Lab chimps, Uncle Sam may want you

KEITHVILLE, La. -- Puddin' was sitting on the grassy bank of a moat one afternoon last week , munching on an apple, when he started to hoot at his fellow elderly chimpanzees. They paid little attention, disappearing into a forest of pine, sweetgum, and oak. Puddin' slowly followed, hollering all the way.

Such is the life of a retired chimpanzee here -- yakking, eating, and socializing with neighbors.

At the 200-acre Chimp Haven , 89 chimps, most of them ancient, who had spent years in federal laboratories for experiments for everything from space travel to HIV now enjoy romps in woods, sleeping in beds of hay, and even watching a little television.

But the good times may not last. When supporters tried earlier this month to ensure that the old chimps would live the rest of their days in peace, Congress said no.

The reason: The chimps might someday be needed to protect the United States.

A bill that would have kept Puddin' and his pals off-limits to laboratory experiments passed the House in the last days of the 109th Congress, but the Senate never voted on it after the staff of Senator Michael B. Enzi , a Wyoming Republican, raised two concerns.

Enzi's staff argued that researchers might want to call back the retired chimpanzees to laboratories for homeland-security reasons. In the event of a bioterrorism attack, they reasoned, the chimps might be needed to test how to protect humans from toxic agents.

As the last hours ticked away in the session, a number of chimpanzee supporters -- including the famed primatologist Jane Goodall -- phoned and e-mailed Enzi's staff to argue that almost all the animals were so ill that they were unfit for research.

An aide to Enzi said last week that the senator thought it would be wiser to keep the door open for future research. Plus, the aide said, the law already makes it somewhat difficult to bring them back, requiring the secretary of health and human services to make a special request.

"If there is a major public health need, such as a bioterrorism attack, the secretary must find that additional research is important to address that need," Enzi staffer Ryan J. Taylor said in an interview.

US scientists overseeing chimpanzee research declined to comment, said Don Ralbovsky , a spokesman for the National Institutes of Health.

Staff members at Chimp Haven, a private foundation set up in 2003 in northwest Louisiana, say the arguments to test retired chimpanzees make little sense.

The US government has so many chimps available for experimentation that it plans to retire scores of them in the next few months. At least 200 of the roughly 1,200 chimpanzees in federal laboratories currently are not being tested because of a lack of projects, said Linda Brent , president of Chimp Haven and a former government chimpanzee behaviorist.

The federal Chimpanzee Management Program recently found that the abundance of chimpanzees in laboratories was so great that it recently extended a moratorium on chimpanzee breeding until the end of next year.

And, according to animal rights groups, the retired animals have so many ailments -- heart disease, chronic hepatitis, diabetes, and arthritis, among others -- that they would make poor research subjects. For tests of potential bioterrorism agents, researchers generally use rodents, not chimpanzees, according to US research documents.

"The chimpanzees that have finally made their way to retirement are so battered and worn, so used up by science, that we don't call Chimp Haven a sanctuary. We call it a hospice center," said Dr. Theodora Capaldo , president of the New England Anti-Vivisection Society , a Boston-based group dedicated to ending animal testing in laboratories.

In 1923, researcher Robert Yerkes started the first behavioral tests on chimps in the United States. Since then, scientists have studied thousands of chimpanzees in US labs. Chimpanzee experiments have led to nearly eliminating cases of hepatitis B and C through blood transfusions.

But despite the close genetic ties between humans and chimps, diseases affect each species very differently, lessening the chimps' impact as research subjects. It was believed in the mid-1980s, for instance, that chimpanzees would play an important role in HIV research, but the virus that causes AIDS in humans does not in chimps.

Nearly half the chimpanzees at Chimp Haven have been exposed to HIV or hepatitis B or C, and all have been deemed unfit for future research because of medical or behavioral reasons, Brent said.

On a recent afternoon, most of the chimpanzees shuffled around at a pace not unlike that of older humans. Most are in their 30s and 40s, although one, aptly called Grandma, is 54, sports a white beard, and cheerfully greets visitors with loud exclamations. In the wild, chimps rarely live past their mid-30s, while those in laboratories can live into their 40s and 50s.

Most chimps here do not have many years left. One-legged Paul, 40, has a bad heart. Rita, 42, has diabetes and leprosy. Tulip, a youngster at 13, has a diseased kidney. And Theresa, 42, who was used in Air Force experiments for space travel, is a diabetic.

When a Chimp Haven worker threw bags of popcorn, 16 chimps quickly converged on the treats, hollering at one another , tearing open the bags, and hungrily pouring the popcorn into their mouths.

"They have a lot of personality," Brent said over the din. "They've been very quick to adapt to life here."

The first few days out of the laboratory are often hard, though; sometimes staff members will bring the chimps into a room with a television set -- plastic coated in case the chimps don't like the program -- and it often calms them. But any change can be traumatic to them. When Nicky was first let outside, he immediately jumped high upon a chain-link fence. He was deathly afraid of grass.

When Puddin' arrived after being tested in four major experiments and living alone in a cage for more than a decade, handlers warned that he could be aggressive. But Puddin' mellowed out at Chimp Haven. "He's very fair-minded," Brent said. "If anyone gets into a squabble, he helps them get along."

He also likes to follow humans. Brent said that when she or someone else at Chimp Haven walks along the perimeter of a five-acre wooded enclosure, Puddin' often joins them.

She desperately wants the legislation protecting the retired chimps to pass in the next congressional session, saying that fear that the chimps will return to testing makes some donors reluctant to contribute to their care.

Under the so-called Chimp Act, passed in 2000 , the federal government pays the bulk of Chimp Haven's costs, but still requires the sanctuary to raise millions of dollars. It's short $1 million now.

Said Brent: "We just hope that people realize that the chimpanzees have given their lives for us, and now in their retirement, we're going to take care of them."

John Donnelly can be reached at donnelly@globe.com