![]() ![]() When my pleas didn’t work, I tried fighting back, but I didn’t have any luck. If I close my eyes I can still actually feel Nikki’s hot breath on my face right before he bit off my nose, and I can see Amadeus’s big white eyes and his big white teeth as he bit finger one by one, almost in like a this-little-piggy-went-to-the-market fashion. ![]() So as they were holding me down, biting at me, tearing at my flesh, all I could do was scream and yell, “Nikki, Amadeus, stop it! Please, don’t,” but none of that worked. I cared about them and that’s why I was actually there at that sanctuary, because I wanted to do everything I could to make sure that these chimps had the best lives that they possibly could. Now, what made it even worse for me was that I knew these chimps. Full-grown adult male chimps are especially dangerous, especially smart, and could be very, very deadly aggressive. Maybe they saw me as a threat invading their territory, trying to steal their girlfriends, maybe they just wanted to show all the humans that were with us who were the real boss of that reserve was. They decided to escape their enclosure and teach me a deadly lesson. So one afternoon I was out there giving a tour, stopped at an all-adult enclosure to tell the guests about the resident chimps in that group, and something enraged the two males in that group. Then in 2012, in June, I traveled to South Africa to a chimp sanctuary to fulfill my lifelong dream of conducting my very own original master’s thesis research with my favorite animals. So growing up, I spent as much time in zoos as I possibly could and I eventually wound up as a graduate student in anthropology. I went home that afternoon and I told my mom, “That’s what I wanna do when I grow up.” I love how smart they were when they would make their own tools and fish for termites. ![]() I loved the noises that they made, the way they played with each other and moved through the trees with little effort. I loved how humanlike they looked, the way they moved. Jane Goodall and how she was living in Africa with chimpanzees and teaching the world how amazing these animals were. I wanted to work with my most favorite animal in the world, chimpanzees. Science.Įver since I was eight years old I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. So raise your hand if you survived the worst thing that’s ever happened to you. ![]()
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