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Volume 13, Number 3

Animals & Medicine

Do Animal Experiments
Predict Human Responses?
by Niall Shanks, Ray Greek, Nathan Nobis, and Jean Swingle-Greek

CHIMP SHOT DEAD AT ZOO

Chimp shot dead after escaping from U.K. zoo

'No Tunnels Found'

Joseph Brean, National Post

Published: Monday, October 01, 2007

Having mysteriously broken free from their "chimpnasium" on Saturday morning, two chimpanzees at a royal zoo in England were faced with a fateful decision: surrender peacefully to their frantic handlers or go for it.

Koko, a female in her thirties, followed a keeper back into the enclosure, bringing to an end her part in the unexplained escape. But 41-year-old Johnny, known to staff as "a bit of a thug," took the road less travelled into the zoo's public grounds, and was promptly shot dead before he could threaten the first visitors of the day, whom staff had just started to shuffle to safety.

Briefly free, he "certainly was not showing any inclination to return," and died from one gunshot wound, according to a zoo spokeswoman. A postmortem was to be conducted.

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The British Sunday papers reported that Johnny and Koko tunnelled their way out of their enclosure, and trumpeted the plot's similarity to the 1963 movie The Great Escape, in which Allied soldiers in the Second World War dig their way out of a German POW camp.

But zoo spokeswoman Alice Henchley yesterday denounced the tunnelling theory as mere speculation. "They did not tunnel out of the enclosure," she said. "No tunnels were found."

Staff at Whipsnade Zoo, a 240-hectare suburban partner compound to the much smaller London Zoo, are "devastated," according to zoological director David Field, who also expressed concern for Whipsnade's six other chimps.

The shooting has elicited much sympathy, because chimpanzees, so similar in both appearance and behaviour to humans, have a unique hold on the human imagination.

In Austria last week, for example, a provincial judge dismissed an application to have a 26-year-old male Sierra Leonean chimpanzee legally declared a person, and thus deserving of a court-appointed guardian, now that its shelter has gone bankrupt. Animal rights activists vowed to push the case to Austria's Supreme Court on behalf of the chimp, whom they have named Matthew Hiasl Pan.

Anita Singh, campaigns manager for PETA in London, said Johnny's death is a further illustration that captivity in a zoo frustrates animals and stifles natural behaviours, leading to boredom, anxiety, even self-mutilation.

"They were 30 and 41 years old. For all that time they've been wanting to escape," she said, adding that the zoo should have been able to tranquillize an escaped animal rather than kill it.

Leaving aside King Kong, other chimps on the run include Judy, a former pet who escaped from her cage at an Arkansas zoo this year and proceeded to clean a staff toilet with a scrub-brush; Bill, who fled a California zoo and was recaptured in a nearby backyard; and Chip, who bit off his handler's finger at a Salt Lake City zoo before being tackled and restrained by another keeper.

Though many of these escapes are resolved peacefully, a shooting death remains a likely fate for an escaped zoo animal, largely because human safety is a zoo's primary concern, and tranquillizers are not always instantaneous.

On Boxing Day 2003 at the Toronto Zoo, for example, a gate was accidentally left open and a Siberian tiger escaped into an area that was separated from visitors by only a waist-level fence.

As at Whipsnade, zoo staff had their firearms at the ready, but the situation was resolved by a quick-thinking handler who lured the tiger back into its cage with a chunk of meat.

jbrean@nationalpost.com

© National Post 2007

CHIMP SHOT DEAD AT ZOO