We are always looking for exciting enrichment items and encouraging our staff, volunteers, and interns to get creative when enriching the primates’ homes, but there are a few tried and true things that will never get old and can be used in various enrichment projects.
At an animal sanctuary in the Congo, several dozen Congolese schoolchildren are getting a crash course in bonobos. These gentle, endangered apes, who resemble chimpanzees, are “our closest cousins,” educator Blaise Mbwaki tells the students in French. “They have a human character, and they are Congolese.”
It’s clear that humans are not the only animals who experience grief and loss and it’s narrowly and anthropocentrically arrogant to think we are.1 Along these lines, a new and wide-ranging transdisciplinary book titled Enter the Animal: Cross-species perspectives on grief and spirituality by Dr. Teya Brooks Pribac, an independent scholar and multidisciplinary artist who lives in the Australian Blue Mountains with sheep and other animals, convincingly argues that nonhumans experience loss and embodied experiences, and so do we because we’re also animals.
A plan to build a center breeding 10,000 monkeys a year for medical research will mean the “industrial-scale farming” of non-human primates, animal-protectionists are warning.
Orangutans and bonobos at the San Diego Zoo have received a coronavirus vaccine, Nat Geo has learned, after some zoo gorillas tested positive in January.