News about Suzie

22
Feb 22

We bring you the news about Suzie’s integration.

In these months, we have managed to introduce her to all the Bilinga’s with open doors (but Victor, who has only been seen through the bars several times, because he seems too uptight).

Suzie loves being with Tom and being pampered. She has not only been in his company, but with everyone else in different combinations every day. Suzie is very slowly adapting to the presence of the others. But we can’t blame her, she is old and has been alone for years. So we hope it is only a matter of time until she accepts all the chimpanzees, not just Tom. But there is one major problem with her: she doesn’t groom anyone…. As you can imagine, this is going to make it difficult for her to join the group, because it is more difficult to bond with others without the basic primate social tool, grooming.

Monitoring the association sessions

She loves to eat lettuce and cucumber while sunbathing in a big hammock hung in a high corner. And we can see her very well thanks to the centre’s new camera system. We use it for educational purposes, but also for research, courses and, of course, to monitor the welfare of the animals. At the moment, we have placed two of the cameras capturing the action in the associations’ cages. This way, we have each session recorded and have a perfect point of view of her favourite place, the hammock.

Veterinary follow-up

Every day the caregivers are collecting faeces samples, to control stress (cortisol) due to the associations, which will be analysed in a study together with the Veterinary Faculty of the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
In addition, she has become accustomed to being weighed by her keepers. This gives us a further measure of her health and well-being.