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April Fool’s Day at the chimp house

April 1, 2014 by Debbie -

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We are always trying to come up with fun and interesting ideas to enrich the chimpanzees at CSNW. Since today is April Fool’s Day, I was coming up with ways to mix things up for the chimps. We tried to serve lunch at breakfast, which didn’t seem to go over as well as I had thought—the chimps were expecting fruit smoothie! So we made up for that faux pas by doing a smoothie forage.

While Elizabeth and I were setting up the smoothie cups, we were trying to come up with “jokes” to play with the enrichment. We decided to put all their toys for the day inside an old trash can, and “leave behind” some things we normally don’t let the chimps have. We left a disinfectant container (with tea instead of disinfectant of course) and a gum container with just a couple pieces of gum in it, plus some kitchen utensils and other chimp-safe things we could find. This part of the day’s enrichment went much better than the first April Fool’s joke we played on the chimps! They loved it.

Jamie was the first to open the trash can of enrichment, and Annie was very interested, too.

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Foxie:

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Missy:

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Jody found the “disinfectant” tea first:

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And Jamie also took an interest:

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5 Comments

  1. Avatar Brenna on April 1, 2014 at 4:42 pm

    No Burrito? 🙁



  2. Avatar diane d. on April 1, 2014 at 6:57 pm

    Where is Burrito?



  3. Avatar Wanda Trotta on April 2, 2014 at 6:41 am

    You guys are amazing – do you ever run out of clever ideas? 🙂



    • Debbie on April 2, 2014 at 9:34 am

      It is hard to try and come up with new things, but we certainly accept the challenge! There are some enrichment themes that go over pretty well so we do them again (but usually just once a month). For instance “cleaning day” is when we put out soapy buckets of water with scrub brushes and the chimps really like that. “Art day” with lots of crayons and chalk is another popular one, “troll scarves” is a favorite of both Jamie and Foxie, “wooden toys” is a good one for Burrito, “pre-made nests” is something both Negra and Annie enjoy, and “lots of paper” is loved by Jody and Missy. So thankfully the chimps don’t mind if some themes are re-used, but we’d love to have fresh ideas, too. If you have any suggestions, let me know! 🙂



  4. Debbie on April 2, 2014 at 9:28 am

    Hi Brenna and Diane, Burrito was gathering smoothie cups upstairs and wasn’t in range for good photos. But he definitely enjoyed the forage and was food squeaking a lot! It’s hard to try and feature all seven chimps, but here’s a couple recent posts about Burrito:
    https://staging.chimpsnw.org/2014/03/socialawkwardness/
    https://staging.chimpsnw.org/2014/03/nature-without-nuture/



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