MARIE-PAULE AND I went back to Jamaica in the winter of 1995, to a different villa this time, but still within easy traveling distance of Treasure Beach and Black River.
Our Molly was then about eighteen months old, still a puppy at heart, but her adult personality was well on the way to being formed. She seemed finally to be over all her medical problems. Nathalie had returned from Spain for a brief while and offered to baby-sit “the puppy,” as she still refers to Molly, while we were away.
I wanted to take the opportunity to revisit the scenes of Molly’s early life, like any would-be writer of a book, trying to add final touches to the manuscript and check details for accuracy. In particular, I wanted to visit Miss June in Treasure Beach and see Molly’s mother, go by the doctors’ offices and the pharmacy in Black River. Above all, I wanted to tell Dr. Francis how grateful I was for his help in providing the transfusion supplies during my time of need, and how Molly had finally overcome all her problems, thanks largely to him.
In the afternoon of the last day of our vacation, we set out for Black River. Coming to the hospital, we drove in through the gates and parked in the shade of the wall by the men’s ward. The walls were the same sun-bleached white, and the mosquito screens in the tall windows were still missing or flapping in torn strands in the breeze. A crowd was already beginning to gather around the fruit and jerk stands outside in the courtyard.
Marie-Paule waited in the car while I made my way to the single-story building that housed the outpatient department. It was as crowded and chaotic as I remembered, the walls the same greasy two-tone off-white and gray, but a pleasant cool breeze wafted through the immense louvered windows on either side. I approached the examination room, knocked lightly on the door, and noticed that the missing doorknob had still not been replaced.
A nurse came to the door, and I asked her whether Dr. Francis was on duty, and if I might be able to speak with him. Her smile faded, and her face took on an undeniable sadness. I felt my heart sink.
“I’m sorry to tell you, but Dr. Francis died last March,” she said softly.
“That’s terrible,” I replied, not wanting to believe what I was hearing. “Whatever happened?”
“Oh, he was attending a dance in celebration of a fund-raising campaign he had organized for the high school—he was always trying to raise money for some worthy cause or other—and he just collapsed and died,” the nurse informed me.
“Oh,” I went on, “that is so terribly sad.”
“Well,” she said, a smile beginning to brighten her face,” Dr. Francis always used to say, ‘I hope when my time comes, it will be quick and I shall be doing something that I enjoy,’ and he was certainly having a great time dancing and chatting with everyone,” she said, chuckling. “You know, he was only seventy years old but he’d had a bad heart condition and had to retire from his full-time duties at the hospital. Everyone came to pay their respects, and you know, they gave him a state funeral down at the big church, he was so important and everybody loved him so.” The nurse went on to recount Dr. Francis’s many accomplishments—he was a preacher revered throughout the parish, he was a justice of the peace, he was a prominent leader in education, he’d been awarded the national Order of Distinction, and on and on she went, brimming with pride.
I walked back out of the outpatient building, saddened by the news of the loss of this kind man. Little had I realized when I had called on Dr. Francis that hot afternoon a year and a half before what a great man he was, so loved throughout the island for his kindness and medical skills. “He took out my appendix,” one old man recalled when I mentioned Dr. Francis’s name, and another informed me that Dr. Francis had saved his life when he developed a liver abscess. Dr. Francis, it seemed, filled a role in everyone’s heart and imagination that was larger than life. Yet I recalled how close I had come to walking out the hospital that afternoon, trying to think of some alternative to solving my problem, afraid that Dr. Francis would not understand my concern for a helpless runt puppy, and might even become angry when he discovered the purpose of my taking up his time. Yet he hadn’t been annoyed with me. Now I would never have the chance to chat with him, to thank him for the kindness he had shown me, and to try and find out what he had really thought of me and my story about the little Molly that needed his help.
