Great Ape Trust orangutan Popi, 40, "gets the birthday party she deserves"

DES MOINES, Iowa, April 26, 2011 – The orangutan Popi turned 40 Saturday at a party her human friends at Great Ape Trust said she should have had as a youngster. Instead, as the headliner in disgraced animal trainer Bobby Berosini’s Las Vegas floor show, she was at the center of an animal welfare dispute that raised critical questions about mistreatment and abuse of great apes in the entertainment industry.

Popi moved to Des Moines in October 2008 from southern California, where she had lived in semi-retirement since about 2001, when Berosini relinquished ownership at the height of his long-running court battle with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which had obtained a secret videotape of Berosini’s backstage treatment of Popi and other orangutans in his act at the Stardust Hotel’s Lido de Paris nightclub. The seven-minute videotape shows Berosini grabbing the orangutans 19 times, slapping them seven times, striking them with his hand seven times and hitting them with a heavy metal rod once every 20 seconds, according to an excerpt from Visions of Caliban: On Chimpanzees and People, a book by historian Dale Peterson and renowned British anthropologist Jane Goodall.

Much of Popi’s young life was spent appearing in two floor shows a night, on movie sets and traveling from place to place in a steel crate too small for her to stretch her long arms and with only ventilation holes at the top offering a view of the world. Her experiences in entertainment more than 20 years ago left Popi with some residual scars that the ape’s human colleagues at Great Ape Trust, a non-invasive cognitive research center, say are fading in an environment rich with choices and intellectual enrichment.

“Popi is one of the most wonderful, gentle souls I have ever known, and the thing that is very important to me is to give her as much choice as we can give her,” said Rhonda Pietsch, senior orangutan caretaker at Great Ape Trust. “Freedom of choice has been the biggest difference in her life.”

Popi’s choices include where to spend time in her spacious home, constructed with the arboreal tendencies of orangutans in mind, and a 3-acre outdoor play yard that will be planted with small plots of corn and other vegetables intended to both please  the tastebuds and intellectually challenge Popi and Allie, a 16-year-old orangutan also living at The Trust.

Since Popi moved to Great Ape Trust two and one-half years ago, Pietsch and her staff have strived to make every day special for the orangutan, who also starred opposite Clint Eastwood in the 1980 blockbuster Any Which Way You Can. But as the ape’s milestone 40th birthday approached, Pietsch and her staff began planning “the kind birthday party she should have had as a child.”

Pietsch and her colleagues – keepers Jackie Mobley and Stephanie Perkins, along with volunteer Jen Graiss, a student in The Trust’s and Simpson College’s Great Ape Scholar program – didn’t disappoint. They put together a day full of surprises from sugar-free confections and natural treats to backpacks bulging with books, balls, tea sets and children’s toys inviting interaction. They festooned the three levels of the orangutan home with brightly colored streamers, made short work of daily taks so they could spend more one-on-one time with the orangutans, and invited some of her Popi’s human friends to share in  her joy as she discovered dozens of gifts they had been stockpiling for months to commemorate the occasion.

During her first few months at Great Ape Trust, Popi appeared to be slow to trust, tentative and shy, and seemed to prefer a solitary existence, Pietsch said.

Now, she eagerly spends time with Allie and participates in Dr. Karyl Swartz’s long-running list memory research trial with orangutans and other species in the primate order. Swartz said Popi has a strong aptitude for the match-to-sample exercises, which involve the presentation of a list of pictures on a computer touchscreen, then present them a second time in a different order and mixed with distractors that weren’t included in the original list.

“Popi is smart, and I’m impresse by how quickly she picked up the tasks,” observed Swartz, an expert on primate memory and learning who recently left her job as The Trust’s associate program director for orangutan studies for a high-level job with the National Institutes of Health. The orangutn’s willingness to participate in the research, even when she makes errors, suggests to Swartz that Popi’s confidence has grown since moving to The Trust and the orangutan is learning that “it’s OK to be wrong” without negative consequences.

Not only that, on a couple of occasions when Swartz was distracted from the trials  to take a phone call, Popi felt confident enough to let her know through gestures  and other means “that my time on the phone was up, and to look at her.”

“The fact that she would do that was an indication of how self-confident she is now,” Swartz said. “I am sure there was no being assertive before [in Berosini’s care]

“Popi has now learned that she can make mistakes and nothing bad happens,” Pietsch added. “It gives her more confidence in the next phase of her life.”

Pietsch said Popi appears to be happy and content in her new life. Erased from the orangutan’s face are most of the worry lines that creased it when she arrived in Des Moines. She exhibits far fewer stereotypies – spinning, rocking and other repetitive behaviors that orangutans sometimes exhibit to calm themselves – and isn’t afraid to turn her back on most people. One significant milestone occurred when Popi began voluntarily going into a transport crate – an enclosure similar in size to the one that defined her environment during her years in entertainment – to receive routine vaccinations.

“I think she’s happy,” Pietsch said. “I think we have taken out of her life the stressors that she had before. She loves everybody here and has a good relationship with everyone here. She has been through so much, and she deserves to have the most happiness that we can give her.”