Sheba: Just Like Us?

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1:21Sheba is a chimpanzee. She was born in a cage, raised in a zoo, and then spent 24 years in a laboratory. As I learnt more about her story, I kept hearing the phrase, we have the need, but do we have the right? Having studied chimps in the wild for years, I've always found it hard to accept experimentation on animals, especially ones that are so like us. The justifications and counter-arguments have raged for decades, and although attitudes have changed, the debate is still unresolved. In the next hour, I explore our conflicted relationship with the animals we use and the struggle to set them free.

2:07But first, let's meet Sheba. Holy moly. Hi, Sheba. How you doing, girly? What you got around your neck? Sheba is 44 years old. Primate researcher and activist Bob Ingersoll knew her for the first 25 years of her life. But this is their first reunion since 2006, when she finally left a research laboratory and came here to Sanctuary at Chimp Haven in Louisiana. It's a moment of unmistakable joy. You are really beautiful. How old is she now? She's 44. Middle 40s, yeah. It was emotional and wonderful and joyous. Seeing Sheba just made all my memories of all the Oklahoma chimps rush into my heart. For many years, Sheba had to endure a lot of things that were not fair and were not right and needed to be changed.

3:09And Sheba was looking at us, you know, knowing, hey, everything's okay. Hey, that's been a crazy journey, huh? Coming a long way to come to the promised land. Listening to Bob talk about Sheba and the memories it brings back of her mother Lily and her father Nim, it's almost impossible to imagine the dark history they all share. What they knew and understand was I was causing them terror. I was a threat. I was hurting them. It started with a dream. Chimps and other primates are so close to us genetically, so sophisticated in their behaviour. Surely, under the right conditions, we could learn more about ourselves.

3:59There is something different about the look that comes back from a primate, a non-human primate. And they know that you know that they're just another version of us. And so we are just versions of each other. From the 1960s onwards, a series of medical, behavioral and social experiments took place chasing that dream. But for the animals involved, it turned into a nightmare. Whatever similarities, chimps aren't almost human. They're chimps. The scientific basis of this work was flawed and worse, often meaningless and cruel. By 2016 in the US, all invasive medical experimentation on chimps came to an end.

4:44Other primates, like monkeys, were not so lucky, and experimentation continues. But chimps live a long time, so the problem didn't simply evaporate. As funding dried up from 2011 onwards, thousands of chimps had nowhere to go.

5:06it's a thrill for me to be able to see them here and to know that they are here they're safe yeah so i mean it's just nice seeing them living like they're meant to interacting with other chimps this is chimp haven in louisiana and it was set up to provide sanctuary to laboratory chimps Amy Fultz is one of the founders. At the time I was actually working in a biomedical research facility with chimpanzees doing behavioral research. Back in the late 80s and early 90s, chimpanzees were mostly being used in HIV and AIDS research. And chimpanzees actually didn't turn out to be a great model for AIDS.

5:49And so the funding was sort of falling off for that type of research. Chimpanzees are a long-lived species. They live into their 60s sometimes, and they're very expensive to care for. And so myself and my co-founders wanted to provide a solution to this need for sanctuary for chimpanzees being retired from biomedical research. There are 300 chimps here, and it costs about$29 ,000 to keep just one for a year. That's nearly$9 million to provide food, medical care, enrichment and all their basic needs. The US government provides around 75 % of that, so Chimp Haven must raise the rest themselves. Michelle Reininger is the colony director.

6:42Of course, it is a huge responsibility. I don't know how much you've seen of wild chimps, but do you think that you have a fairly comparable setup? Yeah, I think with the chimps that we have here, their behaviors in many ways are like those in the wild. We see the different vocalizations that they use. And we've got the pant hoot where they display and then they make, everybody knows the pant hoot. And then it builds up to a big scream. I'm not going to do it because that gets very loud. My PhD research was on chimp pant hoots. So when you said you were about to do a pant hoot, I thought, yes, come on.

7:17So should we do one together? Sure, we can do it together. Okay.

7:28Sorry, sorry. I've got a little bit of chimp in me as well. I can't help, but anyone who's spent any time around chimps just can't help but want to vocalise a bit. We always joke when we're caregivers that when we talk to people, we talk chimp first half the time. Like we greet small babies, we're holding out our hands and... and it's just like we've got to we've got to get out more we've got to get with people more Hugo in this group he's kind of looking at us he is yeah yeah I see you I know I'm about to tell a naughty story of yours I know um there's a chimp in this group named Queenie B and she is this really long lengthy dramatic queen um and he loves to antagonize her he'll grab like a stick or even just with his finger, he'll just touch her on the back, very lightly actually, and she will start screaming like it's the worst day on earth.