Marie-Paule and I drove on into the little town, past the three doctors’ offices, and parked the car by the supermarket in the center. While Marie-Paule went to do a little shopping, I set out on a nostalgic walk. The pharmacy was a little way up the main street, on the other side of the road. As before, two or three heavyset women in head scarves sat or squatted on the boardwalk outside the faded brown doors of the pharmacist’s, selling their neatly arranged piles of fruits and vegetables. Inside, however, things were not quite as I remembered. The short row of wickerbacked wooden chairs was still there, where the little old ladies had sat in their lace gloves, waiting patiently for their prescriptions, but the glass counters had been rearranged, and the apothecary’s jars were gone. Instead, the back of the shop had been converted into a small clothing department. The same solemn-looking lady was there, but this time she was attending to two ladies who were interested in buying a floral print dress.
On the surface, everything seemed the same, yet nothing was as I remembered it. As I walked back to the car, I felt dispirited and empty. The pharmacist’s had changed, it no longer had the same old-world charm that I had remembered. Even the people who crowded the sidewalks didn’t seem to have the same infectious, carefree effervescence that I had recalled, either. But perhaps it was me, and my somber mood, that were different. Dr. Francis had passed away, and I couldn’t help feeling that this man would have had something to teach me about life. Born and raised in the community in which he had served in so many varied ways, I imagined he might have been a down-to-earth man with a simple philosophy, but I would never have the opportunity to find out now.
Marie-Paule and I next made our way to Treasure Beach to see Miss June. We had written to her from America, enclosing the photographs I had taken the previous year of the little children in her Bible class and Molly senior and her puppies.
We drove in through the open gates to Miss June’s yard. She was delighted to see us, and gave us warm hugs and kisses. Her little house was the same, with neat piles of books stacked on tiny shelves here and there around the walls. Her nanny was with her, a bright, talkative ninety-five-year-old lady who looked to me no more than sixty-five.
I saw no puppies scampering around, although the hens and the surly-looking white cockerel were in evidence. “Where’s Molly?” I asked Miss June. Miss June looked at me sadly and said, “Oh, Molly died last August, when I was away in Mandeville. We think she was poisoned, because two other dogs in the area died around the same time and with the same symptoms.” I was dumbstruck. Molly had been only four or five years old, and she had had only three litters, the last just six or seven months ago.
“Yes, it was terrible,” Miss June continued. “As I was about to leave in the taxi to go to Mandeville, Molly looked up at me with an all-knowing expression of sadness, as though she wanted to tell me something, and I had this awful premonition that we might not see each other again.”
Miss June began to reminisce about Molly and her funny little ways. “Molly would hang on every word I spoke,” she recalled, “waiting to catch some phrase or word that she knew and could react to.” I was reminded of our own Molly, her mother’s daughter for sure. “She loved to hear us sing hymns,” Miss June continued, in her singsong Jamaican tone. “She would come and sit at my feet, and howl in such a melodious sort of way, with her little head stretched up in the air. She really was a most special dog!” That was certain. No more trips to Jake’s, her gourmet restaurant, I thought, no more scampering masses of puppies.
“What about Shaba?” I asked Miss June, wondering about our Molly’s father.
“Oh, he died quite some time ago,” she replied. “Another dog came along and wanted to take over Shaba’s territory. They had a terrible fight, and Shaba got so badly bitten, he died of his wounds.”
I was shocked by the news. Life seemed so fragile, as wild and as savage as for any dog living in Africa. Our little Molly could never have survived these challenges.
Marie-Paule and I stayed for a little while to chat with Miss June and her nanny, but it was getting late and we finally left, both of us in sad and contemplative moods.
I decided to take the desolate coast road back to Black River, a road that had only recently been constructed, from crushed coral and seashells. Civilization had not yet caught up with it; no villas or hotels, not even any villages along the way, just miles of endless bush and rugged cliffs. The sunset was one of the most magnificent I had ever seen, the sun a fiery red ball hovering above the horizon, the sky streaked layer upon layer in lilacs, mauves, and pinks, the hues reflected in the smooth pale blue sea. The Santa Cruz Mountains, far off to the north, were aglow in the same soft pastels. It was an evening for reflection, and Marie-Paule and I sat silently as we drove, lost in our private thoughts as the night gathered around us.
