karate dummy

>> eric hutchinson: it is mypleasure now to introduce our next speaker. steve schapiro is the chief ofthe section of primate behavior at the keeling center. he conducts research aimed atimproving the welfare of captive

non-human primates and hisgroup utilizes a comprehensive behavioral management program,including environmental enrichment,socialization strategies, and especially positivereinforcement training

techniques to provide theprimates with opportunities to voluntarily participate inveterinary husbandry and research behaviors. i'm also happy to say that stevewas one of the first people that taught me how to doany of this stuff, and so i'm excitedto hear from him now. and without furtherado, steve schapiro. [applause] >> steven schapiro: likethe other two speakers said,

i'm really happy to be here,grateful for the invitation, but perhaps i'm a little moregrateful than the other two speakers because my australianin-laws are at my house. it's week number three of five. [laughter] so i'm not the least bitunhappy to be here from that perspective, as well. and if they're videotaping this,which i think there was some mention of, maybe thatpart won't get on youtube.

i think the rest of my lifewould be a little less enjoyable if that happens tomake it to youtube. but i've said it. i'm going to haveto deal with it. that's the way it is. so i'm the one up here talking. you know, there are many, manypeople that have contributed to the work that i'm goingto talk about today. you know, i started at mdanderson with mollie in 1989,

if you can believe that. mike keeling was the director ofthe center -- the keeling center -- well, it's now calledthe keeling center. he was director of what wecalled the science park at that time. and i have to pretty much saythat none of the stuff that we would be talking abouttoday -- me, mollie, maybe all of us -- would havebeen possible without the contributions and theefforts of mike keeling.

i think he was a leader forcertainly behavioral management of non-human primates incaptivity and the proper management of non-humanprimates in captivity. and you can see there are a lotof very skilled technicians on this list, quitea number of dvms, and some of the phds that we'veworked with over the years. okay, so i'm going to start, youknow, at a fairly basic level. i'm going to try and emphasizesome of the things that mollie said and probably some of thethings that chris said, as well.

i'm in the dreaded number-threeslot where the first two speakers said everythingi was going to say, so i have to try and make itsound fresh even though it's going to be very similar towhat they were talking about. so, non-humanprimates, as you know, live in socialgroups in the wild. that's what we're tryingto functionally simulate in captivity. that's the point of thesocialization-type approach

that we take. we want to functionally simulatenatural conditions in captivity. so, you know, non-human primatesin the wild live in social groups. mollie already told you that. some of them live infairly large groups. i've given yousome pictures here. many of the macaqueslive in large groups, chimpanzees live in largegroups, ringtail lemurs,

vervet monkeys, squirrelmonkeys, and baboons. so these are, you know, fairlycommon -- except for the ringtail lemur, probably -- fairly common research non-human primates and, you know, we're interested in, again, simulating the waythey live in the wild. and then, of course, there areother species that live in small groups, and mollie talkedabout that; monogamous pairs, something like that. marmosets, tamarins, owlmonkeys, titi monkeys.

orangutans tend to befairly solitary in the wild. the siamangs that you see thereare pretty much monogamous. so, except for the siamangs andthe orangutans not used that much in research right now, theother four species on the slide pretty much are. and we're going to have to dodifferent things for animals that naturally live in smallgroups than we are for animals that naturally livein large groups. so we're going to take slightlydifferent approaches for what

we're going to functionallysimulate from them. so when we start thinkingabout -- as mollie told you, when you start thinkingabout how to house animals in captivity, you want to have an understanding of how they live in the wild. so you really want to understandsome of the natural social processes that aretaking place in the wild, and i really only picked justa couple that i thought were particularly relevant for whatreally this meeting is about.

so there are some naturalsocial processes out there. you know that non-human primatesimmigrate and emigrate primarily to prevent inbreeding. that's how new groups form. that's how animalsmove between groups. you know that sometimes animalsother than the parents take care of infants. so that's called alloparenting. i think you'refamiliar with that.

