The problems began when Linda was about 18 months old. For a year, she had lived in harmony with a Swedish couple and their three young children in Liberia. Hers had not been an easy start in life. As a baby, in 1984, she saw her family shot by poachers in the Liberian jungle. Adult chimpanzees are sometimes sold as food in bushmeat markets in central and west Africa, but the poachers knew that they could get a higher price by offering the baby chimpanzee to westerners as a pet.
They took Linda to the town of Yekepa, where there was a base for a US-Swedish iron ore mining company. The company’s managing director initially bought the baby chimpanzee, but it was soon decided that Linda, as she had now been named, would be happier growing up with other children. She was offered to another of the company’s employees, Bo Bengtsson, and his wife, Pia, who had three young sons. The Swedish couple looked into Linda’s light brown eyes and long, soulful face, and decided that they could offer the little chimp a better life as a member of their household.
When the town wasn’t being drenched in monsoon rains, Linda spent long hot days outside playing with the boys and other children in the hilly, gated community of 100 or so houses that made up the neighbourhood, climbing the tamarind tree behind the Bengtsson house. Although some of the neighbours found it a little tiresome that the energetic young chimpanzee enjoyed ripping up their flowerbeds, the Bengtssons loved Linda. Bo Bengtsson used to place her on the handlebars of his bike, and the two of them would go on rides along the Yah River. “It was very exciting for us, coming from up north, to take care of a chimpanzee baby,” Bo told me, “and it was fascinating to study her. The same eyes, the same hands with fingerprints. She was almost exactly as we are.”
Linda was protective of her new siblings. She would try to defend the boys while they played with their human friends, pushing and wrestling the strangers with a little more intent. As the months passed, the Bengtssons grew conscious that Linda couldn’t stay with them. Adult chimpanzees are affectionate but they are also strong and unpredictable. The average chimpanzee is thought to be 50% stronger than a human of comparable body mass, and there are many accounts of supposedly domesticated pet chimps suddenly turning on people. In one particularly horrifying incident in 2009, a chimpanzee called Travis who had been raised by humans from birth mauled his owner’s friend, biting and tearing her face, ripping out her eyes, removing one of her hands and most of the other. The attack left the victim unrecognisable.
The Bengtssons couldn’t bear to send Linda to an underfunded Liberian zoo, after she had grown used to the love and attention of a human home. And so, in 1986, Linda was sent on a very long and very unusual journey for a chimpanzee. First, she was placed inside a small crate and driven to the airport in the capital, Monrovia, where she was loaded into the hold of a Swiss Air flight. Then she flew for nine hours, to a place unlike any she had encountered before, the place she would live for the rest of her life. Sweden.
* * *
On the morning of 14 December 2022, Rickard Beldt, a 29-year-old keeper at Furuvik Zoo, was attending meetings on health and safety in Gävle, the nearest city to the zoo, which lies about 100 miles north of Stockholm. Outside, it was -15C, and even inside the lecture theatre, people were wearing their jackets and hats.
Beldt looked after the zoo’s chimpanzees. These animals are the pride of Gävle. If you live in the city, you visit the zoo as a child, then as a parent, and then as a grandparent. You spend time watching the chimpanzees: their paradoxically childlike and elderly appearance, their surly, hunched gaits. Probably you know at least some of them by name.
Working as a zookeeper had been Beldt’s childhood dream. When he was very young, he had been obsessed with cars but when he was two, his parents took him to a zoo in southern Sweden. “I threw all the cars away. Now it was all about animals,” he told me, as we sat outside one of Furuvik’s cafes earlier this year. Beldt has spent all his adult life working in zoos, first with big cats, then with hoofstock, reptiles and monkeys. Then, in 2018, at Furuvik, he was assigned to the chimpanzees. He liked that it took time to build a relationship with them. They are discerning creatures. You have to work hard and show great patience to be accepted by chimpanzees, but once you win their trust, the bond is for life.
