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>> Eric Hutchinson: It is my pleasure now to introduce
our next speaker.
Steve Schapiro is the chief of the Section of Primate Behavior
at the Keeling Center.
He conducts research aimed at improving the welfare of captive
non-human primates and his group utilizes a comprehensive
behavioral management program, including environmental
enrichment, socialization strategies,
and especially positive reinforcement training
techniques to provide the primates with opportunities
to voluntarily participate in veterinary husbandry
and research behaviors.
I'm also happy to say that Steve was one of the first people that
taught me how to do any of this stuff,
and so I'm excited to hear from him now.
And without further ado, Steve Schapiro.
[applause]
>> Steven Schapiro: Like the other two speakers said,
I'm really happy to be here, grateful for the invitation,
but perhaps I'm a little more grateful than the other two
speakers because my Australian in-laws are at my house.
It's week number three of five.
[laughter]
So I'm not the least bit unhappy to be here from that
perspective, as well.
[laughter]
And if they're videotaping this, which I think there was some
mention of, maybe that part won't get on YouTube.
[laughter]
I think the rest of my life would be a little less enjoyable
if that happens to make it to YouTube.
But I've said it.
I'm going to have to deal with it.
That's the way it is.
So I'm the one up here talking.
You know, there are many, many people that have contributed
to the work that I'm going to talk about today.
You know, I started at MD Anderson with Mollie in 1989,
if you can believe that.
Mike Keeling was the director of the center -- the Keeling Center
-- well, it's now called the Keeling Center.
He was director of what we called the Science Park
at that time.
And I have to pretty much say that none of the stuff that
we would be talking about today -- me, Mollie,
maybe all of us -- would have been possible without
the contributions and the efforts of Mike Keeling.
I think he was a leader for certainly behavioral management
of non-human primates in captivity and the proper
management of non-human primates in captivity.
And you can see there are a lot of very skilled technicians
on this list, quite a number of DVMs,
and some of the PhDs that we've worked with over the years.
Okay, so I'm going to start, you know, at a fairly basic level.
I'm going to try and emphasize some of the things that Mollie
said and probably some of the things that Chris said, as well.
I'm in the dreaded number-three slot where the first two
speakers said everything I was going to say,
so I have to try and make it sound fresh even though
it's going to be very similar to what they were talking about.
So, non-human primates, as you know,
live in social groups in the wild.
That's what we're trying to functionally
simulate in captivity.
That's the point of the socialization-type approach
that we take.
We want to functionally simulate natural conditions in captivity.
So, you know, non-human primates in the wild live
in social groups.
Mollie already told you that.
Some of them live in fairly large groups.
I've given you some pictures here.
Many of the macaques live in large groups,
chimpanzees live in large groups, ringtail lemurs,
vervet monkeys, squirrel monkeys, and baboons.
So these are, you know, fairly common -- except
for the ringtail lemur, probably -- fairly common research
non-human primates and, you know, we're interested in,
again, simulating the way they live in the wild.
And then, of course, there are other species that live in small
groups, and Mollie talked about that; monogamous pairs,
something like that.
Marmosets, tamarins, owl monkeys, *** monkeys.
Orangutans tend to be fairly solitary in the wild.
The siamangs that you see there are pretty much monogamous.
So, except for the siamangs and the orangutans not used that
much in research right now, the other four species on the slide
pretty much are.
And we're going to have to do different things for animals
that naturally live in small groups than we are for animals
that naturally live in large groups.
So we're going to take slightly different approaches for what
we're going to functionally simulate from them.
So when we start thinking about -- as Mollie told you,
when you start thinking about how to house animals
in captivity, you want to have an understanding of how they
live in the wild.
So you really want to understand some of the natural social
processes that are taking place in the wild,
and I really only picked just a couple that I thought were
particularly relevant for what really this meeting is about.
So there are some natural social processes out there.
You know that non-human primates immigrate and emigrate primarily
to prevent inbreeding.
That's how new groups form.
That's how animals move between groups.
You know that sometimes animals other than the parents take
care of infants.
So that's called alloparenting.
I think you're familiar with that.
And I think you also know that to become a good parent
yourself, particularly in captivity -- you know,
in the wild it's a little bit more natural -- you have to have
opportunities to take care of infants before
you have your own.
So I think alloparenting is going to prove to be a fairly
important thing for what we talk about today.
And then, of course, there's aggression in the wild
and we know that there's aggression in captivity,
with wounding and those kinds of things.
You know that there's intragroup aggression and aggression
between groups, as well.
Between-group aggression is not really going to figure into
the captive situation, but certainly within-group,
intragroup aggression is going to figure in.