8:22She'll kind of do a tantrum on the ground like a toddler would, and then you can literally see him giggling to himself, and then she'll run away from him, and he'll sneak up behind her while she's starting to calm down, and he'll do it all over again just to set her off. Today, there are 1 ,142 chimps in havens like this in the US. Yet 143 remain in labs, either waiting to be released or used for behavioural research. But there are still over 100 ,000 monkeys in biomedical research labs in the US, UK and the European Union. So the fight for people like Bob and Amy is far from over. That day I realised everything's not cool and everything is not good and something needed to be done and I was determined to do something about it.

9:21With modern technology now able to imitate human biology, do we still need to experiment on non-human primates? There are stark differences of opinion. Animals in laboratories never have a good day. They suffer day in and day out. But the good news is that we are on a brink of a major revolution in medical research, in which we are using methods that are based on human biology and that are so much more effective than animal experiments ever have been. There's been so many examples of how the animal research basis has just transformed lives. I'm not saying that that gives us the right to do the research, but I'm just saying that that research, with as few animals as possible, has been transformative on the way medical science has progressed.

10:18I heard about the chimps in 1974. This young man, who was a graduate student in my zoology lab, walked in and he started talking about, there's these chimps in Oklahoma that are using American sign language to talk. And I'm like, no way. And so I was intrigued. Bob Ingersoll was a student at Oklahoma University, studying to be an orthopedic surgeon. And he brought out a chimpanzee named Allie and a female named Vanessa. They came over to me and hugged. And as we're hugging, it was like a flash in my head. I don't want to be an orthopedic surgeon anymore. I want to do whatever this is. These are my people.

11:04and I'd never even heard the word primatology and I knew I wanted to be whatever that was. I think what we were trying to do was communicate with the chimps and let them learn something that we teach them so that we could have conversations and that sort of thing. You know, I just was looking to communicate with a chimp.

11:29This innovative project set out to see if human language could be learnt by chimps. Sheba's story also starts here in Oklahoma. Sheba's mother was a chimp called Lily. She arrived at the Institute for Primate Studies with her owner, Elise Moore. Elise drove up in her van, and she steps out of the van and goes around to the other side and opens the door, and Lily steps out, and Lily's a chimp, And she's about six, seven years old at the time. And she jumps up into Elise's arms and Elise carries her on, you know, on her hip and walks over. And we introduce ourselves. And Lily had been purchased by Elise when Elise was a teenager, I think 17 or 18 years old, out of the back of a magazine, which I thought was crazy.

12:22I mean, COD, let's just order us a chimp. And that's what she did. and that is how I met Elise and Lily. Lily and Elise settled in well at the Institute for Primate Studies. At first, you know, I was just a chairtaker. About two months after I was there, I was essentially running the place. Lily was with the other chimps. During this period, she had started to stay with the chimps more. Even at night, I thought it was really good for her. It was growing up, you know, she wasn't a kid anymore. She was going into adolescence. Life was good. Soon after, an infant chimp called Nim arrived. He had been part of a world-famous sign language experiment.

13:10His arrival was going to change Bob's life forever. ever. In September of 1977, Nim came from Columbia University with a group that was working with Nim in New York. Later on that day, we actually went on a walk before the New York people left, because it was going to be the last time they saw Nim. And that's when it clicked in my head, this guy's going to need a little friend and I'm going to be it. Yes, at four years old in the while, the chimp would still be constantly with their mother. So what kind of relationship did you form with Nim? I was kind of surprised that the New York people had so much trouble controlling Nim and he was biting everybody and that sort of thing.

14:01It didn't occur to me that I was going to have any trouble at all. And in no time, we were rough and tumble playing and doing the kind of things. You know, you have to be a chimp to be with a chimp. You can approximate the relationship that chimps have with one another if you're willing to roll around and tickle and play and that kind of stuff. So that's what I did. So can you tell me a defining moment in your life when something snapped and your life as an activist began? I can. That was a day that I'd spent out with the chimps all day and I'd taken four or five chimps out and came back and we had squared them away, got them back in their cages, and I had walked out to my car to drive away and come home.

14:43And as I was getting in my car about to close the door, I looked at the chimps all lined up in their cage, and they were looking at me behind the bars, and I was going home. Air conditioning, a TV, and that sort of thing, and a refrigerator with whatever I wanted in it. And they were in that cage at the mercy of whatever it was that we provided for them, and that's it. They couldn't get out. They couldn't go home. So all of those philosophical questions just rushed into my brain right at the same time. And from that point on, things changed for me. Because up to that point, I thought it was cool.