and i think you also knowthat to become a good parent yourself, particularlyin captivity -- you know, in the wild it's a little bitmore natural -- you have to have opportunities to take care ofinfants before you have your own. so i think alloparenting isgoing to prove to be a fairly important thing for whatwe talk about today. and then, of course, there'saggression in the wild and we know that there'saggression in captivity,

with wounding andthose kinds of things. you know that there's intragroupaggression and aggression between groups, as well. between-group aggression is notreally going to figure into the captive situation, butcertainly within-group, intragroup aggressionis going to figure in. so i'd just like you to kindof think about those particular social processesthat are natural. maybe we want to functionallysimulate certain aspects

of them, maybe we don't. maybe we don't want to set upconditions in which animals are going to definitely beaggressive towards one another. maybe we want to set upconditions where we can minimize aggression --within-group aggression. and so we really need to payattention to those kinds of things. so, again, i'm going to sayit a lot of different times. it's probably going to appearon most of the slides

that have words. what we're trying to do issimulate the functional aspects of the naturalenvironment in captivity, and for the purposes of whatwe're talking about here, we're going to focus onthe social environment. and we want to do that for anumber of different reasons. mollie showed you, youknow, the regulations, the new animal -- the guide,the animal welfare act, all these kinds of things.

we're interested insatisfying those regulations, operating within the confinesof those regulations. but it really goes a littlebit further, i think. we started behavioral management-- mollie's group started it, you know, a long time ago. and the idea wasn't simplyto satisfy regulations. it was to satisfythe animals' needs. and i think sometimes that'ssomething that gets a little bit lost in the whole conversation.

so i think what we want to thinkabout is how we can address regulations, and this isparticularly important with the nih's working groups' reportand the director of nih -- i'm allowed to say thatwhile i'm here. he's not going to appear fromabove or anything like that. no, he doesn't come tolittle stuff like this. so, you know, with thechimp report that came out, group size is very important,enclosure size is a very important factor in whetherchimp research or chimps can

be maintained in captivity,that kind of thing. so it really doesn'tapply just to chimps, it's to all non-humanprimates in captivity. and that's where my expertiseis, with non-human primates. i don't know much about dogsand rabbits and those but i think one of the thingsthat really important is that we have to think about ways that we can satisfy the animals' needs when they're in captivity, and that's what the paired housing's about, that's what theassessments of temperament

are about, all these other things that you've already heard about are better and better ways for us to take into account what the animals need whenthey're in captivity, when they're in -- i'm talkingabout social groups, but, you know, in pairs or whatever. and i think one of the thingsthat happens is that the balance between the animals' needs andhuman convenience sometimes is out of proportion, where human convenience gets a lot of emphasis and animal needs get relatively little.

so one of the things that ihope that housing animals in compatible groups is going todo -- non-human primates in compatible groups is going tonot restore the balance -- it's never going to be like this, butsort of get the animal needs to have a higher priority upagainst human convenience. because as mollie pointed out,there are some inconvenient things about housinganimals socially. but as she also said, you know,she wants the benefits for the animals to be weighed just as heavily as the benefits

to the humans for housing animals singly versus housing animals socially. so i want you to think aboutwhat we can do or how some of the things i'll end up talking about might help to change the balance of, let's say, human convenience and animal needs in a social context. so if you've neverbeen to our place, i work at mdanderson in bastrop, and we have chimpanzeesliving in corrals.

there are eight of these corralsattached to this one building. you can see there arelow tops on the corrals. [clip playing] so what we're doing is we'regetting ready to feed the animals yogurt, frozen yogurt that's in the container. so one of the reasons i'mshowing you this is really just to give you a feel about whatsocial housing entails when it comes to something as simpleas feeding a preferred food. so we go from corral -- turnsoff corral one to corral three.

and this is a celebration,something that chimpanzees naturally do in the wild whenthey come across a favored food source. and you can see the other threecorrals that are down inside of that building. four corrals down the left side,four corrals down the right side. you can see that they're prettyinterested in getting fed, right?

because frozen yogurt'stheir favorite thing. and one of the things thathappens is sometimes when they get into the celebrationthere's a little self-directed aggression, there's a littlesocial aggression takes place. mollie's group was doing somework at that time on trying to manage some of thatfeeding-related aggression in a social group by feeding them on a predictable versus an unpredictable schedule, andto make a long story short, unpredictable feeding helpedin reducing aggression at meal

times, but didn't affect thedominant status of particular individuals at other times. so it was important stuff. so here's the guy withthe frozen yogurt. and you'll see that animalssort of -- they sort of tend to distribute themselves throughout the enclosure so that they can get their food without too much competition with others. you can see that they can catch -- you can't see that they can

throw, but take my word for it, they can throw with high degrees of accuracy. unfortunately, it'spost-digestion, rather than pre-digestion. and so for something as simpleas feeding animals in a group favored food, these are thekinds of things you had to go through, okay? all right. so i told you that some speciesof non-human primates live

in large groups, somelive in small groups. animals that live in multi-malegroups -- multi-male, multi-female groups, they canbe a little difficult to manage. let me just go back one slide. sorry, i forget tomention one thing. i underlined "compatible"in the title. you've heard about compatibilitya million times today. so we want to house primates incompatible groups in captivity, not just in groups.