In the great turning of this world, big Molly’s passing was of little consequence, I supposed, yet I couldn’t help feeling an awful emptiness. She was a very special dog, and the world was a little poorer for her leaving. Shaba had been a rough-and-ready sort of dog, nothing exactly lovable about him, and yet even he had served his purpose in nature, had put up the good, brave fight to ensure that his, and only his, genes got passed on to the next generation.
I couldn’t help but think of my own life, my work, and its value. I had been in medical research for close to thirty years now, telling myself that what I did was for a noble cause, even though it gave me constant heartache to use animals so. If I were to stop tomorrow, would it make any real difference? Maybe I could avoid it all by finding a teaching job or going back into practice, anything to get away from the nagging in the back of my mind. But that would be cowardly of me.
Was our use of animals really essential? I knew well that animal rights advocates often lambaste scientists for the unnecessary repetition of experiments. They even go so far as to say that research on animals has not only failed to benefit man, but in some cases has led to erroneous results that have actually caused harm to human beings.
Yet it’s no myth, I told myself, that without research on dogs, the very same sorts of dogs we all love as pets—many of them just like Molly—the treatment for diabetes couldn’t have been found. And what about poliomyelitis? Most younger people in countries like the United States and in Western Europe are unaware of the horrors of infantile paralysis, as the disease was commonly known when I was young. Those who did not die from the acute effects of the disease often led the rest of their lives immobilized in iron lungs, because they could not breathe unaided, or wore heavy metal braces on their paralyzed legs. Without the rhesus monkey, vaccines against polio couldn’t have been developed, albeit at the cost of hundreds of thousands of monkeys’ lives. Then I thought of the chimpanzees, who play an essential role in the frustrating attempts to develop vaccines to protect against AIDS. Without the chimpanzees, we would have no vaccine against hepatitis B. There are over 200 million carriers of this disease worldwide, 40 percent of whom, in Third World countries, will die before the age of forty from liver cancer.
Did I really believe my own litany? Or was I like the dedicated young Communist I used to see when I was a student in Glasgow, repeating by rote the old party line to anyone who would listen as he stood frozen in the windswept street, handing out political leaflets?
I remembered once putting myself to the test before a mixed audience of scientists, animal technologists, and animal rights advocates. I had been invited to England to deliver the keynote address at an annual conference on the ethics of using chimpanzees in biomedical research. Eighteen years had passed since I had lived in the United Kingdom, and I was now hopelessly out of touch with British public opinion. Chimpanzees aren’t used in biomedical research in Britain, that much I knew, and I wondered nervously what the audience’s attitude would be to my using them at LEMSIP. Would they start throwing rotten tomatoes at me as I began my talk? Had they drawn the line at this species, determined that, because of some point of ethics or morality, they could never bring themselves to use an animal so closely related to humans? Yet, I also knew that there were no chimpanzees in laboratories in Britain that were used in research, in any event. “You don’t miss what you ain’t got,” as the Cockney expression goes. They, themselves, did not face the ethical issue, at least, not in their own backyard. It is so easy for people who do not live in glass houses to throw stones at those who do.
I never write out a speech or practice beforehand what I’m going to say. In fact, except for the opening line, which has to be strongly delivered, I usually haven’t the faintest idea of what I’ll say when the time comes to stand at the lectern; I leave it more to the audience’s facial expressions, or body gestures—a raised eyebrow here, a quizzical look there, a hunching of the shoulders or disbelieving shake of the head—to guide me through, to mold and sculpt the topic to what seems to be generating the greatest interest. Without a set plan of attack in hand, I’m usually a nervous wreck by the time I reach the podium.