So I'd just like you to kind of think about those particular
social processes that are natural.
Maybe we want to functionally simulate certain aspects
of them, maybe we don't.
Maybe we don't want to set up conditions in which animals
are going to definitely be aggressive towards one another.
Maybe we want to set up conditions where we can minimize
aggression -- within-group aggression.
And so we really need to pay attention to those
kinds of things.
So, again, I'm going to say it a lot of different times.
It's probably going to appear on most of the slides
that have words.
What we're trying to do is simulate the functional aspects
of the natural environment in captivity,
and for the purposes of what we're talking about here,
we're going to focus on the social environment.
And we want to do that for a number of different reasons.
Mollie showed you, you know, the regulations,
the new animal -- the guide, the Animal Welfare Act,
all these kinds of things.
We're interested in satisfying those regulations,
operating within the confines of those regulations.
But it really goes a little bit further, I think.
We started behavioral management -- Mollie's group started it,
you know, a long time ago.
And the idea wasn't simply to satisfy regulations.
It was to satisfy the animals' needs.
And I think sometimes that's something that gets a little bit
lost in the whole conversation.
So I think what we want to think about is how we can address
regulations, and this is particularly important with
the NIH's working groups' report and the director of NIH -- I'm
allowed to say that while I'm here.
He's not going to appear from above or anything like that.
No, he doesn't come to little stuff like this.
So, you know, with the chimp report that came out,
group size is very important, enclosure size is a very
important factor in whether chimp research or chimps can
be maintained in captivity, that kind of thing.
So it really doesn't apply just to chimps,
it's to all non-human primates in captivity.
And that's where my expertise is, with non-human primates.
I don't know much about dogs and rabbits and those
kinds of things.
But I think one of the things that really important is that
we have to think about ways that we can satisfy the animals'
needs when they're in captivity, and that's what the paired
housing's about, that's what the assessments of temperament
are about, all these other things that you've already heard
about are better and better ways for us to take into account what
the animals need when they're in captivity,
when they're in -- I'm talking about social groups, but,
you know, in pairs or whatever.
And I think one of the things that happens is that the balance
between the animals' needs and human convenience sometimes
is out of proportion, where human convenience gets
a lot of emphasis and animal needs get relatively little.
So one of the things that I hope that housing animals
in compatible groups is going to do -- non-human primates
in compatible groups is going to not restore the balance -- it's
never going to be like this, but sort of get the animal needs
to have a higher priority up against human convenience.
Because as Mollie pointed out, there are some inconvenient
things about housing animals socially.
But as she also said, you know, she wants the benefits for
the animals to be weighed just as heavily as the benefits
to the humans for housing animals singly versus
housing animals socially.
So I want you to think about what we can do or how some
of the things I'll end up talking about might help
to change the balance of, let's say, human convenience
and animal needs in a social context.
So if you've never been to our place,
I work at MD Anderson in Bastrop,
and we have chimpanzees living in corrals.
There are eight of these corrals attached to this one building.
You can see there are low tops on the corrals.
[clip playing]
So what we're doing is we're getting ready to feed
the animals yogurt, frozen yogurt that's in the container.
So one of the reasons I'm showing you this is really just
to give you a feel about what social housing entails when
it comes to something as simple as feeding a preferred food.
So we go from corral -- turns off corral one to corral three.
And this is a celebration, something that chimpanzees
naturally do in the wild when they come across
a favored food source.
And you can see the other three corrals that are down inside
of that building.
Four corrals down the left side, four corrals down
the right side.
You can see that they're pretty interested in getting fed,
right?
Because frozen yogurt's their favorite thing.
[clip playing]
And one of the things that happens is sometimes when they
get into the celebration there's a little self-directed
aggression, there's a little social aggression takes place.
Mollie's group was doing some work at that time on trying
to manage some of that feeding-related aggression
in a social group by feeding them on a predictable versus
an unpredictable schedule, and to make a long story short,
unpredictable feeding helped in reducing aggression at meal
times, but didn't affect the dominant status of particular
individuals at other times.
So it was important stuff.
So here's the guy with the frozen yogurt.
And you'll see that animals sort of -- they sort of tend
to distribute themselves throughout the enclosure so that
they can get their food without too much
competition with others.
You can see that they can catch -- you can't see that they can
throw, but take my word for it, they can throw with high
degrees of accuracy.
Unfortunately, it's post-digestion,
rather than pre-digestion.
And so for something as simple as feeding animals in a group
favored food, these are the kinds of things you had
to go through, okay?
All right.
So I told you that some species of non-human primates live
in large groups, some live in small groups.
