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Walking, talking chimpanzees may be TV comedy gold but now three courts in New York are being asked to recognize four chimps as "legal persons" with fundamental rights. The move would allow the animals to be released into sanctuaries where they could live out the reminder of their days in freedom, says the Nonhuman Rights Project behind the initiative. On Monday it petitioned a court in Fulton County Court, New York State, in the name of Tommy, a chimpanzee held captive in a cage at a used trailer lot in nearby Gloversville. "The lawsuits ask the judge to grant the...

Enlarge Image Leaving the lab. NIH plans to phase out much of its research on chimpanzees. Credit: Wikimedia As expected, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced today that the agency plans to retire all but 50 of its 360 research chimpanzees and phase out much of the research that it supports on these animals. NIH Director Francis Collins, who called the decision a milestone, explained that "chimpanzees are our closest relatives" and "they deserve special respect." New scientific advances "have made it possible to replace experiments done in the past on chimps with other strategies, making it now...

On Thursday, after three straight days of stifling 110-degree days, the chimps burst through one door of their outdoor pen, opened a secondary door with two dead bolt latches, and escaped. For 30 minutes they rumbled through yards and climbed into and out of at least one unoccupied vehicle. The male, Buddy, dented fenders and jumped atop a police car before veering toward a gathering crowd of people. A Las Vegas police officer killed him with three shotgun blasts.

LAS VEGAS (KSVN & MyNews3) -- Metro is reporting two chimpanzees got loose in the area of Rowland Ave., northeast of Ann Road and N. Jones Boulevard. Metro reports that one chimpanzee has been captured and the other is still outstanding. Police are warning all residents in the area to stay inside. Police have closed Ann Road from Jones Boulevard to Bradley Road and animal control officers are in the area searching for the second chimp. Police have not said where the animals are from or where they came from. This is an ongoing story and News 3 will have...

Adult Chimpanzee Fatally Mauls Baby Chimp at LA Zoo The unnamed infant was born March 6 to Gracie, who is being allowed to keep the infant overnight to grieve, zoo officials said. The first chimpanzee baby born at the LA Zoo in 13 years was mauled to death Tuesday by an adult chimp in front of a crowd of visitors, including children, zoo officials said. The unnamed infant was born March 6 to Gracie, who is being allowed to keep the infant overnight to grieve, zoo officials said. When the adult male chimp began attacking the infant, zoo staff were...

<p>March 7 (Bloomberg) -- Gorillas have been portrayed as militaristic bullies in the Planet of the Apes movies and as "highly social gentle giants" by researcher Dian Fossey.</p> <p>Now scientists say they're closer genetically to humans than they once thought.</p>

Eagerly he collects wood from the ground, snaps the branches into small pieces and carefully balances them in a pile. Then, taking care not to burn himself, he gently strikes a match and gets ready for a fry-up. Like all red-blooded males, Kanzi loves messing around with a barbecue. But then, as these extraordinary pictures show, Kanzi is no man. He is a bonobo - pygmy chimpanzee - and his love of fire is challenging the way that we think about our closest relatives in the animal kingdom. For although bonobo apes and larger chimpanzees use twigs and leaves as...

Cheetah the chimpanzee, who acted in classic Tarzan movies in the early 1930s, died of kidney failure Saturday at Suncoast Primate Sanctuary in Palm Harbor, a sanctuary spokeswoman said. Cheetah was roughly 80 years old, loved fingerpainting and football and was soothed by nondenominational Christian music, said Debbie Cobb, the sanctuary's outreach director. He was an outgoing chimp who was exposed to the public his whole life, Cobb said today. "He wasn't a chimp that caused a lot of problems," she said. Cheetah acted in the 1932-34 Tarzan movies, Cobb said. Movies filmed during that timeframe starred Johnny Weissmuller and...

(PhysOrg.com) -- A lot of people who have gone to the zoo have become the targets of feces thrown by apes or monkeys, and left no doubt wondering about the so-called intellectual capacity of a beast that would resort to such foul play. Now however, researchers studying such behavior have come to the conclusion that throwing feces, or any object really, is actually a sign of high ordered behavior.

