Florida Great Ape Sanctuary

Florida Great Ape Sanctuary

(Full article available on the web for a limited time)
http://www.montereyherald.com/mld/mo...on/9055630.htm

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Florida ape sanctuary dedicated to orangutans

BY MARGARIA FITCHNER
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WAUCHULA, Fla. - (KRT) - Out in the woods, the new morning ambles through
the oaks and pines, fluttering sunlight over the creek, pestering jaybirds
into raucous gargle and wooing the creature from his dreams with fresh
fruit, herbal tea and the old, sweet promise: You are safe here.

"Are you already awake? Morning, man. I see youuu," caregiver Kat Nowak
croons, stepping into the velvet gloom of the night house as Radcliffe,
shaggy body cowlicked from slumber and dark eyes mysterious as moons, turns
to greet her with a snuffled uhh.

At 270 pounds, this 25-year-old orangutan is the most stately resident of
the Center for Great Apes, the sanctuary that former Miamian Patti Ragan
opened off a rural highway here in orange-grove country six years ago.

Zoo-bred, sold to a circus trainer and then dumped at an amusement park
once he had grown so strong he could have torn off a man's finger in play,
Radcliffe eventually landed in a cramped cage at a roadside attraction near
Kissimmee, Fla. When that place shut down a year and a half ago, the owner
brought him here. `He said, `I'd really like for him to have a nice life
where he doesn't have to work anymore,'" Ragan explained.

Castrated in infancy, Radcliffe never developed the big cheek pads that
endow most males of his species with the fearsome demeanor of an old
warlord, but he is grand nonetheless, all slo-mo, long-limbed grace. Ragan,
who calls him Raddy Honey, clearly adores him. "He's been kept in really
tough circumstances all his life, and the fact that he wants constant
attention just doesn't matter," she says. Then, a purr: "You'd like to come
down here and just sit with us, wouldn't you? I know. I know."

For Ragan, Radcliffe, three other orangutans and 10 chimps, this shady,
50-acre haven where otters frolic and a surging Ah-ah-ah-ah-OOO-OOO-OOO-OOO
means Hello, is the end of the road. In every sense, these apes and this
woman are here for good.

`I saw an old TV spot that I did when we started ... , and in it I said,
`Oh, I want to be out there cleaning cages when I'm 90,' " says Ragan, who,
as primates go, is small, round-faced, fiftyish and, when not sidetracked
into brief spells of frowning intensity, quite friendly and good-humored.
"Well, maybe not, but I'm going to be involved here as long as I'm alive."

This center, with its spacious habitats and almost 2,000 feet of elevated
chutes, which extend the animals' range and choice, is one of nine
nonprofit great-ape sanctuaries in North America and the only one dedicated
to orangutans. It is not a breeding facility. It is not a zoo. Although
scientists, animal-care experts, students and supporters often visit, it is
not open to the public, and when a convertible full of smiling, sunburned
tourists pulls into the driveway, Ragan apologizes but firmly turns the
sightseers away.

"This project is not about being hands-on with the apes," she says. "...
It's about them learning to live with their own species, to provide for
them, as much as we can in a captive situation, a more natural life."

"She's probably the top of the heap just because of the quality of care,"
says April Truitt, director of Primate Rescue Center, a monkey/chimp center
in Nicholasville, Ky. In fact, almost any human wandering around here for
the first time - poking into the kitchen as lunch is scooped into big bowls
or hearing caregiver Ray Rooney call "All right, Roger. I'll be right
there," to a chimp literally screaming for attention - may succumb to an
entirely peculiar notion: I wish I were Radcliffe.

This is probably a good place to stipulate that being holed up in the woods
of Central Florida, a good half-day drive from lifelong friends and her
favorite Cuban and Thai restaurants, is not the sort of existence that
Ragan - Everglades School for Girls alum, former schoolteacher, successful
businesswoman, world traveler - would have configured.

"I had other plans. I was supposed to be in Seattle with an old boyfriend."
But 20 years ago, Ragan impetuously had ditched the lure of Club Med in
favor of an Earthwatch learning vacation to Borneo to study the world's
largest arboreal animals, orangutans.

"The first wild orangutan I ever saw was a mother and infant that we
tracked about three days, and we were ready to go back to camp, because we
couldn't find them," she remembers. "You walk along logs and through paths,
but the orangutans don't stay to the paths." Which means: You slog for
hours, head thrown back, neck flaming with pain while staring straight up
into the tree canopy, eyes blinking at every telltale stirring of leaves.
"And we were up to our chests in water and leeches," Ragan says, "but it
was thrilling."

When Ragan was invited to return to the project the next year, she went.
Back home, she still ran her family's office-temp business and was a
volunteer at Metrozoo. Then one day a breeder she knew asked a favor, and
the techtonics of her heart shifted forever: The mother of Pongo, a baby
orangutan, was ill and could not care for him. Would Ragan be his foster mom?

"I never thought of keeping him with me," she says. "I was always going to
find a suitable place. ... I started looking for sanctuaries, and there
were none."