Animals that live in multi-male groups -- multi-male,
multi-female groups, they can be a little difficult to manage.
Let me just go back one slide.
Sorry, I forget to mention one thing.
I underlined "compatible" in the title.
You've heard about compatibility a million times today.
So we want to house primates in compatible groups in captivity,
not just in groups.
And I think that's important with the paired stuff
and everything that we've talked about up until now.
It's got to be compatible.
Okay, so sometimes multi-male groups can be difficult
to make compatible.
One of the things that you can do is use -- because males fight
with one another.
You can use uni-male groups, particularly for species that
are matrilineal, groups that live in situations where it's
the female matriline that's really the focus of the group.
Most species of macaques, the baboons, vervet monkeys,
most of those species, they're all matrilineal.
Eric, you didn't start the timer.
This is going to -- it's going to hurt everybody
in the audience, not just me, because I'm not going to stop.
[laughter]
Okay?
So you can advance it.
Yeah, take some time off.
Put me in the penalty box preemptively.
Okay, so you can use uni-male groups, again,
as functional simulations for species that are matrilineal.
So take these squirrel monkeys at our facility for instance.
We house them in uni-male, multi-female groups.
So what you see there is a whole bunch of females and their most
recent one or two offspring, and there's only one adult male
in the group, and I'm not sure you're going to be able to see
him in this particular video.
Obviously he's doing some breeding,
otherwise there wouldn't be juveniles and infants in there.
But it turns out that in squirrel monkeys,
males aren't big players in the social dynamics of the group.
They're kind of actively ostracized at particular times
of the year.
So this is just an example.
And, you know, just to give you some perspective,
the enclosure isn't much longer than -- much wider than this.
It's about 20 feet deep, but it's not much longer than my two
arms put out like that.
So, just when you're thinking about enclosure size,
social group size, et cetera, et cetera,
that's just something to keep in mind.
Okay, and here are Rhesus monkeys living
in a fairly standard corncrib.
It's the uni-male, multi-female group.
Mollie made her presentation interactive.
I'm going to make mine interactive, too.
Which one's the male?
Come on.
The one every time he moves, everybody else jumps up onto
the wire and gets out of his way?
Like that?
Okay, so that's kind of how things would be
in a naturalistic group of Rhesus monkeys.
So, again, this is a functional simulation.
We can get breeding, we can get production,
we can get the matrilines, but we don't have to worry about
male-male aggression in this situation.
So, again, it can be a useful functional simulation.
Okay, so for species that are patrilineal,
in which the males form the core of the social group, and,
you know, that applies to chimpanzees, for sure,
and I've been thinking about this for a day or two.
Are there other patrilineal species?
Nothing came to my mind.
So we'll leave that as a pondering point, I suppose.
Does anybody know of any species of non-human primates
in the wild where it's the male-male bond, brothers stay
together, and that kind of thing?
We're all together in this in not being able to identify
anything but chimps.
So here we have a situation in which we do want multi-male
groups, and Mike Keeling is really the one who started this
so long ago.
It's male-male social interactions that are critical
to the day-to-day social life of chimpanzees.
So here we have a situation, two adult males and one infant
to start with.
And I guess that one's not going to play.
I must have missed that one.
Okay, so never mind about that.
[laughter]
Okay?
You would have seen the infant playing when the males
eventually groom, and they're all kind of hanging out
together, just to show you how important
male-male interactions are.
Okay.
As we've been saying, multi-male groups are sometimes difficult
to manage unless you have enough space.
So many primate centers have large field cages in which they
keep many macaques.
If you've been to the Southwest Foundation,
which is now the Texas Institute for Biomedical Research
in San Antonio, you know that they have very large baboon
enclosures with multi-male groups in them, of course,
and you know that the vervet monkeys that used to be at UCLA,
but are now at Wake Forest, also live in multi-male groups.
You can keep species that live in large multi-male,
multi-female groups where the matriline is the most important
in large enclosures successfully.
And so I do a little bit -- I did a little bit
of work in Mauritius.
So here's a situation where we have two adult males and 45
females and their most recent offspring at a breeding
facility in Mauritius.
We're able to house them successfully like that.
We get excellent -- they get excellent breeding.
And what we're trying to do here -- we're going to talk a little
bit more about positive reinforcement training
at the end, and Mollie talked a little bit about it already.
What we're trying to do is sort of get control of the males
so that we can work with the females.
In Mauritius, they hand-catch the animals,
and we needed a way to put the males in a cage within the cage
voluntarily so that we could work with the females
and the infants while the male was in the -- you know,
and so that the male wouldn't bite us in the calves basically.
