Brian the Mentally Ill Bonobo, and How He Healed

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/brian-the-mentally-ill-bonobo-and-how-he-healed/372596/

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A young bonobo at a sanctuary in the Congo (Reuters)

***SNIP

Brian's story is one of many that Laurel Braitman tells in her new book, Animal Madness: How anxious dogs, compulsive parrots, and elephants in recovery help us understand ourselves, a survey of mental illness in animals and its relationship to our own problems.

The individual stories in the book are compelling, and they lead towards an interesting conclusion about the way we project our own attributes onto other species. How much should we anthropomorphize animals like our pets or apes like Brian? As much as it helps us help them. If treating Brian like a human psychiatric patient helped Prosen treat the suffering animal, then it makes sense to project that level of humanness onto the creature.

Prosen began with a full psychiatric history of Brian. He'd been born at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta. Bonobos are famously, polymorphously, perversely sexual—but they don't generally engage in sexual violence. And yet Brian's father, who had suffered his own traumas as a research animal, sodomized Brian for years. During his seven years at Yerkes, Brian started to stick his own hand into his rectum, causing bleeding and—over time—thickening of the tissue there. It was a horrifying situation.

In 1997, when Brian arrived, the bonobo crew at the Milwaukee County Zoo, which was the largest captive troop in the United States, was unusually stable and nice, seemingly due to the calming presence of two apes, Maringa, and Brian's friend, Lody. The troop had already helped other animals recover from mental disturbances, which is one reason that Brian had been sent there. But he seemed beyond natural recovery.


Lody in 2005 (Richard Brodzeller/Zoological Society of Milwaukee)

[hlthe2b]

1. wonderful story of recovery.....

It is wrenching to read stories of how so many of these animals have suffered, but when others step in to help them recover, including empathetic members of their own species (yes, anthropomorphism be damned, they are empathetic), it just warms the hart.

[xchrom]

2. i was hoping some one would appreciate this. nt