ENCORE – EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK: Farewell to Special Friends at Great Ape Trust

At the time I didn’t fully appreciate it, but one of the best things anyone ever said about me was that I am “orangutan-like.”

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After all, folks like the notorious Bobby Berosini had made a lot of money convincing you that orangutans — and other great apes — are dim-witted, slow and at our disposal to force into whatever demeaning act we please.

But when it was explained to me, I was flattered. To be orangutan-like is to be chilled, accessible, as easy and gentle as a morning rain. I’ll take that. Who wouldn’t?

So I’m being as orangutan-like as possible as I say goodbye to a couple of good friends, Popi and Allie, the last of the orangutans to leave the Great Ape Trust campus in southeast Des Moines.

They will live out their lives at the Center for Great Apes in Florida, where an intricate network of overhead tunnels will allow them to travel high above the campus — as they would in the wild. They will be happy and well cared for, and there will be no Bobby Berosinis prodding them on stage, beating them into submission, ridiculing their existence.

You may know that Popi was one of the apes in Clint Eastwood’s blockbuster Every Which Way You Can sequel in the 1980. What you may not know is that as the headliner in disgraced animal trainer 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 was tentative and reclusive when she arrived in Iowa in 2008 from southern California, where she had lived in semi-retirement since about 2001.

That’s 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 the trainer’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 began to fade in Iowa, where she lived in an environment rich with choices.

“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,” Rhonda Pietsch, Popi’s caretaker at Great Ape Trust said last year when a few of us gathered to celebrate the orangutan’s 40th birthday. “Freedom of choice has been the biggest difference in her life.”

She was an eager participant in the research, having gained the confidence that she could make mistakes without suffering a beating. Dr. Karyl Swartz, the orangutan researcher who included Popi in her long-running list-memory trials, said Popi is smart, interested and at ease, displaying fewer of the stereotypies —repetitive behaviors such as spinning associated with stress and trauma — that she did on arrival in Iowa.

She even dares to be assertive, an indication to the scientist of how self-confident she is now. “I am sure there was no being assertive before [in Berosini's care],” Swartz said.

Popi is no longer afraid to turn her back. By the time she left for Florida this week, she was no longer afraid of the transport crate, an enclosure similar in size to the one that defined her environment during her years in entertainment, to receive routine vaccinations.

“She has been through so much, and she deserves to have the most happiness that we can give her.” Pietsch said.

No doubt.

A life filled with choices will continue in Florida at the sanctuary designed with the arboreal tendencies of orangutans in mind. Another of her caretakers will be making the move to Center for Great Apes, where she’s been offered a fulltime job.

Still, it’s sad to see Popi and Allie go. Allie, 17, has special needs, as well, after a neurological disorder at the Denver Zoo, where she lived prior to coming to Iowa, left her partially paralyzed. A constant in her life has been Pietsch, who left her job at the zoo and made the move to Iowa with her orangutan friend.

My heart breaks a little more when I think about what this separation means for them. Orangutan-like, I’ll concentrate on the blessings and privilege of having been part of their lives, to have been allowed to lift the thin veil that separates their species and ours.

And I will never look at an orangutan or any other ape through a one-dimensional lens, or fail to be outraged when I see them exploited in entertainment. And as for Berosini, "An Ethical Grook” from Danish scientist, mathematician, inventor, designer, author, and poet Piet Hein (1905-1996) comes to mind:

I see
    and I hear
         and I speak no evil;
I carry
    no malice
         within my breast;
yet quite without
    wishing
         a man to the devil
one may be
    permitted
         to hope for the best.

West Des Moines Patch Local Editor Beth Dalbey worked in the communications department at Great Ape Trust for three years.