and i think that's importantwith the paired stuff and everything that we'vetalked about up until now. it's got to be compatible. okay, so sometimes multi-malegroups can be difficult to make compatible. one of the things that you cando is use -- because males fight with one another. you can use uni-male groups,particularly for species that are matrilineal, groups thatlive in situations where it's

the female matriline that'sreally the focus of the group. most species of macaques,the baboons, vervet monkeys, most of those species,they're all matrilineal. eric, you didn'tstart the timer. this is going to -- it'sgoing to hurt everybody in the audience, not just me,because i'm not going to stop. okay? so you can advance it. yeah, take some time off.

put me in the penaltybox preemptively. okay, so you can useuni-male groups, again, as functional simulations forspecies that are matrilineal. so take these squirrel monkeysat our facility for instance. we house them in uni-male,multi-female groups. so what you see there is a wholebunch of females and their most recent one or two offspring, andthere's only one adult male in the group, and i'm not sureyou're going to be able to see him in this particular video.

obviously he'sdoing some breeding, otherwise there wouldn't bejuveniles and infants in there. but it turns out thatin squirrel monkeys, males aren't big players in thesocial dynamics of the group. they're kind of activelyostracized at particular times of the year. so this is just an example. and, you know, just togive you some perspective, the enclosure isn't much longerthan -- much wider than this.

it's about 20 feet deep, butit's not much longer than my two arms put out like that. so, just when you're thinkingabout enclosure size, social group size,et cetera, et cetera, that's just somethingto keep in mind. okay, and here are rhesusmonkeys living in a fairly standard corncrib. it's the uni-male,multi-female group. mollie made herpresentation interactive.

i'm going to makemine interactive, too. which one's the male? come on. the one every time he moves,everybody else jumps up onto the wire and gets out of his way? like that? okay, so that's kind ofhow things would be in a naturalistic groupof rhesus monkeys. so, again, this is afunctional simulation.

we can get breeding,we can get production, we can get the matrilines, butwe don't have to worry about male-male aggressionin this situation. so, again, it can be auseful functional simulation. okay, so for speciesthat are patrilineal, in which the males form thecore of the social group, and, you know, that appliesto chimpanzees, for sure, and i've been thinkingabout this for a day or two. are there otherpatrilineal species?

nothing came to my mind. so we'll leave that as apondering point, i suppose. does anybody know of any speciesof non-human primates in the wild where it's the male-male bond, brothers stay together, and that kind of thing? we're all together in thisin not being able to identify anything but chimps. so here we have a situationin which we do want multi-male groups, and mike keeling isreally the one who started this

so long ago. it's male-male socialinteractions that are critical to the day-to-day sociallife of chimpanzees. so here we have a situation, twoadult males and one infant to start with. and i guess that one'snot going to play. i must have missed that one. okay, so never mind about that. you would have seen theinfant playing when the males

eventually groom, and they'reall kind of hanging out together, just to show you howimportant male-male interactions are. okay. as we've been saying, multi-malegroups are sometimes difficult to manage unless youhave enough space. so many primate centers havelarge field cages in which they keep many macaques. if you've been to thesouthwest foundation,

which is now the texas institutefor biomedical research in san antonio, you know that they have very large baboon enclosures with multi-male groups in them, of course, and you know that the vervetmonkeys that used to be at ucla, but are now at wake forest,also live in multi-male groups. you can keep species thatlive in large multi-male, multi-female groups where thematriline is the most important in large enclosuressuccessfully. and so i do a little bit --i did a little bit

of work in mauritius. so here's a situation wherewe have two adult males and 45 females and their most recentoffspring at a breeding facility in mauritius. we're able to house themsuccessfully like that. we get excellent -- theyget excellent breeding. and what we're trying to do here-- we're going to talk a little bit more about positivereinforcement training at the end, and mollie talked alittle bit about it already.