At 12.30pm on that December day, just before they were due to break for lunch in Gävle, Beldt’s phone rang. It was one of his colleagues. Furuvik Zoo is only open to the public during the summer, but on that December morning, there were still 35 people on site: administrative staff, zookeepers attending to the animals and contractors renovating the amusement park, known as the Tivoli.
“Don’t come to the park today,” she said.
He thought he couldn’t have heard what she said next correctly. He asked her to repeat herself. “And then,” Beldt told me, “I just remember everything going dark.”
* * *
Furuvik Zoo was home to seven chimpanzees. They lived in a building that the park refers to as the ape house, in a series of colour-coded enclosures over two levels (green, brown and yellow) connected to one another by hatches. That morning, two of Beldt’s colleagues, Lucas Eriksson* and Eva Lindgren* had been tending to the chimpanzees, following the usual routine: locking them in the brown enclosure while they set up activities in the other enclosures to keep the chimps stimulated and active.
Not so long ago, the keepers might have entered the chimps’ enclosure, but a 2012 incident at Kolmården Wildlife Park, when wolves mauled one of their keepers to death, led to extensive changes in how Swedish zoos operate. Keepers would no longer be allowed any physical contact with the animals in their care: the safety of the staff was paramount. The incident has made zoo managers “very, very nervous”, a now-retired zoo vet Bengt Roken, who has worked extensively at Furuvik, told me. “They think: if there is an accident, I might be blamed.” (After the keeper’s death, the head of Kolmården Wildlife Park was found guilty of manslaughter, for having failed to implement proper safety procedures.)
This isn’t the only significant change that has taken place at Furuvik in recent years. Between 2004 and 2010, the zoo was owned by a cooperative made up of its staff. Then, it was sold to a company named Parks and Resorts Scandinavia AB, which runs amusement parks all over Sweden including Gröna Lund and Kolmården Wildlife Park. Before, the primary focus had been on Furuvik as a zoo; now the park expanded to include more amusement park rides, to increase revenue for the parent company.
At noon, Eriksson and Lindgren unlocked the hatches that connect all three enclosures to each other so the chimps could move freely, and left by a door on the upper floor of one of the enclosures. According to the zoo’s internal notes on the incident, as Eriksson reached the lower floor, he was struck by a strange feeling. The keepers are supposed to double check that each door is locked. Had they done that? He looked up, and his stomach dropped. The door on the upper floor of the enclosure was open.
He ran up the stairs, but it was already too late. He caught sight of Selma, a 14-year-old chimpanzee, lumbering off down the corridor outside the enclosure. Santino, the park’s oldest chimp at 44, was at the door.
“No! Go back inside!” Eriksson yelled. Instinctively, he grabbed Santino by the shoulders and turned him around, trying to push him back into the enclosure while he attempted to shut the door. Eriksson managed to get the ape inside. But then Santino began to screech, and Eriksson realised with horror that the other chimpanzees were coming to join him. He saw no choice but to run.
“Get out of the house!” Eriksson shouted to Lindgren as he ran back down the stairs. Lindgren scrambled out of an external door, and tried to lock it behind her. But as she was doing so, she saw the handle of the door begin to turn. As she ran to a house that the zookeepers use as an office, 20 metres from the chimpanzee building, she heard Eriksson’s voice blare out of her walkie-talkie, calling everyone on site. A code red, the highest level of emergency. All over the park, staff barricaded themselves into whichever building was closest.
* * *
Sandra Wilke, Furuvik’s CEO, was in the park’s main administrative office, just over the road from the park itself. Wilke, 42, doesn’t look particularly corporate, with her short crop of dyed red hair, but she has the measured, sensible air of a seasoned businessperson. Wilke took over Furuvik in 2020, having previously worked in theme park and hotel administration for Gröna Lund. A typical day for her involved logistics and strategy, not on-the-ground work with animals.
