2008 Woodie Awards
Western class fundraising to adopt orphan chimp
Judy McClintock, News Editor
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While most final class projects consist of a lengthy term paper or a well-researched speech, Western’s Primatology class is collecting money to save the life of an orphan chimpanzee.
The fourteen students of Anthropology 399 are in the midst of preparing two fundraisers, a gift basket raffle and a penny drive, in a collective effort to adopt, or sponsor, an orphan chimpanzee through the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI).
The JGI coordinates a sponsored guardianship program for orphan chimpanzee’s who live in sanctuaries, free from the harms of poachers or market vendors, across the African continent.
“Chimpanzees are very endangered right now,” said class student, Daniel Sprinkle, a junior Anthropology major.
According to the JGI website, chimps in the wild are the brink of extinction. At the turn of the last century, the website said, chimps living across Central and West Africa numbered about one million, and today their total is less than 200,000.
Sprinkle said the class has been an experience of learning about various primates and “how they are like us (humans).”
“Through studying them,” he said, “we study about ourselves.”
The fundraising project is a large part of the student’s grade, according to class professor, Jordan Hofer.
“This project is the heart of the class,” he said. “It carries the most weight in grade points.”
Sprinkle, who is treasurer of the project, said raffle tickets for a chimpanzee-related gift basket will be on sale May 9 through May 12.
The basket, he said, consists of candy, a stuffed animal and a movie coupon from Blockbuster. One dollar will buy three tickets, he said, and the selling station will be set up in the Werner University Center.
In addition, the Primatology students are conducting a penny drive to raise money, where jars will be placed on campus for the collection of student and community members’ contributions.
Sprinkle said the class is trying “to get as much money as we can”.
According to Hofer, Sprinkle and the rest of the class have taken over the project with determination. “They are succeeding at making what will probably amount to a nice sum for the Jane Goodall Institute,” he said.
Guardianship for an orphan chimpanzee is about $100, according to the JGI website. And, upon adoption, the guardian receives a photograph and biography of the adopted chimpanzee, a chimp poster, a certificate of guardianship and information about JGI research.
Despite being a large portion of their grade, Sprinkle said there is more urging the class to help.
“Because we are learning about them [chimpanzees] taking the class,” he said, “you want to keep them alive.”
Hofer said it is easy for a course on Primatology to go adrift in theory or abstraction when studying from a temperate valley, such as Western’s location, with no native wild species of primate. “It limits the interaction we have with the creatures themselves, most of which are going extinct in places we usually can only read, think, and talk about.”
“But the students in this course aren’t doing that,” Hofer said. “They know that chimpanzees are actual living critters with emotion and experience of conscious self.”
“This is our way of helping,” said Sprinkle, “to keep the species alive.”