Rest in Peace Sam

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Zoo staff bids Sam a sad farewell
By Cynthia Hubert -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 am PDT Sunday, May 15, 2005
For almost two days, the Sacramento Zoo's most famous resident lay nearly motionless in his den, picking at his food, refusing water, breathing heavily.
In his heart, primate keeper Robbie Flaherty knew it was time for Sam the chimpanzee's suffering to end.

But this would be no ordinary departure.

At 57 years old, Sam was the zoo's senior resident and had lived all but the first three years of his life at the Land Park institution. He had outlasted staff members and administrators, and had entertained generations of people in the Sacramento area. He had national standing as the second-oldest chimp in captivity in North America.

But congestive heart failure and other ailments had sapped Sam's vitality and diminished his quality of life. And so on Tuesday, Flaherty and others were faced with the decision they had hoped they would never have to make.

"One of our guiding principles has been that we didn't want Sam to suffer," said zoo veterinarian Ray Wack, who has been aggressively treating the chimp for heart disease. "We knew that he had a progressive condition, and the day would come when he would tell us that it was time to let him go."

Tuesday was that day.

When Flaherty, who has cared for Sam for the past 15 years, arrived at work after a couple of days off, he learned that the chimp had been curled up in his sleeping den for nearly 48 hours. Through the bars of his enclosure, Flaherty tried, unsuccessfully, to entice him with a drink of Gatorade.

"He wasn't doing more than lifting his head slightly," Flaherty said. "It was pretty bad."

In a meeting that afternoon with Wack, zoo director Mary Healy and others, Flaherty got the question he had long dreaded.

"I was asked if I felt it was time," he said. "I hated to say yes. But I needed to. I just couldn't come up with an argument against it."

A couple of hours later, Flaherty and about a dozen others gathered around Sam for a final goodbye. Wack gave Sam an anesthetic to put the 120-pound chimp to sleep, then injected a dose that stopped his heart.

"There were a lot of tears in that room," Flaherty said.

The gathering was unusual, he said, but Sam was an unusual animal.

He never was the friendliest chimp in his troop, Flaherty said. "Sammy wasn't good at small talk," he said. "He was standoffish. Of all the chimps, he wanted the least amount of attention, and we respected that.

"But I think it was important psychologically that, in his final hours and minutes, he had people around him that he was familiar with."

Sam's legacy extends all the way to Chicago, where a scientist who studies chimps called him remarkable.

He was born in the wilds of Africa and arrived at the Sacramento Zoo on May 3, 1951, said Steve Ross, a behavioral scientist at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. Ross heads the chimpanzee Species Survival Plan, which helps zoos manage the care and breeding of chimps.

"No chimpanzee has lived at a single institution as long as Sam," said Ross, whose records date to the early 1900s. "It speaks to the biology and longevity of chimps, and it speaks well for the Sacramento Zoo. Obviously, they must have been caring for him very well for him to live that long."

Chimps typically live until their late 40s in captivity, Ross said, a few years longer than those in the wild. Only one chimpanzee in captivity is older than Sam was. He is 58 and resides at the Sequoia Park Zoo in Eureka.

"Most people who lived here saw Sam through the decades," said Leslie Field, a primate specialist at the Sacramento Zoo. "He was part of us."

So the mood was decidedly somber last week, and not only among the zoo's staffers and volunteers.

After Sam died and Flaherty and the others paid their respects, keepers opened the door to his den and allowed the five other chimps who lived with him to come inside.

"It's typical for chimps in the wild to essentially say their goodbyes when a member of the troop dies," Wack said. "We wanted to make sure that the chimps in our troop had that opportunity."

The chimps circled around Sam, poked him and lifted his limp arms.

"They had been coming into the den to visit him, on his good days and bad," Wack said. "They knew something was wrong. We didn't want the troop to feel we had just come in and whisked him off somewhere. We wanted them to know it was final."

On Wednesday, Flaherty said, the surviving chimps seemed to be in mourning.

"They're very quiet," he said. "There haven't been any fights or screams or yelling. That's pretty unusual."

Field said it is common, in the wild, for chimps to have "vigils" for fallen members of their tribes.

"They have a very close and intricate and complex society," she said. "And I do think they grieve. They do sense the loss."

Even as they mourned Sam's absence last week, zoo staffers and administrators celebrated the chimp's life and longevity.

When Sam first arrived at the zoo, he lived in a pair of small chain-link cages joined by a small door, they recalled. In recent years, he climbed, swung from ropes and sunbathed inside a large geodesic dome. He and the others got top-notch veterinary care and ate nutritionally balanced primate food along with seasonal fruits and vegetables. He enjoyed interacting with other chimps in his troop, especially with Maria, who at 4 years old is the baby of the group.

"Sammy just loved playing with her, and she loved tormenting him," Flaherty said. "He was like the grumpy old grandpa. There never was any fear that he would hurt her."

When Sam grew frail, Flaherty said, Maria and other members of the group would sit quietly with him in his den. "When he started getting very sick, Maria would approach him very carefully, sit down next to him and put her hand very gently on his arm. There was no teasing or hair-pulling then. She knew he was not well.

"The chimps made a lot of allowances for Sammy's illness. We followed their lead."

Though Sam was widely admired by zoo staffers and administrators, few members of the public paid much attention to him until he was featured in an article in The Bee in November. Then, Sam finally got his moment in the spotlight.

"He became the star of the show," Flaherty said.

Coming to work this week after Sam's death was tough, he said.

"I knew it was going to be stressful," Flaherty said. "But I was fine once I was with my animals. Even though I have lost one who was really important to me, I still have a whole bunch counting on me to take care of them. That really helps."

About the writer:
The Bee's Cynthia Hubert can be reached at (916) 321-1082 or [email protected].
 
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