Riding With A Zebra In The Tank; Journey’s End for Retired Chimps
MR. SAM LITZINGER
12:33:32
Welcome back to "The Animal House." I'm Sam Litzinger. The story of chimpanzee neglect and abuse in the name of scientific progress may be familiar to you, but do you know what happens to the chimps when the experiments are over? Our next guest, Andrew Westoll, uncovered at least one answer to that question behind the gates of a unique Canadian organization. Andrew has written a new book about his experiences, and he's here with the story. Andrew, glad to have you with us in "The Animal House."
MR. ANDREW WESTOLL
12:33:57
Thanks for having me on, Sam.
LITZINGER
12:33:59
Could we set the scene here with a little of your own background as it relates to the natural world, and then we'll talk about chimps more specifically, but what got you interested in all of this?
WESTOLL
12:34:08
Before I became a professional writer, I was a biologist and a zoologist in training, and I once spent a year, when I was 23 years old, living in the upper Amazon jungle studying wild monkeys. So I'd always known about this sanctuary. I'm from Canada, I always knew it was up there near Montreal, and I always wanted to go there and I always wanted to meet the chimpanzees.
WESTOLL
12:34:32
So I was actually gonna work on a magazine article about the place, and one thing led to another and I was moving into the sanctuary for ten weeks to write the biography of this amazing family of animals.
LITZINGER
12:34:45
Describe Fauna Sanctuary for us.
WESTOLL
12:34:47
The best way I know how to describe the Fauna Chimp House is to give you what Gloria tells people, and it's -- the Fauna Chimp House is a cross between a maximum security prison, an old folks home, a daycare center, and a New York deli at the lunchtime rush. There's all these interesting tunnels and nooks and crannies that the chimps can hang out in and hide in and play with each other.
WESTOLL
12:35:10
There's huge play rooms, three-story play rooms with big climbing structures, and out back they can also go outside, and for the first time, see the world unmediated by the bars of a cage, because there's three islands built out the back of the chimp house, and since chimps can't swim, all you really have to do is surround these islands with a moat and they won't get off the island. So they go out there to play all summer long.
LITZINGER
12:35:32
Let's back up and talk a little about Gloria, because in many ways she's every bit as fascinating as the chimpanzees that were there.
WESTOLL
12:35:38
Yeah.
LITZINGER
12:35:39
So who's Gloria?
WESTOLL
12:35:40
Gloria is this amazing woman, who at the age of 40 was running one of the most successful dog grooming businesses around, when she realized she'd come to a turning point in her life, and she wanted to do something bigger and more audacious in the name of animal welfare, and she heard about a laboratory in upper New York state that was shutting down, and all the chimpanzees were gonna be moved to another biomedical laboratory.
WESTOLL
12:36:06
Well, it turns out the veterinarian who worked there was secretly smuggling some of the chimpanzees out at night so that they didn't have to go to this new lab, and he was smuggling them to sanctuaries all across North America. So Gloria heard about these chimpanzees and she said to her partner, Richard, who's a veterinarian, let's take our retirement savings and let's build a building on our farm called The Chimp House to give as many of these chimpanzees as she could the kind of retirement they deserved.
WESTOLL
12:36:36
So it took the Grow family -- Gloria Grow is her name, three or four years to really start building a basis of trust with some of these chimpanzees. Some of these chimps were the first HIV-positive chimpanzees to be released to sanctuary because they'd been used in HIV trials in the laboratory. And these guys were old, really grizzled veterans of the laboratory scene, and they had no reason to like humans or to trust them. So really, the most amazing thing is this transformation and the chimps being able to trust humans again and realize that Gloria and her team is there to help them, not to hurt them.
LITZINGER
12:37:13
How do the chimps view you when you got there and were presumably looking them over trying to figure out what was going on?
WESTOLL
12:37:20
I was a stranger, and I knew I would have to participate fully in the Chimp House life, and I started making their breakfasts for them. These huge trolleys filled with a smorgasbord of fresh fruits and vegetables and water bottles. I would make their tea for them. The chimps love drinking hot tea, and I would make their smoothies for them, which is where, the best place to hide the medications that the chimpanzees each need. But each of the chimps when they saw me engaging with everyone else, all their human friends there, and when they saw that I was just becoming a part of the routine, they each individually warmed up to me in their own fashion.
LITZINGER
12:37:57
It's a fascinating and touching book, "The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary: A True Story of Resilience and Recovery." Andrew Westoll has been our guest. Andrew, thank you very much for being with us in "The Animal House."
WESTOLL
12:38:07
My pleasure.