She received a phone call from the park’s head of animal welfare, Natalie Magnusson, who informed her about the code red. Fearing for her safety if she entered the park on foot, Wilke got in her car and drove the 30 seconds to Furuvik. The zoo’s worst-case scenario had come to pass. Now Wilke found herself hoping to God that the plans for such a scenario would work.
It’s not uncommon for animals to escape from zoos, and all zoos have protocol to deal with this eventuality. The precise response, however, depends on which animal has escaped. In 2022, a king cobra escaped from its enclosure in the reptile house at Skansen Aquarium, a zoo in Stockholm. The week-long hunt for the snake involved calling in X-ray operators from Stockholm’s main airport, who used equipment typically used to scan suitcases for narcotics to X-ray the reptile house for the shape of a snake hiding in pipes or air vents. (The cobra, now renamed Houdini, returned to its enclosure on its own, in the end.)
Seven chimpanzees on the loose require a very different approach. Chimpanzees are big and smart, they are adept climbers and can move at up to 25mph. For the humans catching the chimps, the experience can be emotionally challenging, even existentially confusing, in a way that returning an escaped cobra to its cage is not. Great apes, the name given to large primates like chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas, are so like us. They hold hands, embrace and kiss one another, and the meanings of these gestures seem to be the same as when we do it. They express fear, delight, surprise, affection. And yet they are not us. The Dutch zoologist Frans de Waal, who has more than 50 years of experience with chimpanzees, suggests in his seminal book Chimpanzee Politics that we cannot help but feel a sense of unease around the animal. How should we relate to them, these creatures we know to be wild, but who look like we do? Last month, I stood with a zookeeper at a zoo in the south of England, watching a group of chimpanzees sun themselves in their enclosure. “I find them terrifying,” she admitted. “They’re so human. Who is looking at who?”
* * *
Wilke arrived at the zoo about 12.30pm, 15 minutes after Selma escaped, and went straight to a maintenance building where six of the park’s staff were holed up. The first part of Furuvik’s plans for the escape of what the park calls its högriskdjur, high-risk animals, had been followed: get all people on site locked inside zoo buildings.
About five minutes after Eriksson and Lindgren had fled the ape house, they had seen through the windows of the office where they had sought refuge that three more chimps, Linda, Torsten and Tjobbe, had escaped too. Linda, 42, was carrying Torsten, who was an infant at three years old. Female chimps carry their offspring on their bellies for the first eight months of their life, and then carry them periodically until the baby is about five years old. Young chimps continue to spend a lot of time with their mothers well into adulthood, which females reach at about 13 and males at 16. Family is important to a chimpanzee.
Chimpanzees are curious creatures, eager for novelty. And so, despite the bitter cold, the chimps were keen to investigate this new world. With Torsten clinging to her, Linda climbed on to one of the cars parked outside the ape house, and climbed down again. Tjobbe, a 19-year-old chimp and the group’s dominant male, seemed angsty, darting around outside the ape house. There was so much to discover, and by 12.30pm, around the time Wilke arrived on site, all three had left the area surrounding the ape house. With no CCTV in the park, and without being able to leave their hiding places safely, staff lost track of the chimps.
It was at this point that Wilke and Magnusson called in the hunters. In emergency scenarios, the park can contact a group of locals with gun licences, which they use for hunting deer. On the phone, Wilke and Magnusson asked them to drive into the park to search for the chimps, and to come armed with hunting rifles. If the animals could not be safely contained, they knew that there was only one possible course of action to guarantee human safety. The chimpanzees would have to be killed.
* * *
Apart from the zoo, Furuvik consists of little more than a few clusters of rust-red and yellow houses. It is a small, sleepy place of about 800 people. In the weeks before the escape, the most notable article in the local newspaper was an interview with a local resident who had done some masonry work on a house that would be shown on Grand Designs Sweden. Real news, when there is any, travels fast.
