I first met JoJo, a fully adult male, in 1988. He had been in a standard lab cage, five feet by five feet square, seven feet high, for at least ten years.   He was in a facility owned by New York University, the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates--LEMSIP.  He and many others of the three hundred or so chimpanzees earned their keep: their bodies were rented to pharmaceutical companies for testing drugs or
vaccines.  In particular, chimpanzees were thought, at that time, to be good models for learning about AIDS.  For although they do not get the symptoms of full-blown AIDS, the retrovirus stays alive in their blood.  JoJo was destined to be given a new vaccine against HIV, then "challenged" by an injection of the retrovirus.

It was the first time I had visited <I>adult<I> chimpanzees in a lab.   The veterinarian, Dr. Jim Mahoney, introduced me.  "JoJo's very gentle," he said, as he walked away between the rows of cages, five on each side of the bleak, harshly lit underground room.  I knelt down in front of JoJo, and he reached as much of his hand as he could between the thick bars that formed a barrier between us.  The bars were all around him, on every side, above and below.  He had already been in this tiny prison for at least ten years; ten years of utter boredom interspersed with periods of fear and pain.  There was nothing in his cage save an old motor tire for him to sit on.  And he had no opportunity to contact others of his kind.  I looked into his eyes.  There was no hatred there, only a sort of gratitude because I had stopped to talk to him, helped to break the terrible grinding monotony of the day.  Gently, he groomed the ridges where my nails pressed against the thin rubber of the gloves I had been given, along with mask and paper cap.  I pushed my hand in between the bars and, lip-smacking, he groomed the hairs on the back of my wrist peeling my glove down.

JoJo's mother had been shot in Africa.  Could he remember that life?  I wondered.  Did he sometimes dream of the great trees with the breeze rustling through the canopy, the birds singing, the comfort of his mother's arms?  I thought of David Greybeard and the other chimpanzees of Gombe.  I looked again at JoJo as he groomed me, and my vision blurred.  Not for him the freedom to choose each day how he would spend his time and
where and with whom.  There was no comfort for him of soft forest floor or leafy nest high in the treetops.  And the sounds of nature were gone too, the tumbling of the streams, the roar of the waterfall through the dim greens and browns of the forest world, the wind rustling and sighing in the branches, the scuttlings of little creatures moving through the
leaves, the chimpanzee calls rising, so clear, from the distant hills.

JoJo had lost his world long, long ago.  Now he was in a world of our choosing, a world that was hard and cold and bleak, concrete and steel, clanging doors, and the deafening volume of chimpanzee calls confined in underground rooms.  Horrible sounds.   A world where there were no windows, nothing to look at, nothing to play with.   There was no comfort of gently grooming fingers, no friend to embrace and kiss in joyous morning
greeting, no chance to impress with a magnificent display of malehood.  JoJo had committed no crime, yet he was imprisoned, for life.  The shame I felt was because I was human.  Very gently JoJo reached out through the bars and touched my cheek where the tears ran down into my mask.  He sniffed his finger, looked briefly into my eyes, went on grooming my wrist.  I think Saint Francis stood beside us, and he too was weeping.

From REASON FOR HOPE by Jane Goodall.  Copyright (c) 1999 by Soko Publications Ltd. and Phillip Berman.  by permission of Warner Books, Inc.  All rights reserved.  To purchase copies of this book, please call 1.800.759.0190.