In time, Pongo was joined by Grub, a chimp. "I was just doing it as a
volunteer who was concerned about their future," Ragan says. `Finally, I
thought, `Somebody has to do this.' This will be a project for great apes."
She set up a foundation, started accumulating funds and volunteers and went
looking for property.

"I probably saw 240 places in four years, from Ocala down to Homestead and
from Fort Myers to Fort Pierce, and was just about to say that I couldn't
find something that we could afford that was appropriate, and I found
this." The jungly acreage had two geodesic-dome structures, an old
settler's cabin, an outhouse and the corpse of a 1940 Nash Metropolitan.
Perfect.

"This is still tropical Florida to me," Ragan says. "I feel I'm in
paradise." Rooney, who had worked with Ragan in Miami, showed up two years
ago and bought a house down the road, "so Patti didn't have any choice but
to take me back. It's where I should be. It's what I should be doing."

The center's staff of six is bolstered by 30 volunteers. Psychologist
Nathalie Joliecoeur, preparing snacks, is here every Friday doing odd jobs.
So are Diana Raper and Alison Achey, keepers at an upstate zoo who endure
the four-hour commute on their day off.

"We're working with our closest living relatives," Achey says. "It's fun
for us, fun for them." Metrozoo primate keeper Yuri Mitzkewich drives up
every other month to help build new climbing structures for his buddy,
Radcliffe: "He's a pretty neat guy."

Ragan's friend Marilyn Magill, a Miami flight attendant, shoots photos for
the newsletter and spends a weekend each month in one of the guest cabins,
which have such intoxicatingly charming views of apes and Old Florida that
if grouchy old Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings were typing away out here on the
screened patio, she might be inspired to take a slightly different approach
with The Yearling.

"We know where a lot of these animals would be if it weren't for Patti,"
Magill says. "We want these guys to have a good life. We get to hang out
with our friends, human and nonhuman."

The youngest nonhuman is 4-year-old Knuckles. Bred as an entertainment
chimp, he has cerebral palsy, and on this morning another volunteer,
occupational therapist Debbie Boldt - "What are you doing with this old
hand? Open it up. Yea!!!"_has him belly down on an exercise ball, unhappily
stretching his weak left arm.

"When he first came here, he was terrified even of a three- or four-inch
step. He'd start to cry," Ragan says. "We know he's never going to be
normal. We just want to make sure he can get to the point where he can be
with the other chimps."

A similar optimism cushions the center's eldest resident. Raised from
infancy as the chimp "daughter" of a Jacksonville, Fla., couple,
35-year-old Denyse arrived last Thanksgiving when the widowed husband could
no longer care for her. She and Roger slowly are getting acquainted, and
she may yet learn to live among what must be to her a strange new species,
her own.

More stories:

Thirty-one-year-old Toddy was caught in Africa and spent several years as a
pet. "But as happens, when she got too big, they sold her," Ragan says,
"and she went to several places, mostly private people who tried to keep
her and couldn't." She ended up at a breeding compound.

Chimps Butch, 32, and Chipper, 30, also wild-caught, worked in a circus,
but when their trainer died, they were sent to a biomedical lab. After
animal-welfare groups lobbied to have them retired, they ended up in a
series of roadside zoos, confined to such small cages that when they
arrived here, Butch could not walk, and Chipper huddled in a fetal position
or sat rocking, rocking.

Little Mari, the last orangutan in a U.S. research lab, has no arms. They
were bitten off by her mother when she was 3 months old. Now 22, she uses
her chin to hitch her way up ladders in the habitat she shares with Pongo
and Christopher, and "she definitely kicks," Ragan says, "if they get to be
too much for her."

All this sometimes gets to be too much for Ragan, too. "I have a lot of
sleepless nights," she says.

"Patti has the ailment. I have the ailment," Truitt says. "If you
understand how much these animals suffer ... , it's hard to turn your back."

Captive great apes can live for more than 60 years, and Ragan says she
turns down more than she can take, "because we can't jeopardize the future
of the animals that are here by getting too many." It costs more than
$10,000 a year just to keep each of these creatures fed, healthy and
socialized. The center is supported by memberships and private donations
and grants, and there is room for expansion as funds allow. Five more apes
are expected this summer.

"We just take it step by step," Ragan says. "We're not building a Cadillac
of sanctuaries here. We're building what we feel is required for the
animals we have."

Pongo, the orangutan that started everything, turns 14 in August and is too
big and strong for the hugs he and Ragan once shared. "He didn't realize it
until he was 9. I saw it in his eyes. Nothing aggressive happened, nothing
bad, but he just knew that if he didn't want to let me go, he could just
hold my hand. ..." Ragan is holding Knuckles' hand as she says this, and
one day she will have to let it go, too.

"I think being in the right place at the right time is just happenstance,
really," she says. "When I ran my business, I wore expensive suits and had
my hair done, had my nails done all the time, and now I'm in jeans, drive a
10-year-old Chevy truck, haven't had a manicure in years, and I've never
been happier."