15:16And everything was cool. That day, I realized everything's not cool. And everything is not good. And I was determined to do something about it.

15:30Things were about to get much worse. The Institute closed. Bill Lemon was aging out. He was in his 60s and he also lost funding from the university. So he had 35 or 40 chimps to feed, didn't have the funds to be able to do that. And so he signed a contract to sell all of the IPS chimps to LEMSIP, the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates. And even NIMH got sold. So LEMSIP, the facility where chimps were infected with human diseases. Can you describe to me how you think NIMH felt suddenly going to LEMSIP and his whole life being turned around? Yeah, he was lost. Like, my friends are gone.

16:19I am in a strange room It's like prison But worse Thrown in the back of a truck Driven to New York You wake up in that room The one thing that did happen to him He got a tattoo on his chest Number 37 But Nim wasn't there very long Because I raised a big stink And some friends of mine and I Contacted the New York Times And the Boston Globe And 60 Minutes and any other news outlet And Nim was famous. And so using Nim's fame got him out. I unfortunately was banished because I had stood up. And so I didn't even get to see Nim when he came back. And I was, yeah, I was a mess. I'll try to say it without getting mad.

17:06This is the hardest thing for me to do without anger. LIMSET was the medical facility that pulled all the jobs from small institutes like ours. They pulled our grants, they had a multi-billion dollar deal with the government, and acquired all our chimps. LEMSIP was known for invasive biomedical research on chimps and other non-human primates. Doug Cohn started working there in 1988, fresh out of veterinary school. And I was very fortunate to actually wind up doing something that I dreamed about doing when I was a 10-year-old. And tell me why you first joined LEMSIP. I wanted to get involved in a field called laboratory animal medicine, which is a specialty in veterinary medicine.

17:55And when a position came up at LEMSIP, I jumped at the opportunity to go there. And I was just astounded that I could actually work with monkeys and chimpanzees involved in infectious disease research. And I felt this was the place I needed to be. And I was there for nine years. And what was your main research there? When I came on board, this laboratory was celebrated because it was involved in the creation of the first hepatitis B vaccines that were used in human beings. And there was also a relatively new project to create the first AIDS vaccine for humans. And the HIV vaccine was able to live in human beings and chimpanzees.

18:43And those are the only two species. So there was a great deal of hope that the chimpanzee would be the breakthrough model to create the first HIV vaccine. And we actually infected the animals with HIV virus. So I was responsible for helping the teen insert the virus into these chimps, some of which had the vaccine and some of which did not. So this was kind of a scary endeavor. Yeah. So can you describe what it was like to learn that the tests on the chimps didn't actually work? Yeah. The reason why you do science is to test hypotheses. And there was every reason to believe that the chimps were going to be a breakthrough for HIV as it had been for hepatitis A, hepatitis C.

19:31So, in fact, the HIV virus did circulate in both humans and chimps. But the problem was that the AIDS disease itself didn't actually occur in the chimps. Can you explain the three R's principle to me? And is it something you subscribe to? This is a commandment, if you will, an unofficial commandment. It was actually developed by two scientists in Great Britain in 1959. Birch and Russell were interested in the ethics of animal research. So they came up with these principles of reduction, refinement and replacement. Can this research with animals have a reduction in the number of animals? Can it be refined to reduce or eliminate pain and distress?

20:19And finally, can it be replaced by non-animal methods? And do you think that animal rights campaigners have actually played a really positive role because by pushing for better animal welfare, there's much more rigorous oversight. And that's led in many cases to better science. No question about it. The animal activists of years past and in today have been instrumental in improving the life of research animals. The conditions that animals are in today are better. I mean, a number of amendments have been made to the Animal Welfare Act. And those, in part, were made because of influences of animal activists on the United States Senate.

21:09Dr. Lisa Jones-Engle, who would play a part in Sheba's life, also began her career in biomedical research at LEMSIP. I was going to be a scientist. And if you want to be a scientist and you're in the United States, well, there are no free-ranging primates in the U.S. And so that meant I went to a primate lab. It was in upstate New York called the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates, a lab where we experimented on monkeys and apes. My responsibility was three young chimpanzees who had just been born a few months before I started, Regis, Kareem, and Digger. These boys, they'd all been taken from their moms.

21:51They were in the nursery. You know, they were a few pounds. They were balls of energy and curiosity and clinginess and neediness. But they were in a lab. They weren't in a chimp society. They had no chimp mother.