what we're trying to do is sortof get control of the males so that we can workwith the females. in mauritius, theyhand-catch the animals, and we needed a way to put themales in a cage within the cage voluntarily so that we couldwork with the females and the infants while the malewas in the -- you know, and so that the male wouldn'tbite us in the calves basically. so here you see the male insidea cage within the cage being acclimated to -- desensitize tothe door of his cage within

the cage going up and down. and you can see it'smulti-female, multi-kid, multi-juvenile group, andthere's a lot of animals in there. okay, so that's what i was goingto say about the large groups. things are different-- you know, fairly different when you havesome of these small groups of non-human primates, animals that tend to live monogamously in the wild.

one of the things that seems tohappen is that you probably want to limit inter-group sensorycontact among owl monkeys, among common marmosets, amongtamarins, some of those species, particularly if you're tryingto breed them successfully, because if you think abouthow those particular types of non-human primateslive in the wild, they live in territories thatare pretty far apart from other members of their species andthey don't usually come into, let's just say, visual contact.

owl monkeys don't usually comeinto visual contact with other owl monkeys. common marmosets don't usuallycome into visual contact with other common marmosets. but if you've been to any ofthe places that breed these monogamous primates, inthe united states anyway, you'll see that large numbers ofsocial groups of marmosets will occupy the same room, largenumbers of owl monkeys will occupy the same room, and ithink you'll also see that

the production in many of thosefacilities is not particularly good. chris talked about stress. we're interested in stress. what could be more stressfulfor a pair of owl monkeys than having -- well, let's just say-- and i'm making up this number kind of -- 67 other pairs of owlmonkeys in the same room that they're living in. so if you know an owl monkey --they have owl monkeys here

at nih, those are someowl monkeys there. this is one side of a roomthat's really a very nice room with a waterfalldown the middle, 34 family groups down theright side of the building, 34 family groupsdown the left side. this is our facility. it's really very good. it has skylights so we cansimulate the falling of dusk and the beginning of sunrise.

we have light tubesrather than lights. so if a light breaks, nobody hasto go into the room to fix it. owl monkeys really don't likebeing handled that much, okay? so we can have strangers,or physical plant people, repair the lights from outsidethe room rather than having to go inside the room. so i'll just show you justa quick video of what the waterfall looks like and i'll tell you the reason we have the waterfall is forenvironmental enrichment.

it's theconstantly-changing thing. you know, people havetranquility fountains and that kind of stuff. it's designed to calmthe monkeys down. it's designed to prevent themfrom seeing other owl monkeys. you perhaps could hear --and you will hear again, i hope -- that it generatesa lot of kind of white noise, and the white noise will preventthe owl monkeys from hearing other owl monkeys being handled,which is kind of critical

for what we're trying to do. so maybe you can see the owlmonkeys living in their nest box. and then i justhave -- you know, to give you a little insightinto what we're doing here, this is a view ofthe whole room. i got up on a tall ladder,got up above the waterfall, didn't fall off, but violatedevery osha rule and regulation by not wearing a properharness and what have you.

but this will give you aninsight to what it's like at dusk in one of theseowl monkey rooms. now, this is the best housingfor groups of owl monkeys that you can do, but it'sstill not perfect, okay? there are 68 familygroups of owl monkeys in .0003 kilometers squared. that's a really high owlmonkey density, okay? things to think about. and so it's 175 monkeys perroom, and again, you know,

that many perkilometers squared. okay, so now what i want todo is talk to you a little bit about what strategies youmight use to form groups. so you're going to take youranimals that you have in captivity and you're going toform social groups from them. maybe you'veextended past pairs. now you have trios, quads,whatever it happens to be. you want to form some groups. now there's natural processesby which groups form,

and i've just calledthem accumulation, and i didn't have abetter word for it. so, obviously, in the wild anadolescent owl monkey leaves the family group, a male looking for a female that got kicked out of her group, as well. when they're ableto get together, they form their own territory,and they make a pair. that's what i'mcalling accumulation. sometimes matrilines formtogether to form new groups.

the cayo santiago people won'tunderstand that particularly well, so that's another waythat you can form a group. i already told you that animalsimmigrate and emigrate in order to prevent inbreeding,among other things. you know that perhaps chimpslive in fission/fusion societies where they break up forpart -- the whole community, maybe 100 animals, but you'revery unlikely to see 100 animals at a time. during the day they fission offinto smaller groups and maybe

the whole community fuses atsome point to make this larger community. you know that large rhesusmonkey groups will sometimes fission into smaller groups. that happens at placeslike cayo santiago, and it perhaps happens in someof the field cages at some of the primate centers. it's perhaps easier to manageout at cayo santiago than it is to manage in a place like the california primate center,

where a fission is typicallyassociated with death and a lot of injuries, something that'ssometimes called a cage war. and you know that you startwith a group of one male, seven females, and what happens? you know, you have acorncrib that has one male, seven females, theleast dominant, the most subordinate female endsup looking bad and what do you do? you take her out, you haveone male, six females,

then what happens to thenumber six in that scenario? eventually she's not looking sogood also and now you're down to a group, you know, over time,one male, three females, something like that, and youneed to form new groups from -- as a function of that. so when you're forming groups incaptivity -- again we're going with this functional simulationconcept -- we have to consider a lot of different things. compatibility, we'vealready heard about.

