Likenscapes: Remembering Mr Muggs

Mr Muggs
919th victim in the Jonestown Massacre
November 18 1978
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Unable to cope, some chimpanzees resort to self-mutilation, including biting themselves, attacking a limb that they dissociate as being their own, pulling their hair out, rubbing their skin raw, or hurting themselves in other ways—behaviours that in humans would be described as having “gone crazy.”


Building an Inner Sanctuary… analyses case material of two chimpanzees rescued from research, Jeannie and Rachel. Diagnosed with complex PTSD, Jeannie and Rachel demonstrate that chimpanzees, like humans, suffer when confined, stripped of agency, repeatedly physically injured, and subjected to constant fear and stress. Their symptoms—hypervigilance, dissociating, violent self-attacks, insomnia, ritualistic behaviours, inability to tolerate touch and limited social sills—are representative of human trauma survivors as well as other chimpanzees from research.

“The paper challenges a system that likens chimpanzees to humans when attempting to justify their use to study human biological disease, but refuses to acknowledge the full extent of their emotional, behavioural and cognitive similarities since that acknowledgement argues vehemently against their use,” says Dr. Theodora Capaldo, NEAVS president, psychologist and co-author or the papers

Project R&R: Release and Restitution for Chimpanzees is NEAVS’ national campaign to end the use of chimpanzees in invasive biomedical research and provide them permanent release and restitution in sanctuary. The historic work of Project R&R will lead to the first non-human species being afforded legal protection from use in harmful research.