Desolate Lives

In a recent issue of The Globe and Mail, poet and novelist Lynn Crosbie explained why she will not be going to see the movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes. When she sees chimpanzees, she writes, she feels “the nausea and fear I have long associated with … apes.” She does not like “the way they stare at you,” and finds in their unwavering gaze evidence that “nature hates us.”

“Is no one but me terrified of apes?” she asks.

Well, no. When Andrew Westoll entered the chimp house at Fauna Sanctuary, a privately run home in Quebec for “retired” research animals, the first thing he felt was “fear, which runs up my spine like a silverfish.” In The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary: A Canadian Story of Resilience and Recovery, his eloquent and passionate book about 13  great apes living in retirement near Chambly, Westoll argues that western society has long been terrified of apes. “Nineteenth-century explorers,” he writes, “refused to enter...