Years ago, when I used to go with Guga’s group – five chimpanzees – in the woods of the sanctuary for two hours for them to play, I tried to teach them to collaborate in the work we had to do. We have a small river in the area, where they went to have fun. When there were storms, the branches invaded the stream and we had to clean it. I started to work on this and asked them to help me, but most of them pretended to work and were really hiding and playing. From that group, only Carlos helped me. Similar to what would happen to a group of humans working: a few actually doing the work and the majority pretending to.

A few days ago, a mistake let a door opened and Guga and Emilio, who were in the area of ​​electric fence, left it. I started to follow both to prevent confusion with other chimpanzees in other enclosures or teasing with the lions, which were beginning to become nervous.

As they are within the outer perimeter of the fence, the problem was to convince them to get into the hallways of some enclosure and hence, through several tunnels, return them to their original enclosure.

Guga quickly went into a hallway, attracted to Margaret, a female whom he had not seen since he was a teenager. While he was waiting for me to catch Emilio, who is more difficult to be convinced, he started dating her.

As he spent a lot of time there and there was also available all the cleaning material, as water, soap, hoses, buckets, he devoted himself to something he loves: cleaning, imitating the handlers. He put powder detergent in a bucket, filled it with water and with the squeegee he rubbed both the floor and walls tiles. In half an hour he left the hall shining!

But he was doing time. What he really wanted was to enter the enclosure of Margaret, who recently was dating Toto, the latest newcomer of the sanctuary. When we were able to take out Toto, who was afraid of Guga, who is twice as large compared to him, he came and copulated with her. When we opened the other doors to take him through the tunnel to his enclosure, he wanted to take the female with him and she was undecided whether she would go or not. We managed to talk to him and make him give up the idea of increasing the number of females of his group – today there are two of them, Carol and Samanta. Then he returned to his enclosure very happy, due to the adventure and experience that he had this unexpected morning.

Dr. Pedro A. Ynterian

President, GAP Project International