal before.) She was quite special to many of us in the fields of primate behavior, anthropology and zoology - in fact, thanks to the research and writing of van Hooff's first Ph.D. Mama was a vibrant figure, even though I never met her. Mama died a week after van Hooff's encounter with her. This is what knowledge of animals' thinking and feeling behavior does for us, I think - it makes us realize explicitly how much we share.
As I watched, I thought about what was happening to this ape at the end of her life and I also experienced powerful mental images of my own mother, who two years ago at age 88 entered hospice care and soon after quietly died.
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