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“Primatology” Panel DiscussionKate Baker a , Terry L. Maple b , V. Wensley Koch c &Elizabeth V. Lonsdorf da Tulane National Primate Research Center ,Covington, Louisianab School of Psychology. Georgia Institute ofTechnologyc Animal Care, Animal and Plant Health InspectionService, U.S. Department of Agriculture , Loveland,Coloradod Lincoln Park Zoo's Lester E. Fisher Center forthe Study and Conservation of Apes, Universityof Chicago Committee on Evolutionary Biology ,Chicago, IllinoisPublished online: 11 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Kate Baker , Terry L. Maple , V. Wensley Koch & Elizabeth V.Lonsdorf (2007) “Primatology” Panel Discussion, Journal of Applied Animal WelfareScience, 10:1, 83-86, DOI: 10.1080/10888700701277733

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10888700701277733

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“Primatology” Panel Discussion

Kate BakerTulane National Primate Research Center

Covington, Louisiana

Terry L. MapleSchool of Psychology

Georgia Institute of Technology

V. Wensley KochAnimal Care, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service

U.S. Department of Agriculture

Loveland, Colorado

Elizabeth V. LonsdorfLincoln Park Zoo’s Lester E. Fisher Center

for the Study and Conservation of Apes

Chicago, Illinois and

University of Chicago Committee on Evolutionary Biology

Editor’s Note

In some cases, questions and answers have been edited for space reasons. In other

cases, questions and answers may be incomplete because of transcription difficul-

ties. However, other than these omissions, nothing was changed in the transcrip-

tion of the panel discussions.

Question: Our main scientists … are very resistant to accepting new ideas. …

We were wondering if you have any ideas. …

Baker: What you need to do is provide them with some evidence that would be

of some importance to them in a handout … for instance … the frequency of

self-injurious behavior … how that could impact their project. The role that your

JOURNAL OF APPLIED ANIMAL WELFARE SCIENCE, 10(1), 83–86Copyright © 2007, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Correspondence should be sent to Kate Baker, TNPRC, 18703 Three Rivers Road, Covington,

LA 70433. Email: kbaker1@tulane.edu

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IACUC [institutional animal care and use committee] is playing at your facility is

really key. …

Maple: Steve Schapiro said you got to convince them with data. I’m old

enough to remember when IACUCs started, and the first one I sat on at Davis,

when the first Animal Care Committee started there, the scientists doing their work

did not want to have any kind of interference that would somehow change the pu-

rity and the control in the experiment, and what broke the ice—and I want to be

candid about this—was beer. We started talking to each other. … The American

Society of Primatologists, which was founded by both field types and lab types and

a lot of primate veterinarians, was one of those places where we stopped being ad-

versaries and a certain trust began to build up, so I think it’s evidence but it’s also

trust, and you may want to get to know those folks a little better, and they need to

get to know you, and it may be a primate social process here that’s getting in the

way of your success.

Question: I have a question about baselines. I do understand the scientific im-

portance of them, and I do understand how difficult it is to evaluate changes in for-

est patch or bushmeat or anything without some baseline data. … I’m not sure if

we’re ever going to get the kind of data that we need before we have to make the

hard decisions. …

Lonsdorf: Well, I’ve thought about that a lot, and I’ve talked to people a lot

about it, and I think you’re absolutely right, and sometimes there is an urgency, and

other times, there are populations that are relatively protected, but the country

where they’re in wants to do more … for example, they’ve talked in different

places about adding corridors between forested areas and things like that, and I’d

like to say that the first thing you should do, I think, is to do no harm. We know that

protecting big swaths of forest is good, so we should start with that, but when you

get to the nitty-gritty of “should we put a corridor in here?” I think you really need

to evaluate if you’re really creating more habitat for a group or you’re creating

more sink, and those are the types of things that are more nitty-gritty that I think …

as Terry was saying, I think behaviorists need to be brought to the table in some of

these discussions and say “hey, look, just because you put a half-mile-wide corri-

dor on this thing between these two forest patches, it doesn’t mean gorillas are go-

ing to go in there,” and I think that’s the point I was trying to make. Certainly, make

the big actions of just setting aside forest, but when you come into discussions of

where and what and how to do it, I think it’d be really a help to include behavioral

data in that.

