![]() “It costs about $22,000 per year to take care of a single chimpanzee,” Fobar says. Of the five reputable chimp sanctuaries in the U.S., many are relying completely on donations. One source told Fobar that chimp care is like caring for a human child. More chimps remained in private labs, went to other sanctuaries or were transported to less reputable facilities.įor sanctuaries caring for retired chimps, the cost isn’t cheap. Some chimps were lucky enough to go to the haven, but others were kept in labs after the government decided they were too frail to move. Because chimpanzees live between 30 to 40 years of age - and in some cases, 70 years - Chimp Haven was created as a sanctuary for retired government-owned chimps. Only chimpanzees that fall under specific government requirements receive lifetime funding, leaving many chimps living in struggling sanctuaries without care. Some pluck their hair, rock back and forth, pace, and harm themselves. Fobar adds that many chimps also develop life-long psychological trauma. The result led many chimps to develop a number of medical conditions like heart and kidney issues, and early death. “For many of them, it was a pretty hard life.” “They were infected with various diseases and used in vaccine development and … to evaluate the toxicity of different drugs and chemicals,” says Rachel Fobar, a National Geographic investigative reporter. Research continued for years after that, ending only recently in 2015.Many chimpanzees used for testing were forced to undergo biomedical research experiments for diseases like Hepatitis B and C and HIV. In 1995, the government stopped breeding chimpanzees - with whom humans share 98% of our genes. So I'll leave you to judge the merits of the arguments.The government started breeding chimpanzees for invasive biomedical research in the 1980s - and now, the fate of more than 250 of these primates is uncertain. † I see that there are some later publications that have disputed the claims made in that paper. I'd note, finally, that there's evidence from the X chromosome that the human line continued to have some level of interbreeding with chimps for some million years after the initial split ( Patterson et al, 2005 †). I'm not aware of any exhaustive studies into reasons why cross-breeding is impossible but it's also quite plausible that there are changes in the chemistry of fertilisation, etc. the ratios of limbs are different and so on) so it's quite plausible that the growth patterns are not compatible. ![]() Humans and chimps are anisomorphically quite different (i.e. This suggests that male-human/female-chimpanzee is not capable of producing viable offspring, at the very least.Īs to why, several reasons will contribute: humans and chimps have a different number of chromosomes, making cross-fertility unlikely (although animals with different chromosome numbers can and do breed so this isn't absolute). No humanzees have ever been recorded despite the fact that sexual intercourse between humans and chimps have been recorded on several occasions. ![]() The concept of a human/chimp hybrid is called a humanzee. ![]()
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