So here you see the male inside a cage within the cage being
acclimated to -- desensitize to the door of his cage within
the cage going up and down.
And you can see it's multi-female, multi-kid,
multi-juvenile group, and there's a lot
of animals in there.
Okay, so that's what I was going to say about the large groups.
Things are different -- you know,
fairly different when you have some of these small groups
of non-human primates, animals that tend to live monogamously
in the wild.
One of the things that seems to happen is that you probably want
to limit inter-group sensory contact among owl monkeys,
among common marmosets, among tamarins, some of those species,
particularly if you're trying to breed them successfully,
because if you think about how those particular types
of non-human primates live in the wild,
they live in territories that are pretty far apart from other
members of their species and they don't usually come into,
let's just say, visual contact.
Owl monkeys don't usually come into visual contact with
other owl monkeys.
Common marmosets don't usually come into visual contact with
other common marmosets.
But if you've been to any of the places that breed these
monogamous primates, in the United States anyway,
you'll see that large numbers of social groups of marmosets will
occupy the same room, large numbers of owl monkeys will
occupy the same room, and I think you'll also see that
the production in many of those facilities
is not particularly good.
Chris talked about stress.
We're interested in stress.
What could be more stressful for a pair of owl monkeys than
having -- well, let's just say -- and I'm making up this number
kind of -- 67 other pairs of owl monkeys in the same room that
they're living in.
So if you know an owl monkey -- they have owl monkeys here
at NIH, those are some owl monkeys there.
This is one side of a room that's really a very nice room
with a waterfall down the middle,
34 family groups down the right side of the building,
34 family groups down the left side.
This is our facility.
It's really very good.
It has skylights so we can simulate the falling of dusk
and the beginning of sunrise.
We have light tubes rather than lights.
So if a light breaks, nobody has to go into the room to fix it.
Owl monkeys really don't like being handled that much, okay?
So we can have strangers, or physical plant people,
repair the lights from outside the room rather than having
to go inside the room.
So I'll just show you just a quick video of what
the waterfall looks like and I'll tell you the reason
we have the waterfall is for environmental enrichment.
It's the constantly-changing thing.
You know, people have tranquility fountains and that
kind of stuff.
It's designed to calm the monkeys down.
It's designed to prevent them from seeing other owl monkeys.
You perhaps could hear -- and you will hear again,
I hope -- that it generates a lot of kind of white noise,
and the white noise will prevent the owl monkeys from hearing
other owl monkeys being handled, which is kind of critical
for what we're trying to do.
So maybe you can see the owl monkeys living
in their nest box.
And then I just have -- you know,
to give you a little insight into what we're doing here,
this is a view of the whole room.
I got up on a tall ladder, got up above the waterfall,
didn't fall off, but violated every OSHA rule and regulation
by not wearing a proper harness and what have you.
But this will give you an insight to what it's like
at dusk in one of these owl monkey rooms.
Now, this is the best housing for groups of owl monkeys that
you can do, but it's still not perfect, okay?
There are 68 family groups of owl monkeys in
.0003 kilometers squared.
That's a really high owl monkey density, okay?
Things to think about.
And so it's 175 monkeys per room, and again, you know,
that many per kilometers squared.
Okay, so now what I want to do is talk to you a little bit
about what strategies you might use to form groups.
So you're going to take your animals that you have
in captivity and you're going to form social groups from them.
Maybe you've extended past pairs.
Now you have trios, quads, whatever it happens to be.
You want to form some groups.
Now there's natural processes by which groups form,
and I've just called them accumulation,
and I didn't have a better word for it.
So, obviously, in the wild an adolescent owl monkey leaves
the family group, a male looking for a female that got kicked
out of her group, as well.
When they're able to get together,
they form their own territory, and they make a pair.
That's what I'm calling accumulation.
Sometimes matrilines form together to form new groups.
The Cayo Santiago people won't understand that particularly
well, so that's another way that you can form a group.
I already told you that animals immigrate and emigrate in order
to prevent inbreeding, among other things.
You know that perhaps chimps live in fission/fusion societies
where they break up for part -- the whole community,
maybe 100 animals, but you're very unlikely to see 100
animals at a time.
During the day they fission off into smaller groups and maybe
the whole community fuses at some point to make
this larger community.
You know that large Rhesus monkey groups will sometimes
fission into smaller groups.
That happens at places like Cayo Santiago,
and it perhaps happens in some of the field cages at some
of the primate centers.
It's perhaps easier to manage out at Cayo Santiago than
it is to manage in a place like the California Primate Center,
where a fission is typically associated with death and a lot
of injuries, something that's sometimes called a cage war.
