Ivan stopped outside a door. “Here we are.”
The moment he pushed open the door, the din inside became deafening. I recognized the noise immediately, the hoarse, warning bark of baboons sensing a threat.
The windowless room was massive, the walls lined by cages. The smell, even for me as a vet accustomed to the stench of a practice, was overwhelming.
Remaining close to the entrance, Ivan gestured to a group of cages. “Your baboons are over there.”
Barbara and I stepped forward for a closer look.
“Eight years,” she said under her breath. “Eight years of sitting alone in a cage with nothing to do.”
Blinking the grains of exhaustion from my eyes, I ignored her whispered outburst and focused on the baboons. Male chacma baboons. I could guess why these hadn’t been used in any experiments. They were huge, no doubt aggressive and difficult to handle because of their size and strength.
“They’re not in the best shape,” I said. “Look at their hind legs. Inactivity has caused the muscles to atrophy. These three have lostmost of their hair, probably as a result of stress.” I studied the baboons a minute longer. “The male on the far right has mutilated his arm pretty badly.”
Barbara shook her head. “They’re all caged out of touch. In the wild, baboons will spend hours grooming one another. For such social animals, the loneliness must be unbearable.”
I turned to Ivan. “Were these baboons captive-bred or trapped in the wild?”
He looked uncomfortable at the question. “HBI employs the services of a wildlife dealer who has a permit to capture baboons and fly them over to us.”
Barbara’s lips flattened. I could imagine how she was torturing herself, thinking that these fifteen baboons knew exactly what had been taken from them, that they’d once felt grass under their feet and sun on their faces.
There would be an official handover in two weeks, Ivan said. Although he insisted the baboons remain the property of HBI during that period, he agreed to allow Barbara to visit them each day.
After writing my report, I tried to get those fifteen baboons out of my head, but I couldn’t forget the despair in their eyes or the physical decline of their bodies as a result of laboratory life. So when Barbara called me again a few days later, asking if I would perform surgery on the baboon she’d named Enzo, the one who’d mutilated his arm, I found myself saying yes.
“He might not be strong enough to survive such a lengthy operation,” I cautioned.
Barbara, however, was ready to take the risk. “His arm’s gangrenous,” she said. “It has to be done.”
So I organized an anesthetist and we went to work on the mess that had once been his arm. I would never forget the look on Barbara’s face when I told her Enzo had died on the operating table.
I held her in my arms while she mumbled brokenly, “He was so close to experiencing freedom, so close.”
Filled with guilt, I vowed to atone for my failure.
The next day, after finishing the graveyard shift, I chased away my fatigue and joined Barbara for her half-hour visit to the baboons. I helped her feed them fresh fruit and vegetables, and their childlike excitement told me how mundane their diet must have been.
I only meant the visits to last for two or three days, but after my fourth visit I found I was looking forward to seeing the baboons, to hearing some of them chatter and lip-smack when I entered the room. What started out as cursory interest, then guilty atonement, had finally morphed into genuine affection for these imprisoned creatures.
A week later, with only three days to go before Barbara could take custody of the baboons, I arrived at HBI to find Barbara standing outside, leaning against the building’s brick wall as though she’d collapse without its support. Her eyes and nose were red from weeping.
“They’re all dead,” she managed to choke out.
I listened, in stunned disbelief, as she related how the new head of HBI, worried that Barbara’s welfare group would use the baboons to stir up negative press for the institute, overrode Ivan Klaasen’s objections and manipulated HBI’s Research Ethics Committee to sanction euthanasia for the fourteen baboons on the grounds that they were too psychologically traumatized to be rehabilitated.
Barbara had arrived this morning to discover all fourteen had been killed on site.
She dug out a tissue and blew her nose. “The committee completely disregarded the fact that the baboons were going to a sanctuary with experience in rehabilitating primates who arrive there mentally and physically damaged.”
And while she railed against ethics committees, saying they were a contradiction in terms, because the very same people who sat on the committees often sponsored the experiments, I stood still and silent beside her, my throat tight and my eyes burning with the tears I was holding back. Animals didn’t need any more tears. They needed help. They needed action.
I knew that under the law, animals were regarded as property and therefore possessed negligible rights. And in the end, standing on a cracked sidewalk in the pale rays of a morning sun, it was a simple decision. If the law wasn’t on the side of the animals, on the side of care and compassion for them, then I wasn’t obligated to act within its constraints.
A simple decision, but one that has cost me so much.
Rubbing my eyes, I try to call up my swell of righteous indignation when I walked into Amy’s room and witnessed what she did, but all I can feel is the stranglehold of self-disgust.
