Andrew Westoll, 2012 Charles Taylor Winner

“These days Regis gets pills for diabetes, Spock gets heart meds, Yoko gets thyroid pills, Tom gets antiparasitic and anti-diarrhea meds, Rachel gets a small dose of diazapam to ease her extreme anxiety and Susie Goose gets meds for her bum hip.”

  After reading the foregoing medical routine you may conclude it relates to human beings maybe some of your own acquaintances. But strangely enough, that is the daily routine chimpanzees endure at a Montreal sanctuary.

  The report on these beings are contained in a book “The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary – a Canadian Story of Resilience and Recovery” by Torontonian Andrew Westoll who won the 2012 Charles Taylor Prize for non fiction.

   It is dedicated to “Tom and All of Us Great Apes”. Tom is the Fauna’s most famous resident. He is the only Fauna resident who was born where he should have been, somewhere in the lush rainforests of Central Africa.  Together with Gloria Crow, founder of the sanctuary, he has been a symbol in the drive and campaign to the U.S. Congress for passage of the Great Ape Protection Act. The author reminds us that it has taken immeasurable efforts by a great many people and organizations over the years to bring GAPA before Congress today.

   Due to the barrage of inhumane acts against Toms of this world that scientists produce medicine in the name of healthcare. Many of us take the tests for granted. Thumbing through the pages of Westoll’s book causes one to wonder whether any of us would willingly undergo such routines. Somehow there are lingering doubts whether there would be an affirmative answer to the question.

   This book contains a touching narrative, a sort of front row seat into the Fauan sanctuary that now provides its residents– 16 great apes –  with more than 5,500 square feet of heated indoor floor space and over 100,000 square feet of outdoor recreation area. You actually feel as though you are in face to face contact with Tom and those other individuals who have been abused by the biomedical industry over the last century in the name of progress. Westoll spent time as a volunteer care giver and what a learning he had.

   “Tom was about three years old when he was caught in 1967 or so, after his family was slaughtered by hunters employed by the local bushmeat trade, the exotic animal market or the American biomedical industry. Regardless of the hunter’s affiliation, Tom as was often the case with orphaned primates back then, was quickly sold into the booming biomedical research  industry in the United States,” writes Westoll.

   For more than 30 years Tom was repeatedly infected with increasingly virulent strains of HIV, went through numerous hepatitis-B studies and survived at least 63 times liver, bone marrow and lymph-node biopsies, Westoll reports. ” Tom has gone through more surgeries than anyone else at Fauna. By Gloria’s estimates he was knocked unconscious at least 369 times but this number is based on incomplete medical records and is certainly an underestimate,” says Westoll.

   In his early lab years Tom was a model test subject, a totally trusting ape who would actually present his arm for injections. As a result he went on a distinguished “career” as a living testing ground for human diseases. Before being sent to LEMSIP (Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates) where he lived for 15 years, Tom spent 16 years in the Alamogordo Primate Facility in New Mexico and some time at the Buckshire Corporation, a Pennsylvania lab that leases animals for cosmetic and scientific testing.

   “In this day and age,” Westoll writes “we would never subject humans to such violations. We might have in the past – consider the Fernald School experiments of the 1950s (in which institutionalized young boys were fed radioactive oatmeal) or the Holmesburg Prison study of 1960 (in which convicted criminals were exposed to radioactive isotopes and chemical weapons) or the Tuskegee experiments that ended in 1972 (in which hundreds of impoverished African American men suffering from syphillis were denied treatment). But today, thankfully, Western culture prohibits the abuse of humans in the name of science.”

   The other finalists are Wade Davis, Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest; Charlotte Gill -- Eating Dirt, Deep Forests, Big Tiber and the Life with the Tree-planting tribe; JJ Lee,  The Measure of a man: the story of a father, son and a suit and  Madeline Sonik -- Afflictions & Departures: Essays.

April 14, 2012