At the local primary school, about 12.30pm, children were beginning to receive texts from parents who worked in the park. Word of the chimpanzee escape was reaching other zookeepers now, too: Beldt heard in Gävle. Local radio got wind. But it would still be 90 minutes until the news reached someone who had more knowledge of the Furuvik chimpanzees than anybody else on Earth. In Älvkarleby, a town just south of Furuvik, Ing-Marie Persson was still happily cleaning out the stables attached to her home, none the wiser that this would be one of the defining days of her life.
Persson grew up just a mile from the zoo’s gates and spent her early teens working summers at Furuvik. When she got a full-time position there in 1979, the zoo had three chimpanzees, all elderly. Over the next decade, the zoo established a new group. Santino, four, arrived in 1982 from Munich Zoo, where he hadn’t been integrating well with the other chimps. On arrival, he had to go into quarantine for four months. Persson spent every day with Santino during this period, looking after him and keeping him entertained, and in turn being groomed by him. Grooming is one of the greatest compliments a chimp can give, a sign of love and respect.
The relationship between keeper and chimpanzee depends on their respective personalities. Sometimes, it’s like a friendship, sometimes it’s like mutual courtesy with a colleague, sometimes it can feel like a rivalry. Persson saw her relationship to Santino as parental. “I can say I was a little like a mother for him,” she told me.
Four years later, when Linda arrived at Furuvik, Persson was appointed to take care of her, too. Having lost her family to the poachers in Liberia, Linda had got used to living around humans rather than her fellow apes. Together, Persson and Santino taught her how to be a chimpanzee: how to interpret and use crucial chimp gestures, such as putting their fingers in each other’s mouths to express a friendly greeting.
For the next 30 or so years, Persson devoted her life to the chimpanzees at Furuvik. Santino and Linda became siblings to one another and, like many siblings, they developed contrasting personalities. Santino was thoughtful where Linda was impatient. Linda was sensitive to stress, whereas Santino was more level-headed. Over the decades, Persson, Santino and Linda shared the joys and the pains of life. Persson’s husband, Johnny, who also worked at Furuvik, remembers a moment when, after learning that her father had died, Persson went to the chimpanzee enclosure as usual. Santino, seeing on her face that something terrible had happened, took her in his arms and held her for a long time. “We trusted each other so much, Santino and I,” Persson told me.
Before it was sold in 2010 to the current owners, the Perssons had a 9.5% stake in the zoo. In the time they worked there, Furuvik had a few amusement rides, but the new owners wanted to build many more. Initially, the Perssons stayed on under the new management, but after two years they decided it was time to leave. The couple wanted new, larger facilities for the animals, and the new owners wanted to spend more on rollercoasters. According to the local newspaper Gefle Dagblad, between 2010 and 2017, the new owners invested more than £5m on rides at Furuvik; the corresponding figure for the zoo’s animals was about £400,000. (A spokesperson for Furuvik told me that the investments were intended to increase ticket sales, which in turn would bring more revenue, which would, in turn, mean more money could be invested in the animals.)
Persson knew that once she left Furuvik, she could never go back. It wouldn’t be fair to the chimpanzees to abandon them over and over again. It had to be a clean break. “They never forget people, but over time, the hurt gets less and less,” she said. “It’s the same as human beings.”
* * *
By 12.45pm, three cars of hunters and experienced staff were patrolling the park. Just before 1pm, one of the hunters’ cars stopped near a rollercoaster. There, in the Tivoli, next to the carousel, were Linda and Torsten.
Torsten was born in 2019, to Maria Magdalena and Tjobbe. His birth was a special time for Furuvik: their first baby chimp in 25 years. But when Torsten was two months old, Maria Magdalena began to neglect him, putting him down and ignoring his cries. Eventually, the keepers had to intervene, or the little chimp would have starved. For two months, Beldt and two of his colleagues carried Torsten on their stomachs, on shifts. “I don’t remember how many nights I slept with him. Well, I was awake – he slept,” Beldt said. He would sit on a mattress with Torsten in a building next to the ape house, and together they would watch Beldt’s ice hockey team, Djurgården, compete in the playoffs.
