When he was very young, he had been obsessed with cars but when he was two, his parents took him to a zoo in southern Sweden. Working as a zookeeper had been Beldt’s childhood dream. Photograph: Josefine Stenersen/The Guardian Probably you know at least some of them by name.įuruvik Zoo in November 2023. You spend time watching the chimpanzees: their paradoxically childlike and elderly appearance, their surly, hunched gaits. If you live in the city, you visit the zoo as a child, then as a parent, and then as a grandparent. Outside, it was -15C, and even inside the lecture theatre, people were wearing their jackets and hats.īeldt looked after the zoo’s chimpanzees. On the morning of 14 December 2022, Rickard Beldt, a 29-year-old keeper at Furuvik Zoo, was attending meetings on health and safety in Gävle, the nearest city to the zoo, which lies about 100 miles north of Stockholm. Then she flew for nine hours, to a place unlike any she had encountered before, the place she would live for the rest of her life. First, she was placed inside a small crate and driven to the airport in the capital, Monrovia, where she was loaded into the hold of a Swiss Air flight. ![]() And so, in 1986, Linda was sent on a very long and very unusual journey for a chimpanzee. The Bengtssons couldn’t bear to send Linda to an underfunded Liberian zoo, after she had grown used to the love and attention of a human home. ![]() The attack left the victim unrecognisable. In one particularly horrifying incident in 2009, a chimpanzee called Travis who had been raised by humans from birth mauled his owner’s friend, biting and tearing her face, ripping out her eyes, removing one of her hands and most of the other. The average chimpanzee is thought to be 50% stronger than a human of comparable body mass, and there are many accounts of supposedly domesticated pet chimps suddenly turning on people. Adult chimpanzees are affectionate but they are also strong and unpredictable. As the months passed, the Bengtssons grew conscious that Linda couldn’t stay with them. She would try to defend the boys while they played with their human friends, pushing and wrestling the strangers with a little more intent. Linda was protective of her new siblings. The same eyes, the same hands with fingerprints. “It was very exciting for us, coming from up north, to take care of a chimpanzee baby,” Bo told me, “and it was fascinating to study her. ![]() Bo Bengtsson used to place her on the handlebars of his bike, and the two of them would go on rides along the Yah River. Although some of the neighbours found it a little tiresome that the energetic young chimpanzee enjoyed ripping up their flowerbeds, the Bengtssons loved Linda. When the town wasn’t being drenched in monsoon rains, Linda spent long hot days outside playing with the boys and other children in the hilly, gated community of 100 or so houses that made up the neighbourhood, climbing the tamarind tree behind the Bengtsson house. The Swedish couple looked into Linda’s light brown eyes and long, soulful face, and decided that they could offer the little chimp a better life as a member of their household. She was offered to another of the company’s employees, Bo Bengtsson, and his wife, Pia, who had three young sons. The company’s managing director initially bought the baby chimpanzee, but it was soon decided that Linda, as she had now been named, would be happier growing up with other children. They took Linda to the town of Yekepa, where there was a base for a US-Swedish iron ore mining company. Adult chimpanzees are sometimes sold as food in bushmeat markets in central and west Africa, but the poachers knew that they could get a higher price by offering the baby chimpanzee to westerners as a pet. As a baby, in 1984, she saw her family shot by poachers in the Liberian jungle. ![]() For a year, she had lived in harmony with a Swedish couple and their three young children in Liberia. The problems began when Linda was about 18 months old.
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