and all i need you to thinkabout is to use all the available information that youhave when you go about forming a group with more thana pair of animals. and what i mean by "allavailable information" are things like age -- we've heardabout the effects of age on pairing -- sex -- we've heardabout the effects of sex on pairing -- temperament -- we've heard about the effects of temperament on pairing. all of these same kind of thingsfactor -- and social rearing,

upbringing, those kinds ofthings -- all those influence how compatible a particulargroup is going to be. and so one of the things thatwe've used with our chimps in a slightly different way evenchris has used it with caged monkeys, because rememberwe're talking about groups, is that we assess thetemperament of our chimps -- we have a good publication aboutthat -- and what we're doing with the information. so it's one thing to collecttemperament information.

as mollie talked about, what shelikes to do is solve problems with science. so we've collectedthis -- these data, and now what we want to do isuse the data to improve the conditions for theanimals in captivity. so we know which of ourgroups are most compatible. we'll focus on chimpsfor the time being. and we know what the temperamentcharacteristics of compatible groups are.

and we know what the temperamentprofile of incompatible groups is, okay? so when it comes time for usto try and form a new group, obviously what arewe going to do? we're going to try and model itafter a group that has -- that is compatible and has -- let'scall it the compatible group temperament, okay? so one of the things we doto assess compatibility, just like chris did,we use a novel object.

our chimps have received very,very many different things as part of our behavioralmanagement program. there's not all that muchthat's novel to our chimps. but this karate dummy, whosename is bob -- and actually that's bob the fifth. you'll perhaps get some insightinto what happened to bobs one through four. we exposed the animalsto this novel object, and it is bob the karate dummy.

it's human-like but it'smissing vital human parts. sometimes the chimps understandthis and sometimes they don't, and we can discussthat in a second. so here's the first instance. this particular group of chimps -- and we're interested in how the different animals react to the same stimulus. i mean, that's theprofile we're looking for. so this is just acouple of seconds later.

i like short clipsrather than large clips. so -- unfortunately, though-- unfortunately, fortunately, you decide -- we've used martialarts videos as part of our video enrichment programto the animals. and perhaps jackie chan andjean-claude van damme and whatever else has had adisproportionate influence on the animals' behavior. but again, you know, we'reinterested in who's doing what to bob the karate dummy.

so we use the sopranos also aspart of our video enrichment, which is another mistake. but you can see, differentanimals responded differently to the karate dummy, and we canassess the personalities of the individuals basedon those responses, the response to novelty, andthen we can build a profile for the particular group todetermine -- you know, we know whether they'recompatible or not based on the number of injuries that they have and we can see what

we can do about building new groups that match that compatibility profile. so bob the karate dummy standsup beautifully to kicks and punches and slaps on the head. you saw all that. but canines to the testiclesthat he doesn't have, and canines to the top of itshead does not -- bob doesn't do very well with that. all the department'sveterinarians and all

the department's men couldn't put bob back together again -- -- even with stitches. we rushed him to the clinicand we couldn't save him, unfortunately. the surgical glue melted him. so that wasn't such agreat thing for us to do. well, bob didn't care. i mean, come on. so like i was saying, wewant to use all the different

information that we have,the animal characteristics, we've already heard that youdo better when you use younger animals formed into pairs, verymuch the same thing when you're forming groups. younger animalstend to do better. and one of the thingsthat we don't do, but we should do and we'reprobably going to start to do in the future, is make use of some of these network analyses that are currently being pioneered and utilized

and implemented and applied, which is really the key thing, at the california naturalprimate research center. they're able to look atparticular groups of animals and define networks ofsocial interactions, and they're able to determine,first retrospectively based on some of the network analyses,what caused a group to fall apart, and then more importantlythey're able to look at the data proactively to see if they canpreempt groups falling apart. it's fairly complicatedstatistical work.

