Every now and then, a chimp reappears in Andrew Westoll’s dreams.
The chimp’s name was Tom, and at the beginning of their interactions at the Fauna Sanctuary, he refused to look at Westoll. Trusting a human took a lot of time. Tom’s experience with trauma included having been injected with HIV, as well as other human viruses. Before that, he was “leased” to a lab for cosmetic testing.
And then, a breakthrough. Tom made eye contact, reached through his cage and invited Westoll to tickle him.
“It was sort of the end of a long trust-building exercise,” says Westoll, assistant professor, teaching stream, in the Department of English at U of T Scarborough. “He was OK with me being there.”
In 1997, a family of 13 chimps were retired from a biomedical research lab in the U.S. and brought to The Fauna Foundation, Canada’s only chimp sanctuary. Located outside Chambly, Que., the sanctuary runs under the supervision of founder Gloria Grow and her team.
Like Tom, each of the chimps lived through their own trauma, from being captured during infancy and abuse in the entertainment industry to lab testing.
Westoll recounts his time as a volunteer caregiver and the stories of the chimps in his 2011 book, The Chimps of the Fauna Sanctuary. Alongside 14 other books, it is featured in this year’s Canada Reads longlist, a literary competition by CBC. This year’s theme: “One Book To Move You.”
The shortlist of five books for the Canada Reads competition will be revealed on Jan. 31, 2019. Then, between March 25 and 28, CBC will broadcast debates, as celebrities and others in the media industry argue which of the final five books should win.
Westoll’s book was first longlisted by Canada Reads in 2011 and also won the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction in 2012. A book by U of T Scarborough’s writer-in-residence, Carrianne Leung’s That Time I Loved You, was also listed this year.
Before his career as a writer, Westoll trained as a primatologist and had explored the opportunity to volunteer at the sanctuary when he was still a student. After graduating, he spent a year studying capuchin monkeys in Suriname, South America, for a researcher at the University of Florida.
For him, the book’s reemergence through Canada Reads acts as a reminder that the chimps are still there.
“I left the sanctuary after I had finished my time there and I left the animals behind, but their lives, their struggles and triumphs, continued,” he says.
Westoll recalls how interacting with the chimps was a delicate process. Even though he was there to help, Westoll was a stranger, and the welcoming process had to be on the chimps’ own terms.
“Their trust had been abused for decades, and that is the uplifting part of it all, that you can rebuild trust with an animal, even as a member of a species that might not deserve it.”