And you know that you start with a group of one male,
seven females, and what happens?
You know, you have a corncrib that has one male,
seven females, the least dominant,
the most subordinate female ends up looking bad and what
do you do?
You take her out, you have one male, six females,
then what happens to the number six in that scenario?
Eventually she's not looking so good also and now you're down
to a group, you know, over time, one male, three females,
something like that, and you need to form new groups from --
as a function of that.
Okay?
So when you're forming groups in captivity -- again we're going
with this functional simulation concept -- we have to consider
a lot of different things.
Compatibility, we've already heard about.
And all I need you to think about is to use all the
available information that you have when you go about forming
a group with more than a pair of animals.
And what I mean by "all available information" are
things like age -- we've heard about the effects of age
on pairing -- sex -- we've heard about the effects of sex
on pairing -- temperament -- we've heard about the effects
of temperament on pairing.
All of these same kind of things factor -- and social rearing,
upbringing, those kinds of things -- all those influence
how compatible a particular group is going to be.
And so one of the things that we've used with our chimps
in a slightly different way even Chris has used it with caged
monkeys, because remember we're talking about groups,
is that we assess the temperament of our chimps --
we have a good publication about that -- and what we're doing
with the information.
So it's one thing to collect temperament information.
As Mollie talked about, what she likes to do is solve
problems with science.
So we've collected this -- these data,
and now what we want to do is use the data to improve
the conditions for the animals in captivity.
So we know which of our groups are most compatible.
We'll focus on chimps for the time being.
And we know what the temperament characteristics
of compatible groups are.
And we know what the temperament profile of incompatible
groups is, okay?
So when it comes time for us to try and form a new group,
obviously what are we going to do?
We're going to try and model it after a group that has -- that
is compatible and has -- let's call it the compatible
group temperament, okay?
So one of the things we do to assess compatibility,
just like Chris did, we use a novel object.
Our chimps have received very, very many different things
as part of our behavioral management program.
There's not all that much that's novel to our chimps.
But this karate dummy, whose name is Bob -- and actually
that's Bob the Fifth.
[laughter]
You'll perhaps get some insight into what happened to Bobs
one through four.
We exposed the animals to this novel object,
and it is Bob the Karate Dummy.
It's human-like but it's missing vital human parts.
Sometimes the chimps understand this and sometimes they don't,
and we can discuss that in a second.
So here's the first instance.
This particular group of chimps --
and we're interested in how the different animals react
to the same stimulus.
I mean, that's the profile we're looking for.
So this is just a couple of seconds later.
I like short clips rather than large clips.
So -- unfortunately, though -- unfortunately, fortunately,
you decide -- we've used martial arts videos as part of our video
enrichment program to the animals.
[laughter]
And perhaps Jackie Chan and Jean-Claude Van Damme
and whatever else has had a disproportionate influence
on the animals' behavior.
[laughter]
But again, you know, we're interested in who's doing what
to Bob the Karate Dummy.
So we use the Sopranos also as part of our video enrichment,
which is another mistake.
But you can see, different animals responded differently
to the Karate Dummy, and we can assess the personalities
of the individuals based on those responses,
the response to novelty, and then we can build a profile
for the particular group to determine -- you know,
we know whether they're compatible or not based
on the number of injuries that they have and we can see what
we can do about building new groups that match that
compatibility profile.
So Bob the Karate Dummy stands up beautifully to kicks
and punches and slaps on the head.
You saw all that.
But canines to the testicles that he doesn't have,
and canines to the top of its head does not -- Bob doesn't
do very well with that.
All the department's veterinarians and all
the department's men couldn't put Bob back together again --
[laughter]
-- even with stitches.
We rushed him to the clinic and we couldn't save him,
unfortunately.
The surgical glue melted him.
[laughter]
So that wasn't such a great thing for us to do.
Well, Bob didn't care.
I mean, come on.
Okay?
So like I was saying, we want to use all the different
information that we have, the animal characteristics,
we've already heard that you do better when you use younger
animals formed into pairs, very much the same thing when
you're forming groups.
Younger animals tend to do better.
And one of the things that we don't do,
but we should do and we're probably going to start
to do in the future, is make use of some of these network
analyses that are currently being pioneered and utilized
and implemented and applied, which is really the key
thing, at the California Natural Primate Research Center.
They're able to look at particular groups of animals
and define networks of social interactions,
and they're able to determine, first retrospectively based
on some of the network analyses, what caused a group to fall
apart, and then more importantly they're able to look at the data
proactively to see if they can preempt groups falling apart.