About two-thirds of the way through my presentation—the audience had not yet pelted me with putrescent fruit or interrupted me with catcalls—I thought of a question that I had never before posed to myself, the answer to which would prove to me, beyond any doubt, the extent of my own conviction. “Imagine this situation,” I said tentatively, trying to work out quickly in my mind how I would make the story go. “A situation so hypothetical that for a thousand and one solid scientific reasons could never be, but let us pretend for the moment that it could be.” I briefly explained to the audience about Spike, the chimp that I had delivered by cesarean section years before, and how, after his mother’s death, I had taken him home to be reared by my family for the first year of his life, rather than leave him all alone in an incubator. I went on to describe how, until he was about eight years old, I would, on warm days, take him into the woods so that we could have lunch together. These excursions gave him the opportunity to feel the grass beneath his feet and climb the trees. I went on to explain how he and I had developed a very close bond. I loved Spike with a passion that I couldn’t begin to put into words—not because he was like a pet, for I never looked upon him in that way, but because I was consumed by an overriding sense of responsibility towards him. I had saved his life as a baby, and without a mother to care for him, or other infants that he could grow up with, I owed him something special.
Spike represented for me the very epitome of the plight of the animal in research, deprived even in his young life of the experience that was his right to expect. “Now imagine,” I continued, “that I find myself walking through the slums of Calcutta, and I see a child sitting in the gutter, emaciated, covered in sores, dressed in rags, and next to him is Spike. Imagine further that a world-eminent surgeon steps out from one of the hovels and tells me, in no uncertain terms, that if I don’t immediately give up Spike so that the surgeon can take his heart or his liver for transplant, this little child will be dead by the following day.
“The question is,” I continued, “could I bring myself to turn my back on that little child, a child whom I have never met before, and am unlikely ever to see again, or would I let the surgeon sacrifice Spike and spend the rest of my life in torment?” I almost froze on the stage when I realized the depth of the question I had just asked myself. “Yet, if I believe fully in what I espouse,” I concluded, “I should be able to answer this question with a resounding yes: the life of one child is infinitely more precious than that of one chimpanzee.” There was a deathly silence, broken eventually by a young veterinary surgeon from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, who stood up to say that she absolutely disagreed with any research that called for only one human life saved for every animal destroyed. I agreed with her absolutely, but this was a different issue and she had missed the point I was trying to make.
As Marie-Paule and I continued on towards Black River in the glow of the setting sun, I realized that, five years after that speech, I still hadn’t been able to bring myself to answer the question.
Dr. Fred Prince of the New York Blood Center once wrote that the time between first isolating the virus that causes hepatitis B in 1968 and marketing the first effective vaccine for human use was a mere ten years, a truly remarkable achievement. It had taken, he estimated, fewer than 200 chimpanzees to reach this point, although, as no one can deny, a far greater number of chimpanzees have been used in subsequent vaccine development throughout the world. With over 200 million carriers of hepatitis B in the world, the ratio of chimpanzees used in the research to the number of human lives that could potentially be saved is huge indeed. Were all medical research so frugal and effective in using animals, we wouldn’t face the weighty ethical issues we do today. Yet the burning issue is whether we have the right to use chimps, or any other animal, in the first place. If the answer is yes, then by extension, one might ask “Isn’t Spike’s life worth sacrificing, even if only to save a single human being? Who’s going to be the judge?”
Every now and then, though, I come face to face with human suffering, and I’m taken out of the closed world of the laboratory, with its neatly laundered white lab coats, gleaming test tubes, and the latest piece of newfangled equipment. It’s hard to maintain the goal in mind, this helping of humanity, when you aren’t faced with the “end product”—the human beings in need. Then I thought of the hospital I had visited in Guinea, on my most recent trip to West Africa, just a month or so earlier. For a little while at least, what I saw there brought me back on track.
