Name: Peppy
Sex: Male
Born: January 23, 1979
Favorite food: Eggplant (Peppy and Helen are among the few of our gibbons who prefer veggies to fruit or any other treats).
Favorite activity: Sucking his thumb (like Elizabeth).

Peppy came to IPPL in April 1982 along with Helen. They arrived from the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates (LEMSIP), in New York, in 1982. We had intended to bring only Helen back to IPPL (we had meant her to be Arun Rangsi’s mate), but poor Peppy looked so forlorn at being separated from Helen that we arranged to have Peppy brought down south at the same time, as well. The two of them played happily with Arun Rangsi as youngsters. When they grew up, we kept Peppy and Helen together and found another gibbon female to be Arun Rangsi’s companion.

Peppy and Helen had been born at the Comparative Oncology Laboratory of the University of California at Davis. In March 1979, when Peppy was only two months old, he was infected with the gibbon leukemia virus, but repeated tests indicated that he was “Ab-” (which means “antibodies, negative”) and “viremia, negative.” A note on his medical record states that “the virus preparation may have been inactive.” We call Peppy “The Gibbon That Got Away.”

Peppy sucked his thumb when he arrived and still does—just like our Elizabeth. Once he even sucked his thumb raw. Our vet took a look at it but said there was no way to bandage it or stitch it up, as Peppy would remove the stitches and only make things worse. Instead, he suggested the best policy was to “wait and see” and hope the thumb would heal on its own. Fortunately it did!

When let out of his night quarters, Peppy begins every single day by running from one end of his outdoor enclosure to the other—the whole length of it, arms flung up, out of sheer excitement: it’s as though every day he’s grateful not to be stuck in a lab. He gets along well with Helen and his caregivers. Says our senior caregiver Donetta, he’ll point her to the exact parts of his body that he wants to be scratched.