Chimp Portraits (2006) | Hacker News Reader

Chimp Portraits (2006)

franknoelker.com

33 pointsbrudgers8 comments

Reading the captions is incredibly saddening:

"She spent the next 11 years living in isolation as a research subject. ... She fell into an extended period of depression and was treated repeatedly for rashes and sores on her neck and wrists inflicted on herself during anxiety attacks. She also suffers from the 'phantom hand' syndrome, which has caused her to bite all of her nails to the quick, rubbing them until there is nothing left." - http://franknoelker.com/collection/chimp-portraits#Rachel,20...

Some of them look a little cagey or intimidating, but a few of them give off a really friendly, reliable persona like they'd be your best friend in a heartbeat.

Toddy, for example, looks like a really easy-going, reasonable lady:

http://franknoelker.com/sites/franknoelker.com/files/styles/...

...kind of a horrible life story, though, by human standards.

It'd be really interesting to interact with them, and see how far away the personality is from the portrait's impression, when interacting with them in real life.

It's hard not to feel guided by an instinct to judge a book by it's cover, when looking at those faces.

Meanwhile, based on the descriptions with each picture, most of them are horribly depressed and traumatized by experiments or isolation. I can't really conceptualize what a couple of hundred "knockdown" experiments [0] with "punch liver biopsies" might be like.

Sounds unpleasant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_knockdown

"Knockdown" doesn't refer to gene knockdowns: http://www.releasechimps.org/research/overview/knockdowns

See the upper-right chimp (Binky) for confirmation: "In eight years, this young male known as "Ch-665" was knocked down 136 times-mostly for cage changes and tooth cleanings."

Well, today I learned. I feel like the use of specialized jargon doesn't help communicate the experience or idea the artist would probably like to convey, by including those kinds of details in the captions. The definition for the term needs to be provided as a footnote, each time it gets used under that context, since non-experts are among the audience.

You have to figure that chimpanzees are psychologically advanced enough that it's really the totality of an experience in a lab cage that ruins them. Getting shot with tranquilizer darts is more or less the icing on the cake, adding insult to injury.

I'd suspect that after, on or around knockdown #20, the maximum amount of trust has been eroded, and a chimpanzee is pretty much done with being around people, but especially the ones that dart them.

It is possible to give chimps medical treatment without anaesthetic blow-dart knock-downs, at the cost of a lot of training time for the chimps and staff. At the Ape Rescue Centre in Bovington, UK[0], chimps are trained using clicker training [1] to present their arms for injections on a routine basis so that when an anaesthetic is required, the chimps aren't subjected to a blow-dart but to a seemingly normal injection. Some primates still require knock-downs but it is not routine.

[0] http://www.monkeyworld.org/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clicker_training

Very good, very depressing. I felt a strong compulsion to read each chimps bio.

Each one so distinct!

And we call chimps violent.

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