Space Chimps Retire

jukal writes ""With a $3.7-million grant and a court ruling, Florida's Center for Captive Chimpanzee Care last week took over a primate-testing facility in New Mexico that houses 266 lab chimps, including 16 Air Force animals descended from the first space chips.", read the rest at Discovery."

Comments

Re:Forced migration?

[bgins]

This is about confinement, isolation, and deprivation (of things to do). Not a nice prospect for an up to 50 years lifespan. It is indeed very sad.

I recall an account of how some "primitive" (African tribal) people, when imprisoned, committed suicide or died of no apparent reason. The account I read was in Marie-Louise von Franz but may well have come from Laurens van der Post (1 2). Supposedly they thought that they had lost their soul and so had nothing more to live for.

I guess chimps are perhaps fortunate or at least different in that they don't experience a "loss of soul". I wonder whether any of them have died in captivity for no apparent medical reason: if they had, it might show a frightening similarity between chimps and humans, i.e. that chimps' "consciosness" is closer to humans than we think. Of course, I am NOT condoning this kind of cruelty!!