22:10In Oklahoma, another baby chimp was about to be born who would also be taken from its mother. Lily had become pregnant with Sheba, and Sheba's father was none other than Nim. Elise Moore remembers the day Sheba was born. September 7th, I get a call that Lily has a baby. I go down there. There Lily is. All the others are around her, but they're not touching the baby. She wouldn't let them touch her baby. So I took her into another room, and she held her baby up to me to show me. I said, no, that's your baby. I left for two weeks because I was having to find another place to live. I come back and Lemon has sold the baby to the Columbus Zoo.

22:59Just a few weeks after Sheba was born, she was separated from her mother and sold. The Oklahoma Institute was closing, so Elise had to find Lily a new home. I took her out to California and then one night, Lily had to be moved to the Wildlife Way Station, and a caretaker did not lock her up one night when it was freezing, and Lily froze to death. I was devastated. She's like my daughter and my lifetime work. I mean, my life centered around her. I just think of that baby in Lily's arms and said that Bob and I were not able to be a part of her life or grow up as Lily did or be with her parents. Sheba was now alone at Columbus Zoo and events were about to take a drastic turn, as we'll discover in a few moments.

24:32We'll be right back. change. Save up to 30 % in your next dollar change to take five. $15 value. Valid to participating locations. Terms and conditions apply. As yet another British Prime Minister steps down, is the country still feeling the effects of Brexit 10 years on? I'm Tristan Redmond, one of the hosts of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. Keir Starmer has become the sixth leader to resign since the Brexit referendum. Ever since that vote in 2016, the country's been wracked with political instability. When will it end? For more, listen to The Global Story on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

25:13Welcome back. I'm Charlotte Unenbrook, a zoologist, and you're listening to Sheba, just like us, on the BBC World Service. Sheba is a chimpanzee. Her story reflects our conflicted relationship with the animal world. At this point, she's two years old, having been sold as a baby to Columbus Zoo. Her mother Lily is dead, and her father Nim is in a biomedical research laboratory. But her life is about to change. During the 1980s and 90s, it was still thought that chimps were so like us they would make perfect models for experimentation. Thousands of chimps ended up in invasive biomedical research labs.

26:06Ayesha Akhtar was a medical officer for the US Food and Drug Administration. She's now president of the Center for Contemporary Sciences. She explains why she believes that primates don't make good research subjects for human diseases. You had a fantastic analogy, Aisha, about how despite a big genetic similarity between ourselves and, say, non-human primates, there's still huge amounts of differences in how that DNA is actually expressed. Sure. So it's like playing a piano. So all pianos have the same keys, such as like all humans and other animals share many of the same genes. But the difference in how you play the piano can lead to very different results.

26:59So you can play the keys in one way. You can get Chopin. You can play them in another way and you can get Jerry Lee Lewis. And it's the same as with genes. So although we share similar, in many cases, the same genes with other animals, how they are expressed, it differs. People say, oh, well, you know, we got this drug by using animals and so on and so on. Well, the problem is, is that by default, animals are required for testing. So by default, animals are always used in the development of drugs and vaccines. What if you use something else, something more human relevant? Would we have gotten that vaccine sooner and maybe even gotten a better vaccine, a safer vaccine?

27:47Can you tell me a bit about some of the missed opportunities for some human drugs? Tamoxifen, for example. From my understanding, if it had to be tested on animals, we might not have got such a useful drug. Well, one of the big concerns we have now is that there may have been hundreds, thousands of drugs that would have worked, maybe even been cures and would have been safe in humans. But they were never allowed to go on into human testing because of results in animals that were misleading. So you mentioned tamoxifen. Tamoxifen is one of the most effective treatments we have against breast cancer.

28:30And it did undergo animal tests, but we found severe liver disease in rats only after this drug had already moved on into human clinical trials. But if we had found it before, it likely would never have even moved on and been tested. So we likely would have missed out on the most significant and effective breast cancer treatment we have today. Back in the 1980s and 90s, there were two kinds of life for a laboratory chimp. Invasive work, like Aisha's been talking about, or cognitive and behavioural studies. Sheba was one of the lucky ones. Her journey to Chimp Haven began 42 years ago, when she was rescued from the Columbus Zoo by Dr Sally Boysen, who ran the Primate Cognition Project at Ohio State University.

29:23I had heard through the primate grapevine that the Columbus Zoo now had a PR chimpanzee, a baby chimp that the director of the zoo was taking around on his PR visits here and there around the city. The director was being bitten by Sheba. Then, of course, I got the telephone call, could she come and join our project, and she did. They are a fascinating species in their own right, and anything we learned about them could only, I hoped, would eventually benefit them in captivity. The idea being that if we showed how similar they were and how much they empathized, how much they could communicate, how intelligent they were, that we would begin to slowly change the consciousness of the country in terms of what we did with them in terms of biomedical research.