Not only does Sarah Anne do well at training, but she seems to really enjoy her sessions. One of the surest ways to win over Sarah Anne’s affection is by offering her juice, blueberries, or grapes. Many choose to train though, because when the chimp presents the correct body part he or she is rewarded with a sip of juice or a small piece of fruit. Positive reinforcement training is an optional activity for the chimps: it’s up to them whether or not they participate. This program is designed to teach the chimpanzees to present different body parts for examination, thus eliminating the need to sedate a chimp to treat minor wounds or ailments. Her love of blankets is one thing, but her most striking characteristic is her intelligence, which has helped her excel in Chimp Haven’s positive reinforcement training program. Blankets have become something of Sarah Anne’s trademark because she is rarely seen without one, even in the summer. One of Sarah’s favorite activities is nesting with blankets. She’s still a slender beauty with a wise gaze and today she has ample opportunities to display species typical behaviors such as nesting, tool usage, and grooming in a spacious environment. Sarah Anne’s life is now quite different. At the end of ’06, she was permanently retired to Chimp Haven, along with 6 other chimpanzees from a cognitive research background.
In 2006, Sarah Anne was sent to Primarily Primates in San Antonio where she stayed for several months. Sarah Anne lived with the Premack’s in their home until 1987 when she moved to Ohio State University. All of this has even earned Sarah her very own Wikipedia page. Sarah’s acquired skills were documented in the book The Mind of an Ape by David Premack and Ann James Premack. Here, she proved herself capable of forming grammatical phrases using symbolic tokens. As an adolescent she became the subject of one of the earliest nonhuman-ape language studies.
Sarah Anne was captured as an infant and brought to the United States for research. Regardless, we want to honor Sarah Anne and her extraordinary life by making her the subject of our first blog post! However, some captive chimpanzees have lived beyond 60. The average lifespan of a chimpanzee is generally between 30 and 40 years, so Sarah Anne’s age is quite significant. Because she was born in the wild we do not know her exact birthdate, but we can estimate that she was born around August of 1959, making her 57 years old. Chimp Haven’s oldest resident, Sarah Anne, just got a little bit older.
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