i don't understandthe details of it. but they're having very goodsuccess at identifying what aspects of social groups need tobe maintained in order to keep groups -- large groups --150 animals -- compatible. and, more importantly, they'vebeen able to identify a couple of things that they know that,when this bad thing starts to happen, then groups arelikely to fall apart, okay? so i think this is -- if youwant to read some things, brenda mccowan at davis isthe one to read about this,

and her stuff in the next 10years is going to be very, very important. so one of the things -- anotherthing that you have to consider is what you're usingthe animals for. so, for our -- fromour point of view, we have three differentspecies of owl monkey. we don't want any inbreeding. we don't want any hybrids. so we're very careful in forminggroups of animals that

are of the same species. you know, there arethree different species. and maybe you can tell fromthat photo -- those photos, maybe you can't, owl monkeys arevery difficult to tell apart. it's hard to tell malesfrom females because they're monogamous, which meansthey're the same size, no sexual dimorphism. a little bit easier: rhesusmonkeys, baboons, chimps, things like that because thereis a lot of sexual dimorphism.

okay, and sort of continuingalong the lines of utility. you know, if you're makingan spf colony or a super spf colony, then there are thingsthat you have to consider when you're making your groups. so how do some of thesepathogens in the spf -- you know, herpes b virus, simiant-cell lymphotropic virus, something like that -- how arethey transmitted and how do you have to manage your groupsso that you can minimize the transmission across individuals and obviously across

groups, but really within groups is what you're trying to manage transmission if any of theanimals happen to have any of the pathogens. and then how doyou manage a loss? so if you have one animalthat comes up indeterminate or positive for one of theviruses, what's your next step? do you disband the wholegroup, just isolate the group, give it another test, whatever? there are a lot ofthings to consider.

and certainly forrhesus monkeys, there was a time when we wereconsidering breeding lines of mammal a-1-positive animals and maybe b-17-positive animals, so you really want to defineyour species and manage the groups so that you can getmaximum utility out of these captive populations. and another thing tothink about, of course, is their research destiny. we asked about, you know, ifthey're going to be paired

and then one is sacrificedas part of the study, what happens to the otherguy who's left behind? you know, is he grieving? is it better to have been pairedand then lose your pair mate than it is never tohave been paired at all? this -- i'm quoting -- thatwas shakespeare, you know. he was a biomedical researcher. and, you know, the samewould apply in groups. so now we're thinking aboutsituations in which we might

be able to manage a group so that we could take one animal out, do a study on it, put itback or not put it back, so you have to think aboutthe animal's research destiny. and, you know, mollie's toldus very nicely about the social history of the animalsbeing really important. if you're brought uppoorly to start with, in many circumstances you're notgoing to get better and you're not going to make an outstandingmodel for biomedical research, you're not going to be easyto house in a pair maybe,

you're not going to be easyto house in a social group. so it's really important for usto understand and utilize and employ what we know aboutthe social experience of the monkeys. so i'll just show you,hopefully, a video. you like the waythat monkey looks? you want to put him in a groupwith other monkeys either like him or not like him? it's not going to be goodfor him either way, okay?

and here's the same monkey. he's one of the two pair. so now we'vesocially housed him. do we make him better? not from that video,certainly not. but here, after an extensivebehavioral management program, you know that rhesus monkeysswim in the wild all the time, canals, [unintelligible],they jump in the rain pools. so using a therapist likethat you talk to a three- to

four-month-old, well it's bestthe three- to four-month-old youngster being a good therapistfor nine- to 12-month old socially isolatedrhesus monkeys. here's an example of an animalwho's been through a therapy program like that. that's the same monkey. and i'm hoping you'rethinking to yourself, "oh, that's pretty good," okay? so we can form groups.

it takes a lot of work tosucceed in this regard. it's one of our only successesin bringing back monkeys, providing therapy for monkeys. so i'm not going tosay we cured him. we provided therapy. we brought them back justa significant amount. but the best way to do dealwith these abnormal behaviors, as mollie andchris talked about, is simply to prevent them fromdeveloping rather than trying

to cure them. curing them is very difficult. preventing them from developingthese abnormal behaviors is really quite easy. harry harlow showed us how todo it, you know, 65 years ago. we know how to do it. so there's some interest inwhat age you should wean your infants. we wean our young rhesusmonkeys at seven months of age.

