We have had big difficulty getting Lume happy in his new environment. At first he was very stressed, then he got a bad flu, and was coughing a lot. He hardly wanted to play with Kongo, finding him very annoying. Kongo did not understand this… Even if Lume was screaming in anger and biting him so that he had cuts all over, he was just laughing still wanting to play. So for some days we put Kongo back in a little cage within the enclosure so Lume could recover from his cold. He eventually did, but was still very depressed. And we got more and more convinced that this was a wild chimp. We have now learned Lumes story and it is something like this.
A group of chimpanzees in a forest reserve near Beni in North-Kivu was raiding crops. The farmers got very angry and decided to capture a chimpanzee as evidence. And Lume seems to have been the unlucky one… The photo above was probably taken just after he was captured and is the photo we got when we first heard of him. Lume is a 5-6 year old chimpanzee that have probably just been weaned from his mother, bur are still very dependent on his family. Normally chimpanzees are captured between 1-2 years of age when they are babies. And these little chimps adapts much easier to a life with humans if they get proper love and care. Lume is a bit too old… Like it’s much harder for a 6 year old human child to loose his family, than it is for a 1 year old. But Lume is finally getting better now, with the help from Kongo which after all is a chimpanzee, just a very strange behaving one from Lumes point of view! Kongo is maybe about ten, and we have a feeling he has been someone’s baby. He is very humanized, and don’t know a lot about how a chimp should behave. But he is very nice and happy, which is two things that is very good for Lume!
A group of chimpanzees in a forest reserve near Beni in North-Kivu was raiding crops. The farmers got very angry and decided to capture a chimpanzee as evidence. And Lume seems to have been the unlucky one… The photo above was probably taken just after he was captured and is the photo we got when we first heard of him. Lume is a 5-6 year old chimpanzee that have probably just been weaned from his mother, bur are still very dependent on his family. Normally chimpanzees are captured between 1-2 years of age when they are babies. And these little chimps adapts much easier to a life with humans if they get proper love and care. Lume is a bit too old… Like it’s much harder for a 6 year old human child to loose his family, than it is for a 1 year old. But Lume is finally getting better now, with the help from Kongo which after all is a chimpanzee, just a very strange behaving one from Lumes point of view! Kongo is maybe about ten, and we have a feeling he has been someone’s baby. He is very humanized, and don’t know a lot about how a chimp should behave. But he is very nice and happy, which is two things that is very good for Lume!
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