Guinea is the poorest country I have been to in Africa, although I’m sure there are poorer. On my journey there, I met an American woman named Pam, whose husband is the chief executive officer of a multinational bauxite mining company. She took me to a straggling, ramshackle little town in the northwestern part of the country, close to the border with Guinea-Bissau. The town had grown up around the smelting factory. Pam first showed me the fish market, a vast, sprawling sea of tin-roofed stalls, overflowing with bustling humanity, spread along the banks of a wide, lazy river. Then she took me to see a soccer game, some of the youthful players dressed in brand-new cleated boots (though most of the players were barefoot), the crowd of onlookers roaring with enthusiasm. Finally she asked me whether I would like to visit the local hospital, which was financed to a great extent by the mining company.
We entered the hospital through broad white gates and made our way among modest but well-tended gardens to the children’s wards. Opening the door to the first ward, we found six adult-size beds. In the first bed to the left was a near-naked boy of about fourteen. His emaciated body lay twisted on the mattress, his mouth gaped rigidly open, his eyes rolled up into his head, only their whites showing. Ugly sores covered his scalp, and an intravenous line ran into the leathery skin of his forearm. “He is suffering from malnutrition and sleeping sickness,” the Guinean nurse softly explained to me in French. Lying in the next bed was a young girl, maybe seven years old, also in deep coma. “This one has malarial meningitis,” the nurse continued. I looked around at each bed and was overwhelmed by what I saw. But I hadn’t noticed, when I had entered, the first bed to the right of the door. Lost in the vastness of the bed was a minute, shriveled baby, her matchstick arms and legs held loosely by webbed straps tied to the metal bed frame. She, too, had an intravenous line placed in her skinny wrist, and a stomach tube for force-feeding of milk was taped to the side of her mouth. “And this little one?” I asked the nurse. “She is two months premature,” the nurse replied. There were no incubators in this hospital—no way to keep the infant at a constant warm temperature during the cool nights—nor were there screens on the windows or netting over the bed to protect her from the swarms of mosquitoes that would descend once the sun went down. As I watched, the baby began to quiver and writhe, her whole body racked by convulsions, and she let out a long, croaking screech, like the mewing of an old, dying cat. I bent down to stroke the side of her little face and shushed her to be still. Bit by bit, she relaxed until she fell back into a deep, silent sleep.
As I left the ward, after saying good-bye to the kind nurse, a painful lump rose in my throat, and I found I could utter no words. As Pam and I walked back to the car, I steeled myself not to shed a tear or show in any way the devastating effect these scenes had had upon me. I couldn’t help thinking that somewhere, someone is doing research on malaria, sleeping sickness, and the other diseases that I had seen in that one ward, and I knew whoever it was would be using animals as experimental models.
I’M NOT SURE WHY, but as Marie-Paule and I drove along the coast on our return to Black River, I began to think of my mother, who had died at the young age of fifty. What would she think of me? Would she understand why I was in research, she who had given me my love of animals and had tried to teach me how to be gentle and patient? She had been so proud of my becoming a vet, not because of any social status it would give me—although the vet in Ireland carries a great deal of that, and anyone who can shoe a horse or age him by his teeth is sure of a few pints of Guinness as recompense—but more out of her gentle concern for animals, or “crathers,” as she called them. Would she have thought me cruel or uncaring because I now used animals in research?
I remembered phoning from Scotland her last Christmas Eve, barely two months after I had become a vet. I had just finished a visit to a farm to treat a cow for milk fever, and I was standing in a kiosk on the top of a windswept hill overlooking the Irish Sea, just outside the tiny village of Ballantrae, in Galloway. As I looked out through the glass side of the telephone booth, I could barely make out a thin strip of dark coastline on the horizon. “I can see Ireland as I’m talking to you, Mam,” I said, and before I knew it, she was crying. We were only 450 miles apart, she at home in southern England, but in those days, with the difficulty of travel, it might as well have been ten times that distance. She had had a lonely and troubled life, she and my father not getting on well together since I was a very young child. It’s strange, when I think back on it. My mother was a Catholic from the south of Ireland, and my father was a Protestant from the north—my grandfather even played the fife in the Orange parades every July 12, to mark King Billy’s 1690 defeat of the Catholic forces at the Battle of the Boyne. And although they fought about nearly everything on the face of the earth, their arguments were never centered on religion or nationalism.
