Bonobos in the New York Times

[Stephen Bezruchka]

This slightly salacious piece has much to say about this primate species
and how we might deal with stress.  Look at Frans deWaal's book, Bonobo:
The Forgotten Ape, 1997, Un. of Calif. Press for more.  Stephen

*****
NYT May 3, 2004 KINSHASA JOURNAL  The Gentlest of Beasts, Making Love,
Ravaged by War By SOMINI SENGUPTA

KINSHASA, Congo - Upstream from this dog-eat-dog capital, where the Congo
River spills its tendrils into the belly of the equatorial rain forest,
lies the jungle home of one of mankind's closest cousins and one of the
most endangered primates on earth: the bonobo.

Genetically, humans and bonobos, a species of chimpanzee, are more than 98
percent similar. Socially, it is another matter. Matriarchal as a rule,
bonobos eschew conflict. They do not fight over territory. They do not
kill. Any small friction they resolve through sexual contact: a playful
rub, oral sex, full intercourse.

Peace-loving they may be, but during Congo's latest war, the bonobos'
jungle habitat fell smack on the front line between fighting factions.

Fishing and farming all but ground to a halt during the war, which
officially ended last year. Civilians and soldiers alike turned to the
forest to fill their bellies.

More and more, the bonobos turned up as supper. Their smoked remains
showed up at riverine markets. Babies were orphaned, which is to say they
were more or less destined to die: the bonobo infant, accustomed to
staying on its mother's back for the first several years of life, has
great trouble making it on its own.

So it was that the bonobo orphans of the central African rain forest found
themselves hurtling hundreds of miles down the Congo River to this gritty
metropolis and into the arms of a redheaded Frenchwoman called Claudine
Andr.

Ms. Andr recalls it as love at first sight. More than 10 years ago, after
a famous, ruinous pillage of Kinshasa, Ms. Andr, then a businesswoman,
went to the ravaged city zoo and chanced upon a bereft infant bonobo. He
looked as though he wanted to die, she recalled. She named him Mikano,
took him home and became, in her words, his surrogate mother.

When the war came, more orphans trickled in. She kept them on the grounds
of an elite American school. Then, last year, when peace came, she opened
Lola Ya Bonobo, a sanctuary for orphaned bonobos on a 75-acre patch of
green on the fringes of the capital.

Infants are paired up with surrogate mothers. There is an endless supply
of bananas and sugar cane (bonobos have an incurable sweet tooth). An
electric fence encircles the park, so as to keep the apes from scampering
out of the woods and into Kinshasa's traffic. The park is open to
visitors.

On a Sunday afternoon not long ago, the park's 31 young charges did what
young bonobos do: chewed on blades of grass, swung from palm fronds,
kissed, frolicked and fondled.

"It's the hippies of the forest," Ms. Andr said, taking their wrinkled
hairy hands in hers. "When they feel anxious, when they are afraid, they
have sex. And they calm down."

As if on cue, a big bonobo mounted a small bonobo. They rolled around on
the grass, rubbed against each other and went on their merry ways.

Bonobos are not proprietary about mates, and sex is not always about
procreation. Homosexuality is au courant, and sexual play begins when they
are barely a year old, though intercourse must wait until they are
teenagers. Much to Ms. Andr's delight, a teenage orphan, a male, arrived
recently. Hopefully, she said, mating will soon begin.

"It's really make love, not war," Ms. Andr said of the bonobo way of life.
"It was so sad to see such a pacific animal so destroyed by war."

The plight of the bonobos, a species found only in Congo, is a window into
the repercussions of war on the ecology of the Congo River Basin, one of
the most diverse ecosystems in the world and home to more than 400 species
of mammals. Mining, logging and a sustained trade in bush meat have all
put the squeeze on their habitats.

War having made vast swaths of the country inaccessible to researchers, it
is impossible to know precisely how these creatures have fared. Certain
habitats may have been left untouched, others devoured.

In the Virunga Highlands near the border of Uganda and Rwanda, the
mountain gorilla population has grown, according to a census by the
Wildlife Conservation Society. By contrast, in the Kahuzi-Biega National
Park, the eastern lowland gorilla's population has fallen by 70 percent to
fewer than 5,000, according to Conservation International. The elephants
in the same park may well have vanished.

As for the bonobo population, scientists have no reliable numbers but fear
the species may be nearing extinction. Late last year, the United Nations
Environment Program reported that the bonobo, along with the gorilla,
chimpanzee and orangutan, could disappear in 50 years.

Peace is likely to present a new challenge to forest dwellers: Congo's
rain forests have once again opened up to logging companies, and today the
first batches of timber can be seen floating downriver from quateur
Province to the port here in Kinshasa. With blessings from the World Bank,
150 million acres of rain forest could be opened up for logging.

As the World Bank sees it, timber concessions could pour hundreds of
millions of dollars into government coffers. Environmentalists fear that
the logging could also endanger the habitat of the Pygmy people, who have
eked out a living in the forest for centuries. The bonobos are sometimes
called Pygmy chimpanzees, because Pygmies too are averse to conflict; they
too prefer to hunt and forage in the forest rather than fight one another
for territory. United Nations investigators suspect that some of them had
been eaten during the war too.