By JOSEPH FITZGERALD

MILLVILLE -- For the first few months of her life, Gabrielle, a little girl with big sad eyes, clung to Linda Whiting night and day for warmth and protection. Dressed in preemie diapers and nursing from a bottle every two hours, Gabby bonded quickly with her doting surrogate mother.

A year later, Gabby had grown into a boisterous toddler, raiding the refrigerator and scouring the kitchen cupboards for cans of her favorite black olives. When she was happy, Gabby would spend hours swinging on curtain rods in the living room. If she was in a bad mood, she’d get agitated and occasionally bite her dad.
No, Gabby isn’t some problem child with behavioral issues.
She’s a White-handed gibbon and the love of Linda Whiting’s life.
Gabby was born in captivity 14 years ago at Southwick’s Zoo in Mendon, but her mother rejected her soon after birth. Weak and vulnerable, she was taken in by foster parents, Linda and Gary Whiting of Chestnut Hill Road, both veteran zookeepers and seasoned primate foster parents.
The Whitings have helped hand-rear more than eight monkeys over the years, and while they admit to developing close bonds with each of them, they’ve never lost sight of the fact that monkeys, despite their cute faces and comical antics, remain wild animals.
When Linda Whiting talks about the recent tragic chimpanzee attack in Connecticut, she shakes her head in disbelief.
“Most people can’t imagine the strength a chimpanzee has. They have long muscular arms and their fingernails are like carbon steel,” she says. “Chimpanzees have amazingly sharp teeth and when they become agitated and flip out, it’s bite first ask questions later. They are fascinating animals, but they’re still wild animals.”
Police shot and killed the 200-pound chimpanzee in Stamford after it attacked a 55-year-old woman, leaving her in critical condition with major “life-altering” injuries to her face and hands.
According to police, Charla Nash was visiting the home of the primate’s owner, 70-year-old Sandra Herold, when the chimp, named Travis, attacked. Herold saved her friend’s life by stabbing the 14-year-old chimpanzee with a knife and bludgeoning him with a shovel. The chimp was eventually killed by a police officer who responded to a 911 call and shot the animal as it opened the door and entered his patrol car.
“With a chimpanzee that size and age and with the owner being as old as she is, it was a disaster waiting to happen,” said Whiting, who’s worked at Southwick’s Zoo for more than 20 years. “You’ve got to stay one step ahead of them all the time.”
“The way a chimpanzee’s muscle is attached to its skeleton, you’re talking about a creature that is four to six times stronger than a man, especially if it’s an adult chimp and as heavy as the one we heard about in Connecticut,” says Noel Rowe, founder of Primate Conservation, Inc., a Charlestown, RI-based volunteer non-profit foundation dedicated to studying, preserving and maintaining the habitats of the least known and most endangered primates in the world.
Rowe, a primate expert and author of “The Pictorial Guide to the Living Primates,” founded PCI in 1992 after witnessing the destruction of a lowland forest in Madagascar. Since its first grant in 1993, the foundation has provided financial support for 235 projects in 27 countries with primate habitats.
“Any primate that shows displeasure is going to bite. I don’t know of anyone who trusts them. They’re unpredictable, which is one reason why you never see older chimpanzees in the movies,” he says. “To have a chimp running around loose in a house is unheard-of. At six months old they are already starting to assert their dominance. My sheer speculation as to what might have happened in Connecticut is that this was probably displaced aggression. It’s like if you are at work and you become angry with your boss, you’re not going to take it out on the boss you’re going to take it out on your co-worker or someone else you may have dominance over.”
Rowe says chimpanzees are enormously powerful and dangerous primates and that keeping a chimp or any primate as a pet is never a good idea.
It’s believed that up to 400 chimpanzees are currently being kept as pets in the U.S., although importing the apes from foreign countries for individuals’ use as pets has been outlawed since the 1970s. Although 20 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws to ban primates as pets, no current federal law prohibits it.
The U.S. House of Representatives this week was expected to vote on the Captive Primate Safety Act (H.R. 80), which seeks to outlaw the transportation of primates across state lines by individuals.
“I don’t mean to use the word crazy here in a pejorative way, but you have to be crazy if you think you can domesticate a chimpanzee or any other primate,” says Rowe. “They start out all cute and cuddly but then they aren’t babies anymore. Monkeys make terrible pets. They are group animals and although they can adapt to humans to an extent, they will bite.”
Whiting and her husband Gary, a retired zookeeper at Capron Park Zoo in Attleboro, have never fostered chimpanzees, but they’ve had plenty of experience with smaller primates, including capuchins and vervets. In each case, the Whitings provided foster care for the animals until they were well enough and old enough to return to the zoo.
Gabby, however, was their first ape.
Like the gorilla, chimpanzee and orangutan, the White-handed gibbon is an ape, not a monkey. The chief characteristics distinguishing apes from monkeys are the absence of a tail, their more or less upright posture and the high development of their brain. The White-handed gibbon (also known as the Lar gibbon) has a black to pale brown or yellowish-gray fur body, with white hair framing a black naked face.
The palms of the hand and soles of the feet are also free of fur and white in color, hence its name. The animal’s long arms and grasping hands with thumb contribute to its ability to swing through the trees.
Adult males can weigh between 10 and 20 pounds, while the females are slightly smaller. The lifespan of wild gibbons may reach 25 to 35 years.
White-handed gibbons “brachiate,” or swing by the arms, from branch to branch horizontally and vertically. Their long, strong arms enable them to quickly change direction in flight and to catch a handhold if they fall.
Gabby came into the Whitings home, located less than a mile from the zoo, when she was just two weeks old. Her mother had become sick and, for some reason, would not accept the newborn. For the first few weeks of her young life, she clung to Linda 24 hours a day, curled up in a pouch in an apron around Whiting’s waist.
“We had her since she was a baby and it’s been a very rewarding experience, but it wasn’t as easy as a lot of people might imagine,” she says. “We’ve gone through 12 dozen curtain rods over the years. We had to buy preemie Pampers by the case and we had to baby proof everything and lock the fridge. Apes are extremely smart. They have the intelligence of a 4-year-old.”
Gabby was kept on a diet of fruit, vegetables, monkey chow and water, but her favorite snack is black olives, which the Whitings used to keep in a kitchen cupboard. “One day she saw a picture of the olives on the label of the can and from that day forward she would open the cabinet, grab a can and then run up to my husband to open it,” Whiting says. “They can easily recognize pictures and symbols.”
But the Whitings were often reminded that despite Gabby’s childlike antics, she was still a wild animal, a fact driven home every so often when an agitated Gabby would take a chunk of flesh out of their hand or arm with her needle-point teeth.
“We’ve both been bitten, but that’s part of the territory,” Linda says.
A few months ago, the Whitings realized that their days as Gabby’s caretakers were over. At 18 pounds and fully mature, she was brought back to Southwick’s where she quickly took her place among the other gibbons at the zoo.
“She went back to the zoo just before winter started and she’s doing very well,” Linda says. “She’s adjusted to her life at the zoo and I’m thrilled.”
“She’s an amazing animal and the highlight of my career. My greatest desire now is to see her bond with a male, mate and have offspring,” she adds.
Whiting hopes Gabby will be smitten by Ralphie, a male white handed gibbon who was recently introduced to the troop at the zoo.
“As much as we enjoyed Gabby’s company, this was something we were doing for the zoo and something we have a lot of practical experience doing,” Whiting says. “We’ve done this for many years and we understand the psychology of primates. People need to realize that they do not make good pets. They can be unpredictable and in many cases, as we saw last week, very dangerous.”