After two months, they reintroduced Torsten to the group, in the hope that Linda would adopt him, as she had with two of the other young chimps in previous years. She did. “She wasn’t a perfect mother,” said Beldt, “but she was still a better mother than Maria Magdalena.” Torsten grew well. On his second birthday, the zoo gave him a pile of snowballs to look like a cake, with vegetable hearts placed around it and a letter T on top.
Now that Linda and Torsten had been located near the rollercoaster, Wilke and Magnusson were faced with a difficult decision about what to do next. The escape had occurred at 12.15pm. By 2.45pm, the sun would be all but down. In the dark, it would be much harder to track the chimps. And if the chimps got out of the park by climbing the exterior fence and ran off into the night, they would die of cold by morning.
The cold posed another problem. Wilke and Magnusson consulted the zoo’s vets about whether it might be possible to shoot the chimps with tranquilliser guns. What they learned was not encouraging. The tranquillising ingredient in the dart was liquid and would probably congeal or even freeze very quickly in -15C, making it totally ineffective. If the hunter were able to keep the loaded dart somewhere warm and load into the rifle at the last minute, they would stand at least some chance of success, but apes are smart and dextrous enough to rip out tranquilliser darts. At that point, they are liable to be extremely angry with whoever shot them. (Vets have to wear balaclavas when they come to do procedures on chimps because chimps remember and resent medical treatment.) Even if the chimps were successfully sedated, the park had no secure zone in which to put them. “I would call this situation more or less a mission impossible,” said Roken, the vet.
Wilke, still sitting in the maintenance building, spoke to Magnusson and to the hunters, and to the vets on the phone. Their assessment was that Linda and Torsten did not look as if they were going to return to the ape house of their own accord. Ultimately, the decision lay with Wilke. “It was the most terrible and most hard situation I have been in,” she told me, her face grave. Her priority was the safety of her staff. “We didn’t see any solution but to shoot,” she said.
At 1.05pm, Wilke gave the order. From inside the car, which had remained stationed by the rollercoaster close to Linda and Torsten, a hunter took aim and fired. Linda slumped to the ground. It took a further 10 minutes for the hunter to get a clean shot at Torsten. By 1.15pm, he was dead, too.
Beldt had gone straight from the meeting in Gävle to the house of another off-duty Furuvik zookeeper, where they had been sitting on her sofa in disbelief, following every update from the park. “I don’t remember how many times I said: this isn’t happening. It’s just a nightmare. When we wake up in a few hours, it won’t have happened,” he told me. When we spoke about the moment he heard of Torsten’s death, Beldt was suddenly quiet. He fought back tears. “It’s always hard talking about Torsten,” he said eventually, looking at his knees. “I don’t get a panic attack every time I talk about him any more, but it’s hard. He was like my little kid.”
* * *
At 1.30pm, with just an hour of good daylight left, no one knew know where the other five chimps were. Footsteps were spotted in the snow by the fence close to the entrance, but it was hard to tell which chimp had made them. At 1.41pm, alerted by Wilke, a dozen or so armed police officers set up guard around the park’s perimeter, to prevent anybody coming in.
It was around this time that journalists from national news outlets began arriving. When Markus Dahlberg, a reporter for the Swedish national broadcaster SVT, reached the gates, a police car sped towards them. “They just screamed at us to get [back] in the car and get away from here, it’s not safe,” he said. Dahlberg was baffled by the way the police were acting. “They seemed scared,” he said. “We thought: how dangerous could it be to meet a chimpanzee outside?”
* * *
Now, shortly before 2pm, Persson went inside to wash her hands after cleaning her stables. The phone was ringing. She picked up, and a friend told her what he had just heard on the radio: that chimps were on the loose at Furuvik. Persson was concerned, but she wasn’t panicking. She had dealt with animal escapes before. “We must go there and help them,” Persson said to her husband. “I can bring them inside again.”