When the DNA sequences of Homo sapiens and Pan troglodytes were sequenced, the difference between the sequences of coding genes was smaller than expected based on the phenotypic differences between both species. If not the coding genes, then what is responsible for these dissimilarities? In the words of the authors of a new study that took a look at this question: Although humans and chimpanzees have accumulated significant differences in a number of phenotypic traits since diverging from a common ancestor about six to eight million years ago, their genomes are more than 98.5% identical at protein-coding loci. Since this...

THIS is the moment a group of chimpanzees sees daylight for the first time in 30 years — after being locked in cages for medical testing. The animals hugged each other in delight before they took their first steps outside. Emotional footage, below, shows how they reacted to their new surroundings. The outing marked the end of a 14-year bid to re-integrate the 38 primates after they spent most of their lives cooped up inside. One commentator said: "They hugged as if saying, 'We're finally free'. And then they laughed." The chimpanzees were taken from their mothers shortly after their...

Maturen, 22, had been a volunteer at the sanctuary for more than three years. She recalls the events of Feb. 12 [2010] in great detail. [snip -- she relates the horror in detail next] No one from the sanctuary called 911...Just before 11:30 a.m., someone else did call. A man told the dispatcher..."Something's happening over there," he said. "I don't know if one of those apes got loose, but we had to run out of there real fast, and there were women screaming over there." Deputy Gregory Mason arrived at 11:37 a.m. and found the gates locked.... [snip -- she...

Think of chimpanzees fighting, and it's hard to imagine anything more serious than a few teacups being thrown around at the zoo. But despite their comical popular image, mankind's closest cousins in the animal world are merciless killers with a taste for gang warfare.

Three-year-old Lisa Marie always wears a diaper, never appears in public off a leash and delights in leaping on her owners' heads. "She's part of our family," said Ed Parzygnat, who lives in the Back of the Yards with his wife, Annette, and their chimpanzee. "It's like having a child." Not everyone agrees. A year after a chimpanzee named Travis mauled a Connecticut woman, tearing off her face, there is a push to further regulate private ownership of chimpanzees, monkeys and other primates. The debate pits chimp lovers who keep them as pets or feature them in animal shows against...

Chimpanzees are intelligent enough to appreciate how big a pint of liquid is, or the volume of any other measure. That shows they have an ability to gauge the difference between continuous quantities, such as a pint or half pint of non-alcoholic fruit juice. Previously, apes have only been known to differentiate discrete quantities, such as eight sweets over five. That means chimps are more intelligent than we thought, and shows they have a basic grasp of the physics of liquids. Details of the discovery are published in the journal Animal Cognition.

For the first time, chimpanzees have been seen using tools to chop up and reduce food into smaller bite-sized portions. Chimps in the Nimba Mountains of Guinea, Africa, use both stone and wooden cleavers, as well as stone anvils, to process Treculia fruits. The apes are not simply cracking into the Treculia to get to otherwise unobtainable food, say researchers. Instead, they are actively chopping up the food into more manageable portions. Observations of the behaviour are published in the journal Primates.

Chimps remain cool under fire, possessing a near human ability to predict how wildfires spread and react accordingly. This newfound capability of chimpanzees to understand flames might shed light on when and how our distant ancestors first learned to control fire, scientists now suggest. Primatologist Jill Pruetz at Iowa State University in Ames was observing savanna chimpanzees in Senegal in 2006 as people were setting wildfires, an annual tradition that clears land and aids hunting. Most areas within the chimpanzees' home range are burned to some degree. "It was the end of the dry season, so the fires burn so...

As editor of The Post & Email I can now publicly confirm that our website was hacked 3 times yesterday by an Obama supporter, in conjunction with a simultaneous political attack on the Washington Times Newspaper, in Washington, D.C.. The motive for the attack was identical: The advertorial placed by Commander Charles F. Kerchner, Jr., U.S. Navy, Retired in the Washington Times, entitled ” Obama’s Lack of Eligibility.” The advertorial contained a brief explanation why Barack Hussein Obama was still a British citizen, and why that makes him ineligible for the U.S. Presidency. It featured the classic Asian metaphor of...

This is an older video, by a couple years but it is amazing to watch. The experiment pits Japanese researchers vs chimps in a memory experiment.

Chimp dies, others mourn. Interesting picture and story.