LITZINGER
12:38:11
Right now, scientists around the world are working on various ways to harness a new fuel source that could provide a substitute for gasoline. Some are conducting experiments using animal manure. One of them, Dr. David Mullin of Tulane University, is on the cusp of a major breakthrough of a development of a biofuel that uses the droppings of African Zebras. Dr. Mullin joins us now from New Orleans, Louisiana with details. Glad to have you with us, David, here in "The Animal House."
DR. DAVID MULLIN
12:38:36
Glad to speak to you.
LITZINGER
12:38:37
How did we understand that some of what zebras leave behind could be used for this?
MULLIN
12:38:43
Well, I'm a microbiologist, and I study bacteria, and so I was especially interested in finding bacterial that could produce butenol using cellulose as a food. And so I looked at animals that eat plant material, since plant materials are comprised of cellulose.
LITZINGER
12:39:01
And so now, tell us what is butenol again, for those of us who weren’t paying as much attention in chemistry class in high school as we should have been.
MULLIN
12:39:08
Butenol is an alcohol. It's related to ethanol, except that it has an additional two carbons. So butenol has four carbons, ethanol has two carbons.
LITZINGER
12:39:17
Okay. Now, the breakthrough, I'm fascinated, but why didn't anybody else think of this? Obviously, you were able to put two and two together and come up with something approximating four here. How come nobody else did that?
MULLIN
12:39:28
Well, you know, I'll tell you what gave me the idea. The Audubon Zoo in New Orleans is within walking distance from my office (laugh) .
LITZINGER
12:39:36
And so what, you were strolling through there one day and said, hey...
MULLIN
12:39:39
Indeed. (laugh) Actually, what I was thinking is the zoo is full of exotic animals, and some of the bacteria in their intestinal tracks are also exotic.
LITZINGER
12:39:49
I see. Well, so would this not necessarily work as well for, say, I don't know, cows or horses or other animals?
MULLIN
12:39:55
I have a feeling that you can find these organisms in other animals. You know, we looked in elephants and giraffes and tortoise and many other animals, and we were able to find bacteria that produced butenol in almost all of these animals. The trick was, the bacteria that we isolated from zebra, it's able to produce butenol using cellulose, newspapers or grass clippings. All the other ones need -- you have to feed them sugar, they can't use cellulose.
LITZINGER
12:40:24
Oh, I see. So this is a very specific case here.
MULLIN
12:40:27
That's exactly right. And I'll tell you why I started thinking about using cellulose. One thing is that it's the most abundant biological material on Earth. There's no other material more abundant than cellulose, and cellulose is basically what's plants are made of, and I started looking at how much cellulose there is in the United States, and I can tell you that we throw out around 3.2 billion tons of cellulose each year.
MULLIN
12:40:49
So I started thinking, you know, that cellulose could be used for making fuel for automobiles, and it's available on a vast scale, and on top of that, it's renewable. I mean, every year, you get another 3.2 billion tons.
LITZINGER
12:41:01
Right. And, of course, President Obama was talking about that in his recent State of the Union talk, saying we've got to look at renewables in this way. Okay. Now let's talk about practical applications here. You know in theory this works, where do we go from here?
MULLIN
12:41:13
Well, where we go from here I think is testing out the various types of cellulose that are out there, you know, that could in fact be used as a source of material for making butenol, and by practical, what I mean is, it costs money to harvest plant material, it costs money to transport it, as you can imagine, and it costs money to process it so that butenol can be made. So we would want to be able to find sources of cellulose that would, you know, that would be available, say, year round, that transportation costs would be low, and then in that way we can begin to make it practical.
MULLIN
12:41:48
We're interested only in the non-edible parts of plants, things that are thrown out, things that are not going to impact on, you know, the availability of food. So we're not interested in corn or grains or anything.
LITZINGER
12:42:01
It's great that this was inspired by a trip through the zoo though, and then your agile mind saying, hey, we might be able to do something here.
MULLIN
12:42:07
(laugh)
LITZINGER
12:42:09
I guess you'll never look at African Zebras in quite the same way.
MULLIN
12:42:12
Well, all I can tell you is, it was a lot of fun, and it continues to be fun. For us it's research, basic research.
LITZINGER
12:42:18
And finally, say a word too about the future of biofuels generally, because so many people are saying this is the wave of the future, and others are saying, well, maybe we can't get it on a scale that's actually going to work. Where are you on this?
MULLIN
12:42:31
Well, what I would tell you is that the time frame between, say, here and actually producing butenol as a fuel, I would say 100 days, that would be my -- we would just need to have the right industrial partner. But within a hundred days we could be using this bacterial strain that we isolated for the purpose of making butenol.
LITZINGER
12:42:51
Dr. David Mullin, professor of molecular biology at Tulane University. Thank you very much for being with us in "The Animal House."
MULLIN
12:42:57
Well, thank you.
LITZINGER
12:43:00
Dr. Gary Weitzman answers your animal-related questions next in "The Animal House."
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