When Persson arrived at Furuvik 15 minutes later, she tried to tell the police about her connection to the chimps, but they stood firm. No one would be allowed to enter.
It was only when she got home that she learned that Linda and Torsten were dead. She sat down and wept.
By this point, the park had called in the fire department, whose camera drones were aiding the search for the remaining five chimps. The drones showed that at least two of them were still inside the ape house, and had managed to open some windows that led out on to the roof. Selma was now spotted on the roof. The hunter nearest to Selma, in his car, was given the order to shoot. He took aim.
At the last moment, Selma moved. The bullets struck her right arm and right eye, but she was able to flee back inside through the window of the ape house. “It was terrible. Of course it was, for the one who shot and for every one of us,” Wilke told me. And they had another problem: Santino was also coming out to explore the roof.
Santino was, according to those who knew him well, an unusually smart ape. “He was a thinking chimpanzee,” as Persson put it. Beldt agreed. “With some of the other chimps, if you look them in the eye, it’s like, there’s not much there,” he said, making a cuckoo noise. “But with him, he was looking into your soul.” He loved to paint, and was so prolific that the park started selling his artwork to raise money for chimpanzee sanctuaries in Africa. Persson has one of Santino’s paintings – an abstract work of blue, red and brown streaks, with a bright green circle in one corner – on a mantelpiece in her home. “So many people have said oh, it’s the same as Picasso,” she told me, laughing. One of Sweden’s crown princesses, Victoria, was fond of his art, and came to see him on more than one occasion. Santino was also gentle. As they get older, male chimps become less aggressive and more caring. Santino was the elder statesman of the Furuvik chimps, a calm and authoritative presence.
In his younger days, Santino could be mischievous, too. As well as being a zoo, Furuvik has been a primate research station since 2007. Mathias Osvath, a primatologist who ran the research centre, published some observations on Santino in 2008. Before the park opened in the mornings, Santino would hide rocks in strategic locations, so that when visitors arrived, he had a stash of stones to pelt them with. It wasn’t the first time researchers had found that chimps had the ability to plan for the future, but it was the instance that caught the world’s imagination. Santino featured in international news reports. Jane Goodall came to visit him twice.
The loss of Santino would be a travesty, not just to the park keepers who loved him, but to researchers all over the world. Yet Wilke and Magnusson saw no other option. If they couldn’t guarantee that he was going to stay inside the ape house, they believed that he posed too great a danger to human life. In consultation with one of the hunters, they decided to shoot Santino while he was inside the house, through a window, to limit the possibility of him climbing down and attacking the shooter if they missed. The hunter fired, and they saw Santino fall to the floor inside the house.
Not long after, Manda, one of the park’s younger females at 19 years old, was also spotted climbing in and out of the window. The same decision was taken. When Manda’s face, with her wide, chestnut-brown eyes, appeared at the window, the gun was fired once more. A direct hit.
“They were inside the monkey house, and they still shot them,” Persson said, obviously distressed. “It’s terrible. Why?”
* * *
By 5.30pm, drones were finally able to confirm that the remaining three chimps – Selma, Tjobbe and Maria Magdalena – were all inside the ape house. Hunters stopped patrolling the park, and set up a ring of cars around the building. Then, shortly before 6pm, the ape house was plunged into darkness. The lights were on an automatic timer, and the control panel was inside the building, unreachable. There would be no opportunity for clean shots, or to enter the building safely, until the morning.
Because the chimps had thrown open many of the windows, the inside of the ape house, usually heated to between 20 and 24C, would now be very cold. Elsewhere in the ape house, there was an area known as the Rainforest, which was home to tropical animals such as marmosets and iguanas. Wilke and her staff feared for the safety of these animals, who might freeze to death overnight, or worse. “Had they eaten up all our tamarins?” Beldt said. “We had no idea.”
