Feeding Chimpanzees
By Jalil Goosby
A large factor of providing care for any animal is keeping them fed. Every individual has specialized nutritional needs, and providing for these needs is incredibly important. At Project Chimps, this is true as well. Feeding chimpanzees is a very important daily duty at our sanctuary!
Chimp Chow
The chimpanzees are each given three large meals a day, with plenty snacks in between. Caregivers have adopted a hands-off approach when it comes to feeding chimpanzees. For example, lunch is distributed to the chimps in their enclosures to help encourage foraging behaviors that are normally found in wild chimpanzees. Snacks are even placed in enrichment puzzles as a sort of reward for completion. The menu for the chimps changes from day to day, this is so the chimps can be given variety.
Chimpanzees are omnivores, meaning that their diet consists of a wide variety of different kinds of foods. Plants, nuts, fruits, and even meat are all on the menu for chimps in the wild. At Project Chimps, chimpanzees are given a mostly vegan based diet, but this doesn’t mean the chimps can’t forage for insects that they find in their habitats, which is fine by us!
Sometimes though, feeding chimpanzees isn’t so simple. While they aren’t particularly picky about the food they eat, chimpanzees can be very picky with how they get that food. For one chimp, this couldn’t be more true.
Feeding Chimpanzees Like Nyia
Nyia is an 18-year-old female who arrived to us in 2022, making her a relatively new addition to Project Chimps. As with many new chimps, building trust with caregivers takes time, and a lot of work. The biggest challenge in earning Nyia’s trust was getting her to accept the meals given to her at Project Chimps. Caregivers had to find a clever workaround to this problem quickly. No chimp goes hungry at the sanctuary after all.
The initial solution was to give Nyia’s food to her in a paper bag. The thought process behind this was to eliminate human contact with the food going inside of Nyia’s enclosure. When asked, caregiver India Sloan said “Nyia is suspicious of anything we offer her, so it is not at all surprising to us that she likes her food items to come in another container so she can investigate them.”
Nyia’s Solution
While the paper bag solution works well, Nyia needed another degree of separation while she was learning to trust the caregivers. To do this, Nyia has begun to use her favorite toy, a small pink plastic bucket manufactured by Green Toys. The bucket is intended for small children to use to carry dug up sand at a playground or a beach. Nyia uses her bucket for very different purposes, however. She has chosen to use her bucket as an additional buffer between her food and the humans who touch it.
“I think Nyia enjoys her pink bucket because it gives her a sense of control over her food,” says India, “If Nyia’s items come in a paper bag and then go into another vessel, it eliminates the aspect of humans touching the food, at least to her.”
Nyia isn’t the only chimp who has taken a liking to the small pink bucket. “The boys love the pink bucket to display with,” says India, “by pushing it around the rooms, which essentially sands down the bucket until it disappears.”
It costs $7 a day to feed each chimp. You can help contribute directly to the menu in a variety of ways! You can follow this donation link to make a contribution, or you can check out our Ways to Give page. If you want to donate pantry items or a toy to a chimp like Nyia, we invite you to visit our Amazon Wish List.