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Dear John,
Several months before we filed our lawsuit seeking the right to liberty for seven chimpanzees held captive in the DeYoung Family Zoo in Wallace, Michigan, I paid a visit to this facility. As we prepare for a hearing in this case, I’d like to tell you what I saw there.
First, the DeYoung Family Zoo is a roadside zoo located in a rural area on the border between Michigan and Wisconsin. It opened to the public in 1990. It offers various ticketed animal encounters and opportunities to hand-feed animals, including deer, bears, horses, camels, wolf puppies, piglets, kangaroos, alpacas, geese, tortoises, coyotes, dingoes, camels, mountain sheep, ducks, and chickens. The DeYoung Family Zoo also offers private tours to meet and hold a sloth, otters, kangaroos, or a penguin.
In past years, the DeYoung Family Zoo has invited paying customers to hold and interact with at least one chimpanzee, our client Louie. It appears that as Louie grew bigger and stronger, the DeYoung Family Zoo stopped using him in ticketed encounters. Public records indicate that Louie was housed in isolation from 2010 until at least 2018, and all the chimpanzees appear to be housed exclusively indoors for the duration of the winter. The section of the facility that houses primates has been closed to the viewing public since 2020, but you can still see the structures and some of the interior from the parking lot.
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When I took a self-guided tour of the facility in August of 2023, I saw several chimpanzees inside one of those structures. It’s easily visible from the parking lot. The bottom half is a windowless, barn-like industrial building. The top half is a caged outdoor area, enclosed by what appeared to be a chain-link fence. It contains a few ropes for climbing. I’ll call it Facility A. Facility A is connected to a similar structure (Facility B) by a caged walkway. I saw DFZ employees move various food products in and out of Facility B. One DFZ employee told me both structures housed “some of the monkeys” as well as other species during specific times of the year, like an alligator during the winter months.
Standing there, I saw three chimpanzees in the caged outdoor area of Facility A and another in the caged walkway between facilities. One chimpanzee in the outdoor area grabbed the fence and shook it violently. The chimpanzee in the walkway rocked back and forth for over a minute while trying to open the access point to Facility B. My takeaway was that these chimpanzees were agitated and desperate in their small cages.
There were moments of silence where one chimpanzee positioned in the corner of the second structure appeared to observe me for several minutes. When I lowered my cell phone (which I’d been using to take photos and videos to be submitted with our lawsuit), the chimpanzee moved to a different space in the structure, seemingly no longer interested in watching me.
Chimpanzees are extraordinarily cognitively complex autonomous beings whose interest in exercising their autonomy is as fundamental to them as it is to us. Yet the DeYoung Prisoners can’t meaningfully exercise their autonomy at DFZ and as a consequence suffer physically and psychologically. Six of the world’s most renowned experts on chimpanzee cognition and behavior have submitted affidavits and declarations in support of this case, demonstrating not only that chimpanzees possess the autonomy and self-determination that allow them to choose how they will live their own emotionally, socially, and intellectually rich lives, but also that DFZ is an unacceptable place for such cognitively complex beings.
The NhRP is asking the Michigan courts to free the DeYoung Prisoners to a chimpanzee sanctuary accredited by the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries, which would allow them to exercise their autonomy and extraordinary cognitive complexity to the greatest extent possible. We expect our hearing in this case to be scheduled any day now. If you can, please consider donating to the NhRP today to help us wage this legal fight in Michigan [[link removed]] .
In an upcoming email, we’ll tell you more about who these clients are and what we know about how they wound up in this facility.
Thank you for all your support, John xxxxxx.
Sincerely,
Jake Davis
Senior Staff Attorney, the NhRP
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The NhRP is a nonprofit, tax-exempt 501(c)(3) corporation (Tax ID #: 04-3289466). It is solely through your donations that we can continue to work for the recognition and protection of fundamental rights for nonhuman animals.
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