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Celebrity Chimps Headed For Early Retirement

Retirement is supposed to be a happy time. You slave away for decades and spend your golden years basking in the glow of your achievements… that’s the way it’s supposed to work, right? Well, for two chimpanzees that appeared in numerous Hollywood movies and TV shows retirement is coming earlier than expected and is not without controversy. According to news reports, the chimps were removed from a ranch and will retire to a sanctuary to settle a lawsuit alleging animal cruelty. (Not exactly the way you want to end an illustrious career.) A representative from the Animal Legal defense Fund … Continue reading →

Chimpanzee Testing to Resume?

A chimpanzee at work for NASA Animal testing is a tricky issue. Given my love for animals I’d normally think I’d come down firmly against it, but it’s not that easy. For a while I worked for a medical journal, specifically, an immunology journal. Immunologists are the ones who research and cure diseases. Although it was hard to read over the studies in which they used animals for testing, their findings were always applied to fighting terrible diseases. But none of that is the case here. The Huffington Post published an article on August 23 examining the plight of more … Continue reading →

The Smartest Species

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I saw a headline on MSN about the smartest animal species… of course I had to click that link! The article compared signs of human intelligence — like making tools, solving problems, self-awareness, and more — with animal behaviors. Humans are the top of the list of the smartest species (at least as far as we know). Next on the list of smartest animals came chimpanzees. Humans and chimps share a lot of the same genomes — and chimp behavior demonstrates that some of that is shared intelligence. Among documented intelligent behaviors in chimps are: Making and using tools Hunting … Continue reading →

Monkeys Going to Mars

Monkeys from the Sochi Institute of Medical Primatology in Russia are being prepared to boldly go where no one has gone before — Mars. Why monkeys? Humans and monkeys have approximately the same sensitivity to radiation. The macaques from the Sochi Institute will give a more accurate picture of how humans will react to the conditions on a flight to Mars. The Sochi Institute will spend the next few years performing experiments in order to select forty monkeys with the right stuff for space flight. Those forty monkeys will graduate to the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow. At the … Continue reading →

How Do Monkeys Keep Their Nails Clipped?

Do they even have nails to keep clipped? These are the type of burning questions that keep me up at night. (Okay, they don’t keep me up at night. But I was thinking about it before I drifted off last night.) So I did some cursory Internet searching today and found that apes and most monkeys do in fact have nails, but some have claws. I could not find any mention of how they keep them trimmed. While clever, I’m fairly certain no ape or monkey colony has come up with a nail salon out in the wild. But if … Continue reading →