As I stood talking to her on the telephone, I tried to cheer my mother up by recounting an incident that had happened to me just a day or two before. As I had been driving home after a day of farm and house calls, a tiny kitten ran out from the side of the road under a car some distance ahead of me. The driver continued on his way, unaware that the kitten had been struck and now lay motionless in the middle of the road. I stopped the car and carefully picked her up. She was unconscious, and her chin was split so that I could wiggle the bones of each side of her jaw. The skin of her chin had been stripped off her jawbones and was hanging like a pouch at her throat. Unable to locate the owners of the kitten, I took her home, treated her with subcutaneous injections of fluid, tied the sides of her jaw together with silver wire threaded between her teeth, and stitched her chin back in place as best I could. Her prognosis seemed good, and the story seemed to lift my mother’s spirits.
Not three weeks later, while I was on a farm calving a cow, the farmer’s wife rushed into the byre to tell me that she had received a telephone call to say that my mother had taken seriously ill, was already in hospital, and that I should go to her as fast as possible. I finished the calving and drove straight to the airport in Glasgow, fifty miles away. I took the first plane to the south coast of England, not stopping to change my clothes or even my Wellington boots, which were covered in cow manure.
Within eight hours, I was at my mother’s bedside. She was as white as a sheet, and so very, very tired. Unbeknownst to me at the time, X rays had revealed a dissecting aneurysm of her aorta. “How is the little kitten?” she asked me in her soft Irish brogue. “She’s doing fine,” I said. My mother looked up into my eyes, and with a faint smile she replied, “That’s good!” and then she died.
As a boy, I would look up at my mother as she stood at the kitchen sink each evening. She would be peeling the potatoes with an old horn-handled knife, worn to a crescent from constant sharpening. As silent tears trickled down her cheeks, she would softly sing in her out-of-tune voice, songs that recalled the leaving of Ireland, and the potato famine, and the Troubles. On reflection, I was now sure that she too must have been constantly asking herself about the meaning of life.
It was almost dark by the time Marie-Paule and I made it back to the villa. We had our evening meal by candlelight, our last dinner in Jamaica; in the morning we would return to the States, back to reality. After supper, we sat out on the verandah, Marie-Paule to have a glass of wine, me to enjoy a last cool Red Stripe beer. I sat silent, trying to sort out my jumbled thoughts and wondering how they might be connected to the sadness I felt at the day’s events.
I could hear, from my spot on the verandah, the coarse calls of the egrets as they returned to their roosts. I could make out the distant dark silhouette of the sixty-five-year-old Ambrose as he gently led his goats back from their daytime grazing. Their newborn kids bleated in panic as they chased their mothers in gamboling stride, trying desperately to keep up. Ambrose had watched over us from his tiny boat as Marie-Paule and I had explored the coral reefs far out to sea, had lifted us out of the water with the amazing strength of one wrist, had taught me how to extract the succulent juices from the sugarcane with a machete. This was the timeless rhythm of Jamaica. The sun would rise again tomorrow, and life would begin anew.
I couldn’t help thinking of all the animals I had known over the years—six or seven hundred chimpanzees, the many hundreds of rhesus and Java monkeys, scores of baboons, and all the other animals that I had used in research in the endless search to help find cures for human diseases. I thought, too, of the haunting mistakes I had made as a vet over those years, and the elation of success after struggling through the night alongside the technicians to pull an animal through what I was sure was a terminal crisis. I thought, too, of the cowardly part I had played all those years ago in the deaths of Pops and Nico, the only chimps of the fourteen on LEMSIP’s “surplus” list to be assigned to a terminal study. Pops, your regular, squat, nondescript chimp (not that that made any difference), and Nico, an unusually handsome and magnificent animal. Then my thoughts turned to Spike. Full-grown now, weighing about 130 pounds, he was all muscle and brawn. Yet Spike’s only claim to fame had been his biting off the tip of Jane Goodall’s thumb during one of her visits to the lab. Someone once described him to me as a little thick, rather slow to learn. “Have you noticed?” she asked. “Not only does his lower lip hang down all the time, but he constantly has boogers up his nose.” For some reason Spike had reminded her, this keen observer of chimpanzee character, of a truck driver or an Irish boxer. Even I had to admit that he wasn’t one of your rocket scientists among chimps, but he would always be my little Spike.