and i think it's too young. i think they should beweaned at one year of age. but we're a production colonyand our veterinarian is very much in favor of theseventh-month weaning thing because he thinks that femalesare going to have an easier time with their next pregnancy ifthey don't have to worry about having an infant on them. the fact that rhesus monkeys inthe wild at one year -- females with one-year-old infantson them have a new baby,

and the interbirth intervalis like 384 days, so it's, you know, basically one year,that doesn't go into the veterinarian's thinking. so we would like the animalsto get a little bit more social experience, maybe beweaned at one year of age, but it's an argument that ican't have with him because it's an argument that i can't win. except in mypersonal family life, i try not to have argumentsthat i can't win, okay?

in my family life,unfortunately, i've had many. too much sharing? always. that's just my style. you're all my friends. because we have an 84 percentproduction rate in our rhesus colony -- uni-male,multi-female, about 1, 000 animals sfp, no onecan touch that, okay? so even with weaning theanimals at seven months of age,

they turn into outstandingbreeders and outstanding parents, okay? so despite the fact that froma behavioral point of view, from a textbook point of view,i would like the babies to stay with their moms for longer andtheir social groups for longer, our weaning situationhas worked beautifully. seven months, theyproduce like crazy. everything's good. and, you know, obviously wehave good breeding competence.

eighty-four percentproduction rate. the owl monkeys and the squirrelmonkeys don't really breed as well. and i think, for the owlmonkeys anyway -- well, part of the reason is we don'twant any more owl monkeys. we have too many andthere's no demand for them. i think part of the problemwith owl monkeys and marmosets, these monogamous species, isthat they live in these big rooms with many, many socialgroups and it's a very atypical

situation for them, and i thinkit adversely affects their reproduction. for the squirrel monkeys, one ofthe things we end up using are sort of nursery groups. we'll -- when we identifypregnant females, we'll put them into groups withother pregnant females and move them away from the adolescentsin particular because adolescent squirrel monkeys arebig-time allomothers. and it's good for them.

they learn how to mother. but it's bad for the infantbecause they're not lactating and they're raw. they don't knowhow to do it right. so the infants may suffer alittle bit in that circumstance. so that's kind ofwhere i am there. most non-human primate specieshave some alloparenting, and, like i said, it helpsyou be a better mother. it may not help the offspring ofa subordinate female who can't

get her infant back from thejuvenile offspring of a dominant female. so that's something istudied a long time ago. so here i've got twoquick videos of -- well, i have one quick videoof allomothering. this is not thechimp baby's mom. this is another female. and, in fact, this femaledid most of the caring and interacting withthis particular baby.

and there are some good thingsfor everyone to learn in that circumstance. okay, we've alsoused all-male groups. so some people say, you know,that's going to cause all kinds of problems. well, with the chimps,which live patrilineally, we have plenty ofmale-male pairs, or we've had plenty ofmale-male pairs over the past. we're moving away from thatbecause we need a minimum group

size of seven, etcetera, et cetera. so male chimps tend toget along just fine. male rhesus monkeys, when wedid our spf derivation strategy about, i don't know,23 years ago now, we had extra males when weformed breeding groups and we just put them inall-male groups. and they did just fine. and, in fact, males that hadexperience in all-male groups ended up being better breedersthan males who had not, okay?

there was the confoundingfactor of age, but still the experience yougain in a male-male group can be advantageous to you as a breeder later on in life in, you know, uni-male, multi-femalesituations. you've already seen that wecan form groups and we can occasionally provide therapy forthe abnormal behaviors that we see, but it's notalways the case. age, i already told you,is really important. young animals go togetherbetter than older animals.

we've all seen that. this is just inmauritius -- again, i don't know what i'm showing. as mollie said, one of thethings you have to do is monitor for compatibility. we can use observations,like mollie talked about, three times a weekfor each pair. we don't do our observationsanywhere near as frequently unless you consider the dailyrounds that the veterinarians,

the vet techs, and the behaviorpeople do, looking for wounds. if we're looking for woundsand we don't see any, we've essentially monitoredfor compatibility, right? and at some point we're goingto get really involved in this network analysis, i think. it's pretty good stuff. so i think that's anotherway that we're going. and as mollie told you atthe very, very beginning, the best thing you can dofor non-human primates --

a socially-living, non-humanprimate -- is give it a compatible group-mate-- partner, group-mate to live with. there are other types, butthat's the best form of environmental enrichment,social enrichment. there are other types ofenrichment that you can use and you can use them in all sorts of different group settings. so here's something as simple as a banana feeder where

the animals can in fact compete to get access to the limited amount of resources that are there. it's an opportunity for them to express their dominant status in a socially-sanctioned way andmaybe they don't have to beat the crap out of somebodyelse just because. they're able to express theirdominance over the enrichment device. again, they don't needanother outlet for it. so owl monkeys -- you know,we reverse the life cycle.