It's fairly complicated statistical work.
I don't understand the details of it.
But they're having very good success at identifying what
aspects of social groups need to be maintained in order to keep
groups -- large groups -- 150 animals -- compatible.
And, more importantly, they've been able to identify a couple
of things that they know that, when this bad thing starts
to happen, then groups are likely to fall apart, okay?
So I think this is -- if you want to read some things,
Brenda McCowan at Davis is the one to read about this,
and her stuff in the next 10 years is going to be very,
very important.
Okay.
So one of the things -- another thing that you have to consider
is what you're using the animals for.
So, for our -- from our point of view,
we have three different species of owl monkey.
We don't want any inbreeding.
We don't want any hybrids.
So we're very careful in forming groups of animals that
are of the same species.
You know, there are three different species.
And maybe you can tell from that photo -- those photos,
maybe you can't, owl monkeys are very difficult to tell apart.
It's hard to tell males from females because they're
monogamous, which means they're the same size,
no *** dimorphism.
A little bit easier: Rhesus monkeys, baboons, chimps,
things like that because there is a lot of *** dimorphism.
Okay, and sort of continuing along the lines of utility.
You know, if you're making an SPF colony or a super SPF
colony, then there are things that you have to consider when
you're making your groups.
So how do some of these pathogens in the SPF -- you
know, *** B virus, simian T-cell lymphotropic virus,
something like that -- how are they transmitted and how do you
have to manage your groups so that you can minimize
the transmission across individuals and obviously across
groups, but really within groups is what you're trying to manage
transmission if any of the animals happen to have any
of the pathogens.
And then how do you manage a loss?
So if you have one animal that comes up indeterminate
or positive for one of the viruses, what's your next step?
Do you disband the whole group, just isolate the group,
give it another test, whatever?
There are a lot of things to consider.
Okay?
And certainly for Rhesus monkeys,
there was a time when we were considering breeding lines
of mammal A-1-positive animals and maybe B-17-positive animals,
something like that.
So you really want to define your species and manage
the groups so that you can get maximum utility out
of these captive populations.
And another thing to think about, of course,
is their research destiny.
We asked about, you know, if they're going to be paired
and then one is sacrificed as part of the study,
what happens to the other guy who's left behind?
You know, is he grieving?
Is it better to have been paired and then lose your pair mate
than it is never to have been paired at all?
This -- I'm quoting -- that was Shakespeare, you know.
He was a biomedical researcher.
[laughter]
And, you know, the same would apply in groups.
So now we're thinking about situations in which we might
be able to manage a group so that we could take one animal
out, do a study on it, put it back or not put it back,
something like that.
So you have to think about the animal's research destiny.
And, you know, Mollie's told us very nicely about the social
history of the animals being really important.
If you're brought up poorly to start with,
in many circumstances you're not going to get better and you're
not going to make an outstanding model for biomedical research,
you're not going to be easy to house in a pair maybe,
you're not going to be easy to house in a social group.
So it's really important for us to understand and utilize
and employ what we know about the social experience
of the monkeys.
So I'll just show you, hopefully, a video.
You like the way that monkey looks?
You want to put him in a group with other monkeys either like
him or not like him?
It's not going to be good for him either way, okay?
And here's the same monkey.
He's one of the two pair.
So now we've socially housed him.
Do we make him better?
Not from that video, certainly not.
But here, after an extensive behavioral management program,
you know that Rhesus monkeys swim in the wild all the time,
canals, [unintelligible], they jump in the rain pools.
So using a therapist like that you talk to a three- to
four-month-old, well it's best the three- to four-month-old
youngster being a good therapist for nine- to 12-month old
socially isolated Rhesus monkeys.
Here's an example of an animal who's been through a therapy
program like that.
That's the same monkey.
And I'm hoping you're thinking to yourself, "Oh,
that's pretty good," okay?
So we can form groups.
It takes a lot of work to succeed in this regard.
It's one of our only successes in bringing back monkeys,
providing therapy for monkeys.
So I'm not going to say we cured him.
We provided therapy.
We brought them back just a significant amount.
But the best way to do deal with these abnormal behaviors,
as Mollie and Chris talked about,
is simply to prevent them from developing rather than trying
to cure them.
Curing them is very difficult.
Preventing them from developing these abnormal behaviors
is really quite easy.
Harry Harlow showed us how to do it, you know, 65 years ago.
We know how to do it.
Okay?
So there's some interest in what age you should
wean your infants.
We wean our young Rhesus monkeys at seven months of age.
And I think it's too young.
I think they should be weaned at one year of age.