Question: How can we encourage zoos to recognize that animal behavior is just

as important to welfare and well being as having a vet on staff—or keepers … ?

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Maple: Speak out. That’s what I’m trying to do is to be as forceful as I can in

speaking out. As you know, I, for a number of years, have been fortunate to recruit

a lot of talent, and in training them and sending them—many of them—to zoos as

“scientific curators,” because that’s where the opportunities are. I wish I could say

there were more research opportunities, but there’re not, but I think these are the

foot soldiers of change. It’s almost better to put them in curatorial slots. Some of

these students are rising to the top now. They’re going to leadership positions, and

they will have an opportunity to change things, but I’m afraid that it’s my zoo di-

rector colleagues where the problem is. There’s a lot of resistance—you talk about

the IACUC resistance. I believe there’s a very strong resistance to science. It is last

in the zoological garden, as Hediger said many years ago, and I just remember

what Steve said. He really inspired me today. We gotta prove it. We gotta prove that

science is essential. We gotta prove that these young animal behaviorists are criti-

cal, and I think it’ll take rapport between our other colleagues—the veterinarians,

the curators. I believe a lot of curators are resisting this, because they see y’all as

competitors for the expertise in the zoo, so it’s a tough problem, and I’m really

sorry to say to you that, after 30 years, looking back on what I thought would hap-

pen—as much as has happened, and a lot has happened to be happy about—not

nearly enough has happened. There aren’t nearly enough people … most of you

animal behaviorists, you probably never thought about your local zoo in recent

years, but I believe that zoos right now have more influence over the public’s un-

derstanding or perception of animal behavior than the Animal Behavior Society

has, and if that’s true, and if what the signals that we’re sending and the informa-

tion we’re putting out there isn’t good enough, it’s because we don’t have enough

of you working with us, so I hope that will change, but I really am proud of all of

you that are out there who are changing the face of zoos and reinventing them.

Koch: Let me add a comment on that … for those of you who haven’t heard of

the organization called Animal Behavior Management Alliance, it’s a group of

people that are doing … positive reinforcement training with their animals. There

are some very good card-carrying behaviorists that head it up, and the majority of

that organization is made up of keepers, and they are learning how to do this with

their animals, and the keepers will come in and give talks on what they have done,

and some of it is totally incredible.

Question: … How much is known about disease epidemics in other primates or

other animals in large social groups? Is there something about apes that makes them

more susceptible?

Lonsdorf: There’s a special topics issue of AJP coming out this month, of dis-

ease risk analysis studies in primates, and there’s a variety of primates represented,

but the basic answer is, in the primates where there’s less resistance to getting your

hands on them, they actually know quite a bit. There’s been a lot of great studies of

“PRIMATOLOGY” DISCUSSION 85

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the temple macaques, the temple monkeys that sit there and get fed by tourists, and

then tourists get bit and scratched, and they’ve got really good measures of disease

risk transmission there. The theory is debated, and I’m not a veterinarian—I just

actually hang out with them—so don’t really quote me on this, but to them a pri-

mate is a primate is a primate, and great apes shouldn’t be all that much more sus-

ceptible to getting human diseases, but the problem is that there just haven’t been

really good studies that have documented transmission events. There’s some good

work being done by the mountain gorilla veterinary group that have showed simi-

lar pathogens in the gorillas and the humans around the park, but they don’t know

if that’s just from sharing an environment, and the problem is really being able to

have good assessment techniques for pathogens from noninvasively collected

samples or having good quality necropsies. I can’t tell you how many study sites

either don’t do a necropsy, don’t do one that covers all the organ systems—and

then, they sit on a dusty table out in the field house and never get sent anywhere for

testing.

… In the 46-year history of Gombe, they’ve immobilized an animal 4 times, and

one was recently—a young male named Faustino that had some very strange and

alarming symptoms, and we got a blood sample from him. We sent it everywhere

we could think of to get tested, and he came up showing antibodies for a lot of stuff,

and so I take it to our vets and say “what does this mean?”, and they say “well,

what’s a normal blood sample from a wild chimp look like”? We’ve no idea. We

don’t have that data, so we don’t know if what Faustino’s showing antibodies to is

just part of being a normal wild chimp or not, ’cause there’s just very little data on

that still.

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