By the evening, the situation at Furuvik had become international news. The zoo put out a statement on its Facebook page, which was inundated with outraged responses. “You keep animals in cages, display them for people’s entertainment, say that you care about them but then as soon as something doesn’t go as planned, all your love for them is gone,” one person commented.
None of this filtered through to Wilke and her staff on the ground. “I was just in the crisis,” she told me. That evening, she was busy seeing to it that most of the people who had been barricaded inside the park’s building all day were evacuated. Wilke stayed on with a few of the keepers, in a house with some beds. She sat in a chair and tried to get some rest overnight. “I don’t think anyone was sleeping,” Wilke said.
Just after 5am on Thursday 15 December, the lights came back on in the ape house. Drones confirmed that all three chimps were still inside. An hour later, Beldt arrived at the park, along with other zookeepers and workers from Kolmården Wildlife Park, 180 miles south of Furuvik, who could help take care of Furuvik’s other animals, who still needed feeding. The zoo staff set up floodlights around the ape house.
That morning, a war room was set up in the animal office, with Wilke, Magnusson, Beldt and a handful of other staff familiar with chimp behaviour. “We were all nervous, and stressed and sad,” recalled Beldt. “But there also was some determination: we’re gonna solve this, we’re gonna save the three, we’re gonna make everything OK.”
The first plan they formulated – using air horns to scare the chimpanzees into one of their enclosures and lock them in there – was a failure. The chimps did not move. So they turned to plan B, which involved reclaiming a part of the ape house called the researchers’ corridor. From there, staff could make contact with the chimps through bars and give them food, and set up heaters to keep them warm.
But before they could carry out this plan, the automatic lights in the ape house went out again at 6pm. Even with the floodlights, the staff preferred to wait until the morning to carry out the operation. Another long night stretched out before them.
There was to be more drama before morning. About 10pm, the ape house fire alarm began to blare. The fire department found there was no fire. Instead, they suspected that the chimps had damaged some hot water pipes, and the alarm was responding to steam. But the alarm could only be turned off from inside the building. The alarm company could not shut it off, nor could the fire department. Eventually, after four hours of hellish ringing, zoo staff tried to disable the alarm by using a forklift truck to knock one of the alarm horns on the outside the building off the wall. At 2am, they succeeded, and the noise finally stopped.
“There were so many different things against us,” Wilke said.
* * *
Once the sun was up, at about 8.30am, drones confirmed that all the apes were in their yellow enclosure. The task team entered the research corridor as quietly as they could. From there, they could lock the three doors connecting the chimpanzee enclosures to the staff areas of the house.
Now, almost 48 hours after the initial breakout, the keepers could safely access those areas themselves. They could also offer the chimps food through the bars of their enclosure, set up heaters, and get vets in to assess them. Maria Magdalena and Tjobbe had coughs, but it didn’t seem to be anything worse than a normal cold. (During the winter, the apes and the keepers are constantly giving each other the sniffles.) Selma, with her wounded arm and eye, was faring worse. The keepers gave the chimpanzees sedatives in a warm drink, hoping they would go to sleep in the yellow enclosure where they could be contained. Instead, they lumbered off upstairs and fell asleep in the green enclosure, which had more hatches to secure than the others.
In Älvkarleby, Persson was following every update on the radio. When she woke up on Friday morning to the news that the chimpanzees were still not contained, she felt desperate. At 9.34am, Persson sent a Facebook message to Wilke, offering to come to Furuvik to help. She didn’t receive a response. She still doesn’t know why not, but she has her suspicions. “We had such different thinking about the future of the zoo,” she told me, “and about animal welfare.” (A spokesperson for Furuvik Zoo told me that that they didn’t take Persson up on her offer because they believed that “those currently working with us are the ones who know the chimpanzees best.”)
