Rosalía Abreu

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Rosalía Abreu (born January 14, 1862 , † November 3, 1930 ) was the daughter of a wealthy Cuban plantation owner and the first animal keeper in the world who managed to keep and breed chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes ) in captivity over their entire lifespan. The behavioral observations made in their private animal husbandry at the beginning of the 20th century and published by experts included the first scientific reports on mating , birth and individual development in chimpanzees. Her findings on the food needs of chimpanzees and orangutans formed the basis for the successful keeping of great apes in zoological gardens worldwide.

Life

Rosalía Abreu was the youngest daughter of the large landowner Pedro Nolasco Gonzáles Abreu y Jimenes (1808–1873) and his wife Rosa. She grew up in Havana until she was eleven . After the death of her husband, the mother moved to New York City , Rosalía attended the Edenhall School in Torresdale, Pennsylvania , now a district of Philadelphia . In 1878 she went to France with her diabetic mother and her widowed older sister Rosa Contreras, where her mother wanted to seek health advice from Jacques-Joseph Grancher (1843–1907), a close colleague of Louis Pasteur . Her sister Grancher married in 1879. The eldest daughter of the family, Marta, married Luis Estévez Romero in 1874, who in 1902 became Vice President of the Republic of Cuba under Tomás Estrada Palma .

In 1883 Rosalía Abreu married the Cuban medical student Domingo Sanchez Toledo in Paris , whereupon she - following Spanish conventions - adopted the name Rosalía Abreu de Sanchez Toledo. The couple had five children, one of whom died early. In 1898, after the occupation of Cuba by US troops in the Spanish-American War , she left her husband and moved back to Havana with her four children. Here she built on her childhood preference for exotic pets - she had already kept a female macaque in France - and bought her first chimpanzee in 1902, but did not live permanently in Cuba, but temporarily also in New York City and the holiday resort of Long Branch (New Jersey) .

After her house burned down in 1901, Rosalía Abreu had the new, stately home Las Delicias with a spacious park built on what was then the outskirts of Havana , which still exists today. The property housed numerous accommodations for animals and developed - not least because of her marriage to Luis Estévez Romero - into a meeting place for the wealthy and especially for those politically leaning towards the USA.

Because of her large animal husbandry and the intensity with which she personally looked after them, Rosalía Abreu was considered increasingly eccentric in the last years of her life. Her death in 1930 is documented by an obituary in the New York Herald Tribune dated November 5, 1930 (p. 5) and by an entry in the Bulletin of the Pan American Union (vol. 65, p. 105).

Monkey attitude

The keeping of monkeys on Rosalía Abreu's estate initially served no scientific purpose, but was in the tradition of private menageries . Her behavioral observations only found their way into behavioral research after the American psychologist and zoologist Robert Yerkes had contacted her by letter in July 1915 - without knowing that the first chimpanzee in captivity was called on April 27, 1915 Anumá , was born; a scientific report on this did not appear until 1916, written by Louis Montané, professor of anthropology at the University of Havana. In the following 18 months there was a lively correspondence between Yerkes and Abreu, in which Abreu described the keeping conditions and the behavior of the great apes; These letters show, among other things, that Anumá and her mother had dinner with Abreu and that mother and son behaved “very correctly at the table.” At the beginning of 1917, the correspondence ended abruptly, according to a letter from Yerkes, as a result of his official duties during of the First World War . Only in October 1923 did Yerkes get in touch with Abreu, whose animal husbandry had meanwhile given further chimpanzee births. As early as January 1924, Yerkes visited Cuba for ten days and sounded out whether it would be worthwhile to arrange a research stay with Abreu lasting several weeks. This actually took place in July 1924.

At that time, Rosalía Abreu's animal husbandry was home to various New World monkeys , vervet monkeys and gibbons as well as three orangutans and 14 chimpanzees. On the basis of Abreu's descriptions, his observations in Cuba and his studies on two chimpanzees kept at home, Yerkes' book Almost human emerged in 1925 , which made Abreu's animal husbandry known among behavioral researchers around the world.