But we're a production colony and our veterinarian is very
much in favor of the seventh-month weaning thing
because he thinks that females are going to have an easier time
with their next pregnancy if they don't have to worry about
having an infant on them.
The fact that Rhesus monkeys in the wild at one year -- females
with one-year-old infants on them have a new baby,
and the interbirth interval is like 384 days, so it's,
you know, basically one year, that doesn't go into the
veterinarian's thinking.
So we would like the animals to get a little bit more social
experience, maybe be weaned at one year of age,
but it's an argument that I can't have with him because it's
an argument that I can't win.
Except in my personal family life,
I try not to have arguments that I can't win, okay?
In my family life, unfortunately, I've had many.
Too much sharing?
[laughter]
Always.
Always.
That's just my style.
You're all my friends.
Because we have an 84 percent production rate in our Rhesus
colony -- uni-male, multi-female, about 1,
000 animals SFP, no one can touch that, okay?
So even with weaning the animals at seven months of age,
they turn into outstanding breeders
and outstanding parents, okay?
So despite the fact that from a behavioral point of view,
from a textbook point of view, I would like the babies to stay
with their moms for longer and their social groups for longer,
our weaning situation has worked beautifully.
Seven months, they produce like crazy.
Everything's good.
Okay?
And, you know, obviously we have good breeding competence.
Eighty-four percent production rate.
The owl monkeys and the squirrel monkeys don't really
breed as well.
And I think, for the owl monkeys anyway -- well,
part of the reason is we don't want any more owl monkeys.
We have too many and there's no demand for them.
I think part of the problem with owl monkeys and marmosets,
these monogamous species, is that they live in these big
rooms with many, many social groups and it's a very atypical
situation for them, and I think it adversely
affects their reproduction.
For the squirrel monkeys, one of the things we end up using
are sort of nursery groups.
We'll -- when we identify pregnant females,
we'll put them into groups with other pregnant females and move
them away from the adolescents in particular because adolescent
squirrel monkeys are big-time allomothers.
And it's good for them.
They learn how to mother.
But it's bad for the infant because they're not lactating
and they're raw.
They don't know how to do it right.
So the infants may suffer a little bit in that circumstance.
So that's kind of where I am there.
Most non-human primate species have some alloparenting, and,
like I said, it helps you be a better mother.
It may not help the offspring of a subordinate female who can't
get her infant back from the juvenile offspring
of a dominant female.
So that's something I studied a long time ago.
So here I've got two quick videos of -- well,
I have one quick video of allomothering.
This is not the chimp baby's mom.
This is another female.
And, in fact, this female did most of the caring
and interacting with this particular baby.
And there are some good things for everyone to learn
in that circumstance.
Okay, we've also used all-male groups.
So some people say, you know, that's going to cause all
kinds of problems.
Well, with the chimps, which live patrilineally,
we have plenty of male-male pairs,
or we've had plenty of male-male pairs over the past.
We're moving away from that because we need a minimum group
size of seven, et cetera, et cetera.
So male chimps tend to get along just fine.
Male Rhesus monkeys, when we did our SPF derivation strategy
about, I don't know, 23 years ago now,
we had extra males when we formed breeding groups
and we just put them in all-male groups.
And they did just fine.
And, in fact, males that had experience in all-male groups
ended up being better breeders than males who had not, okay?
There was the confounding factor of age,
but still the experience you gain in a male-male group can
be advantageous to you as a breeder later on in life in,
you know, uni-male, multi-female situations.
You've already seen that we can form groups and we can
occasionally provide therapy for the abnormal behaviors that
we see, but it's not always the case.
Age, I already told you, is really important.
Young animals go together better than older animals.
We've all seen that.
This is just in Mauritius -- again,
I don't know what I'm showing.
As Mollie said, one of the things you have
to do is monitor for compatibility.
We can use observations, like Mollie talked about,
three times a week for each pair.
We don't do our observations anywhere near as frequently
unless you consider the daily rounds that the veterinarians,
the vet techs, and the behavior people do, looking for wounds.
If we're looking for wounds and we don't see any,
we've essentially monitored for compatibility, right?
And at some point we're going to get really involved in this
network analysis, I think.
It's pretty good stuff.
So I think that's another way that we're going.
And as Mollie told you at the very, very beginning,
the best thing you can do for non-human primates --
a socially-living, non-human primate -- is give
it a compatible group-mate -- partner,
group-mate to live with.
There are other types, but that's the best form
of environmental enrichment, social enrichment.
There are other types of enrichment that you can use
and you can use them in all sorts
of different group settings.
