Name: Helen
Sex: Female
Born: April 2, 1980
Favorite food: Celery (Helen and Peppy are among few of our gibbons who prefer veggies to fruit or any other treats).
Favorite activity: Stealing glasses.

When our first rescued lab gibbon, Arun Rangsi, arrived at IPPL in 1981, we knew that eventually he would need a female companion, since gibbons live in monogamous pairs. In April 1982, the director of the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates (LEMSIP) in New York, Dr. Jan Moor-Jankowski, offered us a two-year-old female gibbon named Helen to be his mate.

John McGreal drove to New York to collect her. He found Helen sitting dejectedly in a cage. In the next cage an unhappy-looking male gibbon named Peppy sat sucking his thumb. Clearly, these gibbons were friends and cage-mates and had just been separated. After a series of phone-calls, we succeeded in persuading laboratory officials to send both gibbons to IPPL. They both became playmates for young Arun Rangsi, but, when the three grew up, we paired Helen with Peppy and found another gibbon to be Arun Rangsi’s mate.

Helen and Peppy had both come to the New York lab from the Comparative Oncology Laboratory of the University of California at Davis, which had closed down when it lost its funding and distributed its 50-plus gibbons far and wide. Helen had, fortunately, never been used for research. The laboratory may have been keeping her healthy for breeding purposes.

Helen is quite a feisty gibbon (some of us call her “Hellion”); she will throw food back at her caregivers after taking a bite if the fruit is not absolutely to her taste. Although she usually prefers veggies, she loves blueberries off the bushes near her cage; they produce only a handful or two when in season, and Helen thinks they should all be hers.

You have to watch out for your glasses around her, too. Our senior animal caregiver Donetta remembers one day, years ago, when Shirley was scratching Peppy’s back, Helen managed to grab Shirley’s reading glasses. They tried to get the glasses away from Helen, but no luck, so Shirley suggested waiting until Helen got tired of them and dropped them. Donetta came back half an hour later, and there was Helen—wearing Shirley’s glasses. She was lying on her back and slowly moving her head back and forth, no doubt thinking, “So this is how humans see the world!”