Abreu's findings that the cages for great apes should be large and airy, with sunny and shady areas, that their cages shouldn't get too cold at night, that they should be kept in groups and fed with vegetable food, that they should always have access to fresh food Should have drinking water that left food had to be removed, they became common property of animal keepers in zoological gardens in the 20th century, but were still downright revolutionary in the 1920s. For example, the first great ape kept at London Zoo had only survived six months, the second 18 months and the third four years. At the beginning of the 20th century, breeding great apes in zoological gardens was still considered impossible; Even when Rosalía Abreu died in 1930, only seven chimpanzees had been born in captivity worldwide - four of them on Abreu's premises. Wolfgang Köhler had also successfully kept chimpanzees from 1914 to 1920, but only published the keeping conditions in passing.

Yerkes also reported that the now ten-year-old Anumá , although raised in close contact with people, “hardly equates to an average two-year-old child” in his behavior; the family structure of the chimpanzees, however, appeared to Yerkes to be quite comparable with that of humans. Anumá was shot dead by a guard in 1925 after he was bitten in the hand by Anumá .

In 1926 Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov asked Abreu whether a male chimpanzee was available as a sperm donor for the experimental fertilization of a woman. Ivanov probably learned about chimpanzee keeping in Cuba from Rosalía Abreus' sister or her husband while at the Pasteur Institute . Like Russian and American biologists, Abreu understood such an experiment as a test of Darwin's hypothesis that the chimpanzee was man's closest relative, and was initially open-minded. However, after a threatening letter from the Ku Klux Klan addressed to her , she withdrew from this project. Nevertheless, she stated in a written decree about the whereabouts of her animals after her death that she had no concerns about crossing a male chimpanzee with a female Homo sapiens . At the same time, however, she refused to fertilize a female chimpanzee with the semen of a man because a man was too big and the female chimpanzee would suffer pain during childbirth. After Abreu's death in 1930, Ivanov did not conduct such an experiment again, as he fell out of favor with Stalin that year and was sentenced to five years' exile in Alma-Ata , where he died in 1932.

The pioneering efforts of Rosalia Abreu and - completely independent of it - by Wolfgang Köhler enabled Robert Yerkes, 1929 a research station for the primates Biology Yale University set up, which he headed, and from 1930 to 1941 until today as The Yerkes National Primate Research Center continues .

literature

  • Clive DL Wynne: Rosalià Abreu and the Apes of Havana. In: International Journal of Primatology. Volume 29, No. 2, 2008, pp. 289-302, doi : 10.1007 / s10764-008-9242-0
  • Robert M. Yerkes: Almost human. The Century Co., New York 1925.
  • Louis Montané: A Cuban chimpanzee. In: Journal of Animal Behavior. Volume 6, No. 4, 1916, pp. 330-333

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Clive DL Wynne: Rosalia Abreu and the Apes of Havana. In: International Journal of Primatology , Volume 29, No. 2, 2008, pp. 289-302, doi : 10.1007 / s10764-008-9242-0 . The spelling of your first name in this original article is incorrect (see discussion page).
  2. ↑ zootierliste.de The world's first breeding of a chimpanzee in the zoo was not achieved until 1920 in New York.
  3. ↑ Louis Montané: A Cuban chimpanzee. In: Journal of Animal Behavior, Vol. 6, No. 4, 1916, pp. 330-333
  4. ^ Clive DL Wynne, p. 294
  5. ↑ Donald A Dewsbury: Comparative Psychology. In: Irving B. Weiner (Ed.): Handbook of Psychology, Vol. 1 , John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken 2001, p. 71
  6. ↑ see the book review by Samuel W. Fernberger in: Psychological Bulletin , Volume 23, No. 6, 1926, pp. 343-344, doi : 10.1037 / h0063915
  7. ↑ quoted from Clive DL Wynne, p. 297
  8. ↑ After her death, one of her chimpanzees came to the Anthropoid Experiment Station in Orange Park , Florida , set up by Robert Yerkes , see Animals: Ape Twins. ( Memento from November 25, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) On: time.com , text from Time from June 11, 1934.
  9. ↑ The spelling of your first name in this original article is incorrect (see discussion page).
personal data
SURNAME Abreu, Rosalía
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Cuban naturalist
DATE OF BIRTH January 14, 1862
DATE OF DEATH November 3, 1930