I had managed to get Spike, and eight other chimps, all veterans of research, into retirement recently at the Wildlife Waystation, a refuge for displaced and needy animals in southern California. Founded and run by Martine Colette, a small, tough French-born dynamo, the Waystation is nestled in the rolling hills and canyons of the Angeles National Forest, northeast of Los Angeles. Living by the motto of the Waystation, “Deeds, not words,” Martine came through for me in my hour of need, after long months of desperate searching across the country, and so many empty promises of help from others.
Thanks to pressures from the animal rights movement and a growing awareness of public opinion, those scientists who, in the early 1980s, were advocating euthanasia of “surplus” chimpanzees as a way of avoiding the enormous financial burden of maintaining them, began to talk about setting up retirement facilities for the animals’ lifelong care. But it has been largely talk, and forming committees and subcommittees to oversee the retirement facilities that, after twelve years, still don’t exist.
Nine chimps was an insignificant number compared to the couple of hundred that had already earned their retirement, but at least it was a start. I traveled out to California to spend a few days with the chimps to help them settle in to their new life. When the time came to leave, I felt sad, yet elated. At last there would be no more sticking and poking with needles, no more living alone in a cage in a dreary lab. Spike and the others could look forward to a lifetime of freedom and peace.
What was so special about Spike? Why did I choose him to be among the small group of chimpanzees that I was trying to quietly send into retirement? After all, Spike was young, and many of the other chimpanzees going into retirement had given far more years of their lives to research and were far more deserving of special consideration. Rufe, for instance, was the elder statesman of the group at thirty-nine years of age. He had come close to dying from heart disease only four years earlier. One of the most gentle and intelligent of chimpanzees, Rufe had participated in the aerospace program in his earlier days at the Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, before arriving at LEMSIP in the late 1960s to undergo years of research into viral hepatitis.
Booee was the only famous member of the group going into retirement. In fact, he was the only famous chimp we had at LEMSIP. Booee had been part of the chimpanzee American Sign Language program at the University of Oklahoma, in Norman. The Institute of Primate Studies there ran into financial difficulties in the early 1980s, and the director, Dr. Bill Lemmon, was forced to disband the colony. Many of the animals arrived at LEMSIP to continue their research careers, but this time in biomedical research.
Booee once accused me of lying, in his nonstop signing. I had entered the room where he and nine other animals were caged. Booee asked me for a treat, quickly running his index finger across his scalp—the sign for his name—then hitting his forehead to indicate “wants,” and finally touching the side of his cheek to say “treat.” I did have sweets in my pocket, pink-and-white striped peppermints that I purloin in great numbers from restaurant counters specially for the chimps. However, I didn’t have enough to give one to every animal in the room, and I knew Booee couldn’t see the candies anyhow. So I lied, signing to him that, no, I didn’t have any sweets. He asked me again for one. I lied a second time. With lighting speed, Booee repeated twice in quick succession “Booee see [as he pointed emphatically to his eye] treat in pocket.”
Booee broke many hearts when he appeared on television in early 1995. Portrayed as the animal who had been marooned in research, there was an outpouring of sympathy for him, from the general public, the Great Ape Project (founded by Peter Singer, the Australian animal rights philosopher), many of the animal rights groups, and the Jane Goodall Institute. Yet no one showed the least bit of interest in the other chimps; they just weren’t famous and newsworthy enough.