they are fresh fruit eaters,they're ripe fruit eaters, so you need a wayto enrich them. so we put some ripefruit on [inaudible]. they're not overly interactiveduring the daytime [inaudible], but they are relativelyactive [inaudible] year. visual barriers aresomething that can be used, particularly in groups, to maybeprevent some aggression from taking place. if an animal can get [inaudible]visual barrier and animals

can get on the other sidewhen they're being chased, and that's anadvantageous thing. i've already shown you alittle bit about the training. obviously if you keep animals ingroups and you want to work with them, then you're going tohave to use your positive reinforcement training toget them to do what you want. here's a group-housed animalgoing to give us a conscious blood sample by insertingits arm in the sleeve, sucking on the juicebottle that's put up there.

and you'll see noanesthesia is involved. the current termis acquiescence. so is the animal acquiescingto what we're doing? that's the questionthat i'm asking you. i don't like this particularterm, acquiescence. i think acquiescence is what youdo when your wife nags you to take out the garbage. you acquiesce and youtake out the garbage. you don't volunteerand say, "honey,

i'm going to takeout the garbage." this to me is volunteering. so there's a vac container,there's a blood sample. and, you know, this is how mucheffort goes into getting a blood sample in a social group withpositive reinforcement training being the operation. and i'll just showyou one other thing. we have an animal with a badlung so we've taught the animal to use the nebulizer and thenebulizer has albuterol

and something else in it. so [inaudible]voluntary participation. i hope you're thinkingthat the answer is yes. so one of the things we'reworking on most closely, most completely right nowis getting the animals to voluntarily participatein their own medical care. and i'll just show this lastvideo and then i'll stop. so here's an animalwith arthritis. it's getting acupuncture andlaser therapy at the same time.

it's living in itsgroup, no problem. and the important thing is thati want you to look at is that we're not giving theanimal grapes, apple, or anything during this process. the animal is working for thepositive reinforcement of the acupuncture treatmentand the laser therapy. so the animal has made theassessment that the benefits of sitting there for this process -- the benefits that are involved in pain relief, better gait, et cetera,

et cetera, are positive reinforcement enough for him to volunteer to do the behavior. and obviously we're doing thatwith animals in the group. so just the last thing that iwant to say is that one of the things that we're struggling with with our chimpanzee colony in particular is that we have a lot of very old chimpanzees. we have three that are 51years -- 52 years, almost 53, and we have about 40 thatare 40 years and above.

and if any of you are inthat age range yourself, you know that things that usedto work don't work all that well anymore and you can't movearound like you used to, et cetera, et cetera. so we have a large number -- oran important number of animals that are mobility-impaired. so we have to form groupsbased on their mobility. so we have mobility-impairedgroups that are in enclosures where it's less likely they'regoing to fall in the event that

there's a ruckus withthe rest of the animals. so that makes it difficult forus -- and you don't really care, but, i mean, it makes itdifficult for us to meet some of these 20-foot heightrequirements for certain subsets of animals that would probablynot benefit from a 20-foot height for chimps in captivity. and, you know, with thesegeriatric groups we're having to manage a lot ofdifferent things. and just the last thing i'llsay is that we're constantly

assessing their quality of life. we have a publication coming outin animal welfare that describes our quality of life assessmentsystem that incorporates -- susan lambeth is the onethat's done this really. it incorporates not onlyveterinarians in the assessments of quality of life, but thebehavioral team, as well. and not only do we look forchanges in clinical chemistries and clinical parameters, butwe also look for changes in behavioral parameters.

animals that used tolike to do things, when they stop liking to dothose things, we get worried. when they stop likingto interact with people, that worries us. and for animals that never likedto interact with people to start with, when they start tolike interacting with people, we worry, as well. so we're looking forchanges in behavior. and i think we have about sevenanimals on this quality of life

watch at the moment, and i thinkit's a fairly important aspect of keeping animals in groups. so my summary is just thatyou heard what we had to say. it's all about formingcompatible groups, using all the informationthat you have, same types of information thatyou would use to form compatible pairs, that type of thing. and, once again, i want to thankall these people who, you know, have really significantlycontributed to what i told

you about today. so thanks for listening. i'll be happy to take any --