Sedgwick County Zoo, in Wichita, Kansas, has a fine indoor facility. Oklahoma's Tulsa Zoological Park also has very fine accommodations for chimps. Geneticists say that we share with the chimpanzee all but 1 percent of our genes. It's quite one thing to see chimpanzees insane on film, and quite another to see it with your own eyes. Of the 2,000 chimps in labs, more than half are maltreated, by my standards.
Chimps are more like humans than like monkeys.
In the labs they desperately need larger cages and more varied environments. They are intelligent, social animals and should not be kept isolated singly in cages with nothing to do. Ensuring some psychological well-being of primates is the aim of one of the amendments added to the Animal Welfare Act in 1985. Regulations to enforce this and the other amendments, however, have not yet been approved. There is still debate, and wasted time, over what constitutes psychological well-being in chimpanzees.