Novel explores compassion for animals

• By GREG LANGLEY
• Books editor
• Published: Mar 2, 2008

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CAPTIVITY
By Debbie Lee Wesselmann
Robert F. Blair, $22.95

One foggy autumn morning, Dana Armstrong arrives at her job at a South Carolina primate shelter to find her charges, chimpanzees, are not where they belong. They have been released by vandals.

“She dropped her briefcase to free her hands and began to pant-hoot, softly at first and gradually louder and more urgent — Hoo, hoo, hoo — until her voice erupted into a shriek — WRAAAAA. WRAAAAA. From inside the electric fence, several chimpanzees called back, but another, closer one hooted behind her.”

She lures one of the chimpanzees inside the building and slams the door. Then after getting the animal back into its cage, she assesses the situation. The shelter, a last-resort for chimpanzees who have been lab animals or show animals, has been ransacked. Papers are strewn everywhere.

Worst of all, the cages housing the chimps have been opened and some of the chimps have fled, including “Tekua, the sizable and sometimes hysterical male infected with the HIV virus, and, worst of all, Benji, dubbed ‘Psycho Chimp’ by some of the less sympathetic graduate students.”

It’s a public relations nightmare that Dana, a professor at the University of South Carolina, will have to handle. First, the chimps have to be recaptured. They promptly are, all except one who is hit by a car and killed. All this happens in the first few pages of Wesselmann’s book. Despite the flurry of early action that may lead readers to expect some storyline about escaped chimps menacing a quiet Southern town or spreading some rare disease, this book isn’t about those things. It’s about Dana, and the chimps reflect her own troubling guilt about an event in her own childhood.

Dana is the daughter of  Reginald Armstrong, “professor of psychology at the University of Oklahoma where he and several colleagues were studying the linguistic abilities of primates.”

When she and her younger brother, Zack, were small, the family became part of a cognitive psychology experiment. A baby female chimp, Annie, was introduced to live with the family and be socialized into human behavior. Annie was taught American Sign Language (ASL), and the family would sign with her to communicate.

“Dana’s mother, Susan, resigned from her job as a kindergarten teacher to devote herself to her three children — two human, one not.”

The whole experiment was filmed with cameras installed in the Armstrong home to record a kind of simian The Truman Show or Edtv.

Things went along well. Dana, then 7, and Zack, 2, loved Annie and treated her like a sister, but one day, two years after Annie joined the family, Dana and Annie were playing and had a disagreement. Dana pulled the head off Annie’s doll, and the chimp retaliated by biting her hand, just as another child might. But Annie wasn’t another child, she was a powerful animal. The bite sent Dana to the emergency room. Dana’s parents decided the chimp had to go. Annie is sent away, and the children are given no information about her fate. She’s just gone. Dana feels she has lost a sister and that she’s responsible.

The incident traumatizes Dana. “The memory of Annie lived like a parasite inside Dana, a separate organism that was paradoxically a part of her, viciously attached, sometimes invisible, but surfacing from time to time with a painful spasm.”

Driven by her feelings of guilt, Dana becomes a primatologist who specializes in rehabbing chimps who have been scarred by human captivity.