The magazine for alumni and friends of Massey University.
Issue 14, April 2002

Born free

Sporting punk rock hairstyles and looking like animated plush toys, the cotton-topped tamarins roaming the grounds of Wellington Zoo at liberty are a delight to visitors.

And the idea, if you trace it back from zoo to zoo, is one introduced by Dr Arnold Chamove in a paper in 1989. “I said these monkeys don’t like coming down to the ground, why not put them up in the trees? If the ground is open and grassed, they will stay away from it.”

Chamove, who started his career working for an American primate centre, is known as an expert in primate enrichment: providing these intelligent animals with the stimulation they need. It was Chamove who persuaded the centre he worked for to allow the animals, which had been kept in isolation for fear of the spread of disease, time to socialise with one another, and it was Chamove who introduced the now-common practice of keeping primates with a bark chip substrate rather than on bare concrete floors. “When I was in Africa there was a group of mandrills who were living in a several-acre enclosure and they were digging through the leaf litter for stuff. I thought gee, I wonder what happens if you give monkeys in cages the opportunity to dig through things. And we did a series of studies which showed that they will dig the bark looking for food, and they will dig through it even if there is no food and there is free food on the side.”

“ First it was illegal. In Britain the home office said you can’t clean woodchips, it’s illegal, we won’t let you do it. I asked ‘Can I do it for a week?’ So we did all sorts of analyses of the litter. We found more evidence of transmission of disease on a concrete floor.”

Although most of this work was done with rhesus monkeys, Chamove has also conducted studies with the great apes. “There are no studies of great apes and their response to fire – so I did a study of great apes and fire – and I have looked at ways of enriching their lives,” says Chamove.

He looked at the environment in which the great apes are customarily kept. “One thing I noticed was that in cages in zoos they almost always have ropes for apes and the apes hardly ever use them.

“ So I did various things with ropes to make them more interesting and find out why apes never use ropes. If you take a rope and put it over the top of the cage and into another ape’s cage and once in while when that other ape pulls the rope up, then they show some interest.”

Most primate enclosures, he says, are designed for the convenience of the viewing public and not the proclivities of their residents. “Glasgow Zoo was redesigned by someone who had come up through the ranks and I remember they built this beautiful monkey house; it was built out of plywood. Plywood and monkeys! It lasted twenty four hours or forty eight hours and they ripped it apart.”

When it comes to the great apes Chamove argues for space – tens or hundred of acres – and untidiness. Expanses of grass may be what we like, but chimps are indifferent to the beauties of a well-kept lawn. “Chimps aren’t interested in lawns. They’d be much more interested if you took all the clippings and prunings and just dumped them in there so they could search through them.”

Arnold Chamove and his wife Carol Chamove run a company called Innovate. Innovate draws on the disciplines of business psychology, counselling, and animal behaviour.

Currently the company is looking at how to use natural animal warning coloration to warn sharks away from swimmers, at how to increase the intake of farm animals, and at how to protect fruit from birds and trees from cattle.

Innovate is also investigating whether the hierarchies, alliances, mentoring, and group behavior at work within the animal world can provide lessons for business.