and the keepers once had to intervene and sedate her in order to remove Julius from her and return him to Sanne—who would then once more act irresponsibly. Sanne’s behavioral shift was odd, resembling postpartum depression. Her keepers noted that she often left Julius to fend for himself for as long as 45 minutes at a time.10
YOUNG MOTHER
Sanne was a young mother, only eight years old. It is not unusual for first-time chimpanzee mothers to be somewhat indifferent to their young. While cats and birds automatically and instinctively know how to care for their offspring, chimpanzees—and humans—must learn these skills from others. It is therefore common for a chimpanzee’s first pregnancy to fail, whether due to miscarriage or stillbirth or the mother’s inability to care for her young. In fact, there is an evolutionary logic to the development in some species of a mechanism in which young mothers do not needlessly waste their time and resources on childrearing until they are socially mature enough to manage the task. It is common in chimpanzee colonies for young mothers to learn about motherhood from the older, more experienced females.11 Often, a chimpanzee mother may allow a young, childless female to try out the role of keeper for her chimpanzee newborn. The mother remains nearby, assuring herself that the young female chimpanzee in training is not taking undue risks, that she is handling the baby gently, that she is not climbing too high with him and that she does leave him lying on his own. Only after such a trial period are the younger female chimps allowed to act as babysitters. Lotta had most likely picked these skills up from other mothers at the Swedish zoo and was thus able to care for Billy, while Sanne had never seen any such behavior modeled at her zoo in Denmark. Although Sanne had been able to observe Lotta’s mothering for a few months, she had apparently not gleaned enough during this short period to give Julius the proper care he needed.
To complicate matters, Sanne was an unpredictable chimpanzee. Her keepers had been curious about how she would handle her role as a mother. Their routines in those days involved considerable risks, as keepers regularly entered the chimpanzee enclosures and came into close physical contact with the chimps. It usually went well enough. The keepers learned to read each individual chimpanzee and decide when it might be safe or unsafe to be in their presence. Dennis was a wise and caring chimp who was easy to figure out. Sanne, on the other hand, was unreliable and her mood could change from one second to the next. She was temperamental and hot-blooded.12
Now that Sanne had a baby it was no longer possible to enter the enclosure with her. It was hard enough trying to get her to change her behavior. The keepers felt helpless to do anything other than stand by, watching Julius from the outside. They tried to isolate Sanne and Julius from the rest of the group in order to encourage better emotional bonding between mother and baby, but even then she would frequently set him aside and continue to ignore him. Julius became dehydrated and overly cold from lying on the cement floor for long stretches of time and could easily have become seriously ill. On February 12, 1980, the situation took a dramatic turn. At some point or another over the course of the afternoon, unobserved, one of the other chimpanzees bit Julius’s finger so hard that his fingertip was hanging loose. None of the keepers knew which chimp was the culprit and some of them believed it must have been Sanne, while others thought it clearly was Dennis’s doing. It may also have been Lotta or Bølla. Only Billy was small enough to be considered innocent in the ordeal. One theory was that Dennis bit Julius in order to evoke a motherly reaction from Sanne or one of the other female chimpanzees.
The wound was discovered around 7:00 p.m. Julius was lying in a pool of blood, howling from the pain. One of the keepers quickly called Billy Glad and director Edvard Moseid, who both arrived as quickly as possible. They were onsite by 7:30 p.m. Julius was on his back, screaming. Edvard signaled that he was going to enter the pen to help Julius, but Sanne responded with a clear gesture indicating that he was not allowed. Instead, she scooped Julius up but held him carelessly and roughly at an arm’s distance, away from her own body. After a short while she put him back down again, this time on his stomach in the hay. Julius appeared starved; he grew silent and seemed nearly dead. Sanne was more concerned with the three humans than with her baby’s well-being. Julius was going to die if Edvard and Billy did not intervene. They felt they had no choice. They had to try to save him. “Whatever happens, happens. We will deal with it later. We can’t just stand here watching the baby die before our eyes,” Billy noted in his journal.13
Sanne flew into a rage as they came close; she did not want to let them into the enclosure. Her maternal instinct was still functioning in this single aspect. Although she ignored Julius, she now acted to protect him from intruders. Edvard tried pulling Julius out with a plastic rake, but Sanne’s brutal reaction stopped him. Nor could they persuade Sanne to go into a separate pen so they enter and retrieve Julius. They tried tempting her with grapes and bananas, even with soda, but Sanne wouldn’t budge. Time was running out. They had to get ahold of the chimpanzee baby. Thinking they might already be too late, they decided to fetch a hose. Billy aimed the powerful jet of water straight at Sanne, pressing her toward the back wall as Edvard opened the feeding hatch, leaned in with the rake and scooped Julius toward the fence where it was possible to coax the tiny creature under it and out of the enclosure.14
It was 8:15 p.m. when Billy finally held Julius in his arms. Julius smelled bad and was dirty, his fingertip dangled loosely with a bone sticking out. Billy wrapped him inside of a blue wool sweater and a military jacket while Edvard sprinted down to the office to call Billy’s wife, Reidun. He informed her that a party was on its way to their house in Bliksheia with a small baby chimpanzee.
“That’s fine,” she replied.15 They administered a few teaspoons of sugary water to Julius before carrying him down to the parking lot where they stowed him in the front seat of Billy’s car and drove home to the Glad family. Here Julius would remain for a few days until his health improved and his finger healed. No one knew what would happen after that. There was no plan. From here on out, it was all improvisation.
Chapter 2
HAPPY DAYS
“If we look straight and deep into a chimpanzee’s eyes, an intelligent, self-assured personality looks back at us. If they are animals, what must we be?” 16
FRANS DE WAAL
BILLY AND REIDUN Glad’s two sons, twelve-year-old Carl Christian and ten-year-old Øystein, were still awake when their father and Edvard Moseid parked the car outside the house and stormed into the living room with a baby chimpanzee in their arms. Outside it was cold and dark, snowy and blustery. Julius stared at the two boys with wide, terrified eyes. Edvard placed Julius on the kitchen table and Billy snipped off the torn tendon protruding from his fingertip, rinsed and bandaged the wound, affixed the damaged finger to two other fingers and gave Julius pain killers. Then he cleaned the chimp’s entire body with a cloth and dressed him in a wool shirt. Reidun went down to the cellar and found an old nursing bottle from her own sons’ infant days. She filled it with warm milk, thinned out somewhat with water and gave Julius a few small sips at a time. She held him on her lap as she fed him and Julius began to relax.17 Later that evening he was fed again, this time with a bit of penicillin mixed in. They put him in a banana box in the bathroom, the warmest room in the house. He made a few small whimpering sounds and fell asleep. Only hours before, he had been a member of a community of captive chimpanzees, and while neglected by his mother, he was nonetheless surrounded by his own kind. Now here he was, asleep in a human’s bathroom.
Edvard had recently moved to a new house in Vennesla, a community neighboring Kristiansand, and he had two small daughters aged two and four. They therefore agreed that Julius would live with the Glads for the first weeks. The Glad children were older; Reidun was a stay-at-home mom with a nursing background. Billy was a medical doctor—not a veterinarian—but had nonetheless assumed responsibility for the medical needs of the zoo’s chimpanzees, considering it an intriguing challenge.
The Glads decided not to let Julius sleep alone for the first night in his new quarters. Reidun dragged a mattress into the bathroom and put it on the floor beside him. Her night was sleepless and full of wonder; Julius slept surprisingly deeply. He woke up hungry once and she gave him a