So here's something as simple as a banana feeder where
the animals can in fact compete to get access to the limited
amount of resources that are there.
It's an opportunity for them to express their dominant status
in a socially-sanctioned way and maybe they don't have to beat
the crap out of somebody else just because.
They're able to express their dominance over
the enrichment device.
Again, they don't need another outlet for it.
So owl monkeys -- you know, we reverse the life cycle.
They are fresh fruit eaters, they're ripe fruit eaters,
so you need a way to enrich them.
So we put some ripe fruit on [inaudible].
They're not overly interactive during the daytime [inaudible],
but they are relatively active [inaudible] year.
Okay.
Visual barriers are something that can be used,
particularly in groups, to maybe prevent some aggression
from taking place.
If an animal can get [inaudible] visual barrier and animals
can get on the other side when they're being chased,
and that's an advantageous thing.
I've already shown you a little bit about the training.
Obviously if you keep animals in groups and you want to work with
them, then you're going to have to use your positive
reinforcement training to get them to do what you want.
Here's a group-housed animal going to give us a conscious
blood sample by inserting its arm in the sleeve,
sucking on the juice bottle that's put up there.
And you'll see no anesthesia is involved.
The current term is acquiescence.
So is the animal acquiescing to what we're doing?
That's the question that I'm asking you.
I don't like this particular term, acquiescence.
I think acquiescence is what you do when your wife nags you
to take out the garbage.
You acquiesce and you take out the garbage.
You don't volunteer and say, "Honey,
I'm going to take out the garbage."
This to me is volunteering.
So there's a vac container, there's a blood sample.
And, you know, this is how much effort goes into getting a blood
sample in a social group with positive reinforcement training
being the operation.
And I'll just show you one other thing.
We have an animal with a bad lung so we've taught the animal
to use the nebulizer and the nebulizer has albuterol
and something else in it.
So [inaudible] voluntary participation.
I hope you're thinking that the answer is yes.
So one of the things we're working on most closely,
most completely right now is getting the animals
to voluntarily participate in their own medical care.
And I'll just show this last video and then I'll stop.
So here's an animal with arthritis.
It's getting acupuncture and laser therapy at the same time.
It's living in its group, no problem.
And the important thing is that I want you to look at is that
we're not giving the animal grapes, apple,
or anything during this process.
The animal is working for the positive reinforcement
of the acupuncture treatment and the laser therapy.
So the animal has made the assessment that the benefits
of sitting there for this process -- the benefits that
are involved in pain relief, better gait, et cetera,
et cetera, are positive reinforcement enough for him
to volunteer to do the behavior.
And obviously we're doing that with animals in the group.
So just the last thing that I want to say is that one
of the things that we're struggling with with our
chimpanzee colony in particular is that we have
a lot of very old chimpanzees.
We have three that are 51 years -- 52 years, almost 53,
and we have about 40 that are 40 years and above.
And if any of you are in that age range yourself,
you know that things that used to work don't work all that well
anymore and you can't move around like you used to,
et cetera, et cetera.
So we have a large number -- or an important number of animals
that are mobility-impaired.
So we have to form groups based on their mobility.
So we have mobility-impaired groups that are in enclosures
where it's less likely they're going to fall in the event that
there's a ruckus with the rest of the animals.
So that makes it difficult for us -- and you don't really care,
but, I mean, it makes it difficult for us to meet some
of these 20-foot height requirements for certain subsets
of animals that would probably not benefit from a 20-foot
height for chimps in captivity.
And, you know, with these geriatric groups we're having
to manage a lot of different things.
And just the last thing I'll say is that we're constantly
assessing their quality of life.
We have a publication coming out in animal welfare that describes
our quality of life assessment system that incorporates --
Susan Lambeth is the one that's done this really.
It incorporates not only veterinarians in the assessments
of quality of life, but the behavioral team, as well.
And not only do we look for changes in clinical chemistries
and clinical parameters, but we also look for changes
in behavioral parameters.
Animals that used to like to do things,
when they stop liking to do those things, we get worried.
When they stop liking to interact with people,
that worries us.
And for animals that never liked to interact with people to start
with, when they start to like interacting with people,
we worry, as well.
So we're looking for changes in behavior.
And I think we have about seven animals on this quality of life
watch at the moment, and I think it's a fairly important aspect
of keeping animals in groups.
So my summary is just that you heard what we had to say.
It's all about forming compatible groups,
using all the information that you have,
same types of information that you would use to form compatible
pairs, that type of thing.
And, once again, I want to thank all these people who, you know,
have really significantly contributed to what I told
you about today.
So thanks for listening.
I'll be happy to take any --
[applause]