Two of the nine retiring chimpanzees, Chas and Seetee, had been used in the AIDS program at LEMSIP, although they hadn’t been infected with live virus. Lindsey, Ray, and Bold had participated in many studies and had even had their spleens removed in an unsuccessful program to develop vaccines against malaria. In contrast, Spike had been used in only two major projects: the first a safety test for a hepatitis vaccine, the second a safety test of a blood clotting factor prepared from pooled human blood, to ensure that it contained no hidden viruses before it was used in human trials.
Yet when does even a scientist, seeing no alternative to using animals in research, say “This animal has paid his dues”? Is it after a certain amount of time, or a prescribed number of research projects? Some chimpanzees are robust and seem to be able to put up with any amount of use, while others can be psychologically demolished by even a single project.
WITH SPIKE, I FELT an inextricable bond, as though we had drawn up an unspoken agreement. After all, I had brought him into the world and given him his first breath of life. We had shared food. Like a mother must feel for her children, I felt an inescapable responsibility towards Spike. But, at the same time, I had to admit that neither study Spike had been put on was particularly taxing, in a physical sense, especially to a big, strong animal like him, but a virus, unknown to medical science at the time, may well have been lurking in the blood clotting preparation he had received in the second study.
Without my realizing it, Spike had a time bomb ticking away inside him, ready to explode if even the mildest illness struck him. Within barely a month of arriving at the Waystation, Spike became seriously ill. I flew out again to see him.
Dehydrated and delirious, Spike didn’t even recognize me. He had lost a lot of weight in only forty-eight hours, and he was deeply jaundiced. I and the two resident veterinarians at the Waystation, Becky Yates and Silvio Santinelli, immediately set about taking blood samples from Spike in an attempt to diagnose what was ailing him. In the meantime, we hooked him up to an intravenous line to infuse him with much-needed fluids and electrolytes. Spike’s liver was failing, that was patently obvious, but without the blood test results we couldn’t determine whether he was suffering from primary liver failure or whether his liver condition was secondary to some other disease.
In the meantime, Spike needed plasma to relieve the burden on his liver, and once again I found myself calling for Dr. Socha’s help to send, as fast as possible, the best matched plasma he could find from the other chimps at LEMSIP. Becky, Silvio, and I worked feverishly on Spike over the following days, and by the third transfusion of plasma, he began to make a spectacular recovery. His appetite returned—in fact he was eating like a horse, as though he was making up for lost time—and he was back to his playful, rambunctious self. Greatly encouraged by his progress and anxious about the press of work back at LEMSIP, I saw no need to stay any longer. I knew I could leave Spike in Becky and Silvio’s capable hands.
I remember so well that last morning when I dashed in to see Spike once more before leaving the Waystation to catch my early flight back to New York. In the subdued light of predawn, I quietly approached Spike’s cage, not wanting to disturb him too much or awaken the other chimps, just to tell him a quiet good-bye, and to say that I would be back again to see him soon. He heard my coming and stirred himself out of sleep in his deep-strawed nest to lumber over towards me. Spike still looked very gaunt, his gait stiff and awkward, but the brightness had returned to his eyes and his spirit was high. With his fingers stretched through the bars of the cage, he gently grasped the back of my head in both hands and pressed my face to the bars so that he could give me a great, open-mouthed, huffing kiss. Little could I have realized that this would be the last time I would see him. Not four days later, just two days short of his sixteenth birthday, Spike died in his sleep, his liver shot to pieces, and a light went out in my soul.
Doug Cohn, my young veterinary colleague at the lab, tried to comfort me. “You know, Jim,” he said, “Spike saw the blue skies and heard the birds sing. He made it to the Promised Land.”
Perhaps that’s what life is all about, I said to myself, and my thoughts returned to Molly. I could see her in my mind’s eye, bounding through the forest, her head and neck outstretched, her legs extended, gliding through the air with the grace of a deer, consumed by the joy of living, this little thing that had struggled so hard to survive, and I thought, Molly, this little one-eyed Jamaican bush dog, has also made it to the Promised Land.