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Pepe is starting to be fond of school. He often struggles to stay focused, since engaging in rough-and-tumble play with his new peer, Michelle, is much more fun. This baby chimp belongs to the most endangered subspecies of chimpanzees – western chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus).

At a very young age, he became an orphan when his mother was killed by poachers. For the group of resident orphans at the Chimpanzee Conservation Centre (CCC) in Guinea, “going to school” means daily excursions into the lush forests of the High Niger national park, where caregivers teach them the skills they will need to navigate the challenging environment and the complex social lives of their wild counterparts. It takes several years before the young chimpanzees are ready to be released, and successful recovery is far from granted.

Once common throughout equatorial Africa, chimpanzees have disappeared from most of their historic range. In 2003, a population of 170,000-300,000 wild individuals was estimated across a highly discontinuous distribution covering 1m sq miles (2.6m sq km). There are four recognised subspecies of chimpanzees, among which western chimpanzees stand out for their many unique behaviours. Some communities of this subspecies have been shown to manufacture wooden spears to hunt down other primates, crack nuts open by balancing them on a root and pounding them with a stone, soak themselves and play in water to cool down on hot days, travel and forage at night, and regularly gather in caves to socialise and sleep. Many of these behaviours could be culturally transmitted through social learning across generations.

Researchers are understandably excited by the prospect of understanding this rich cultural diversity, though sadly they are under considerable time pressure. After reports of unprecedented decline, in 2016 the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) upgraded the western chimpanzee’s threat status from endangered (the status of every other subspecies) to critically endangered. According to the western chimpanzee conservation action plan 2020-30, 10,000-52,000 wild chimpanzees are thought to remain in west Africa, with Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone being the strongholds of the subspecies. Guinea harbours more than 60% of the remnant population. Importantly, more than 80% of chimpanzees in Guinea are found outside protected areas, so that remoteness and inaccessibility are the main factors ensuring the viability of wild populations.

“Guinea is rich in mineral resources such as bauxite (used in electronic devices), and this sector is expanding rapidly. Deforestation and habitat fragmentation caused by large-scale development projects (such as mines and their associated infrastructures), as well as the expansion of subsistence agriculture (due to increased demographic growth and soil infertility), are gradually taking chimpanzee territory,” says Tatyana Humle, the board chair of the CCC. Although traditional (and correct) beliefs of kinship have historically helped chimpanzee conservation in some areas of Guinea, poaching to sell the babies as pets and adults as bushmeat is becoming one of the most severe problems for their conservation. “This is an unfortunate byproduct of the rapid conversion of natural chimpanzee habitat for human activities. Chimpanzees living in forest-farm mosaics often rely on crops and fruit orchards to compensate for the loss of their natural food resources, which frequently results in retaliatory killings and orphaned chimpanzees as a byproduct,” she says. Nearly half of western chimpanzees live within 5km of a human settlement or a road, and remoteness will continue to dwindle if urgent measures to control anthropogenic pressure are not implemented.

More than a sanctuary

Started in 1997, the CCC aims to rehabilitate and release chimpanzees that are victims of illegal trade, or that have been injured, or orphaned as a result of retaliatory killings. After almost 26 years, the CCC has grown into a leading institution in the conservation of African apes, and its message has permeated the different layers of Guinean society.

Most importantly, by ensuring the lifelong care and welfare of confiscated individuals, the CCC plays a fundamental role in supporting national authorities in combating the illegal trade of live chimpanzees. They boost the local economy by feeding chimpanzees with local produce (vegetables, fruits and cereals), which also helps to raise environmental awareness about the importance of protecting this threatened subspecies.

Cédric Kambere, a Congolese veterinarian with a great deal of experience working with apes, is a key part of the project. His expertise becomes particularly critical when sick chimpanzees, often recently orphaned babies, arrive at the sanctuary. There are currently 62 chimpanzees living at the sanctuary, 18 of which are still infants or sub-adults that have a lot of learning to do if they are ever to be released back into the wild. The stories surrounding their arrival to the sanctuary are heartbreaking. Marco, a four-year-old unweaned baby, was rescued after his mother was shot for meat. The bullet hit the baby’s mouth, forcing vets to remove several teeth. Sewa, a six-year-old female, was rescued from a home where she was kept as a pet. The owners had dressed her in children’s clothes and shaved her head in imitation of a human haircut. Together with Tola, Bomba, Bingo, and another two babies who did not overcome injuries from poaching, one-year-old Pepe was among six baby chimps to arrive at the sanctuary in 2022.

Notably, the CCC is the only chimpanzee sanctuary currently releasing individuals back into their natural habitats. But the situation is looking increasingly dire for the release project. “Many recovered chimpanzees cannot be released simply because of the physical or psychological trauma they experienced prior to their arrival. Worse still, loss of habitat coupled with human expansion is hampering the availability of suitable release sites,” says Miguel García, a Spanish primatologist in charge of the CCC’s conservation activities, including the release project. Suitable release sites need to encompass the typical home range of a chimpanzee community (ranging between 15-60 sq km) and provide sufficient food and water all year while not being part of the existing territory of another group. Four areas have been recently assessed to date, and none met the requirements for a release. A promising assessment study is ongoing at the Ndama reserve in northern Guinea, close to the border with Senegal. The recently established Moyen Bafing national park offers yet another note of hope. This park harbours 15% of the chimpanzee population in the country, and was established to offset the impact of two bauxite mining companies in the Fouta Djallon region. But Tatyana Humle has concerns. “There is a growing commitment from the Guinean government to make offsets compulsory for the mining sector; however, offsets should be a last resort and a push for avoiding impacts on chimpanzees and other threatened species should be preferred.” Securing sustainable funding for this national park and for sanctuaries such as the CCC would make a world of difference for chimpanzee conservation in Guinea.

Why care about western chimpanzees? Throughout history, the erroneous intuition that humans are radically different (even superior) to other animals has been used to justify our exploitative attitude towards nature. By holding a mirror up to ourselves, apes force us to abandon this “human exceptionalism”. In 1758, the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus not only dared to place humans alongside monkeys and apes within the “primate” order, but even assigned humans and apes the same genus, Homo. Later genomic analyses would vindicate Linnaeus’s intuition, confirming that indeed chimpanzees and bonobos are more similar to humans than to gorillas. Our striking parallels with chimps become evident when considering almost any aspect of our biology. For instance, our immune systems are so alike that many infectious diseases that affect humans are also able to infect chimps, gestation also lasts around nine months, and infants have a prolonged childhood (up to 10-12 years) where they need to remain close to their mother and learn a set of skills that will be crucial in their adult life. At the same time, almost weekly we are shown new evidence suggesting that tool use, empathy and other capacities widely believed to be exclusive to our species are also present in other primates. As Darwin suspected, the gap between humans and apes (once thought an impassable abyss) seems to be “one of degree, and not of kind”. By fixing humans firmly within the animal kingdom, our ape relatives provided us with the right framework to understand our place in nature, and replace our dismissive attitude towards other animals with one founded on respect and curiosity. Paradoxically for the self-appointed “thinking ape”, we’ve been so obsessed with finding what makes humans “uniquely human” that only recently we’ve started to appreciate what makes chimps “uniquely chimpanzee”.

We should act now if we intend to preserve the rich cultural heritage of our closest relatives. Failure to implement urgent measures in order to balance chimpanzee conservation and the cumulative impact of large-scale development will mean not only that rescued orphans at CCC will never know freedom again, but also the irreversible extinction of western chimpanzees.