It was only that afternoon, two days after the first chimp was shot, that the zoo contacted the Swedish Agricultural Agency. The law forbids unplanned killing of primates, and Furuvik needed express permission to do so. By not applying for this dispensation beforehand, the zoo broke the law, claims Annika Norée, an associate professor in criminal law at Stockholm University who subsequently reported Furuvik to the police over the incident. “There are rules,” she told me, “if there has to be a euthanisation –” then she corrected herself, “I don’t want to use that word in this situation, because it was killing.” (The Swedish Agricultural Agency granted Furuvik retrospective permission to kill the chimpanzees, accepting the park’s claim that there was a threat to human safety.)
* * *
After the chimps awoke from their sedative-induced slumbers, they moved back to the yellow enclosure. The zookeepers got one hatch closed, but another hatch they needed to close had frozen solid. They changed tack, and instead managed to close the door between the enclosures and the Rainforest, so they could now access the other animals in the building. Beldt was relieved to find that all the smaller primates, the snakes and the iguanas were a little cold, a little hungry, but safe. Others had not been so lucky. “We had to put down a turtle that the chimps had gotten hold of,” he said. They had bitten off its limbs. The zoo had also lost two tarantulas, and four giant African land snails. They moved the survivors to warmer areas of the park and then, in the early hours of Saturday morning, they turned their attention back to the chimpanzees.
With the yellow enclosure hatch still frozen, the plan was to isolate the chimps in the brown enclosure instead. At 8.30am on Saturday 17 December, one animal keeper and one vet went up the stairs and looked through the bars into the upper part of the brown enclosure. The animal keeper called to the chimps and offered them food. Slowly, the three chimps moved towards the keeper.
One chimp came to the upper floor. Then another. At last, when all three were there, a zookeeper downstairs approached the hatch. At 9.06am, 70 hours after the first door swung open, with one modest click of bolt into lock, it was over. All three remaining chimpanzees were contained.
Wilke burst into tears. Beldt breathed out for what felt like the first time in days. “I felt just such a happiness then,” he said.
Later that day, keepers and other park staff held memorials at the corpse of each dead ape. Standing around the bodies, they said a few words and bid their goodbyes. Recalling these memorials, Wilke welled up. “It was hard,” she said, lost for words.
* * *
It was May when I visited Furuvik. I had wanted to go sooner, but was told that the keepers would find it too difficult to speak to me. Outside the park’s gate, members of the public had set up tributes to the four dead chimps: candles, posters, photographs, flowers. One person had attached a laminated picture of Torsten to a stake and driven it into the ground, and written above it in red pen: “Why was I not allowed to live?”
In the early summer the park is only open on the weekends, and when I visited there was nobody there but the core animal support staff. Selma, Tjobbe and Maria Magdalena were all out on their island enjoying the sun. It was their lunchtime, and Beldt was the zookeeper on duty. He used a bucket and scoop to throw heads of romaine lettuce and slices of aubergine, fennel and parsnip over the fence around the island. Selma’s arm had healed fully, but her injured eye was now grey and unseeing.
The chimps were otherwise doing well, Beldt told me. “In the first weeks they tried to call for the others and it looked as if they were looking for them,” he said. But he thinks chimps are better at handling loss than humans are. “In my experience they grieve a lot in the first few weeks, but then life has to go on.”
Things have been hard for the zookeepers. “The animal keeper that forgot that door has had a very, very tough time,” Wilke told me. The public reaction has also not been kind. “When we read people say that we’re the ones who should be shot, that we’re monsters and savages, it’s horrible,” said Beldt. “When people say the zookeepers don’t care about animals, it hurts, because this is my life. I spend more time here with our animals than I do with my girlfriend or my family.”
Could the zoo have done anything differently? De Waal, the Dutch zoologist, has seen many escape attempts in his time. When chimps get out, he says, they’re curious more than anything. “They’re usually not in an aggressive mood,” he told me. “I’ve actually never seen that.” Keepers who knew the chimps well could have tried to coax the chimps back inside, he suggested, and mentioned Persson specifically. “That’s the sort of person you would want.” Many other experts have pointed out that since chimpanzees do not like the cold, they would have been likely to return to the ape house.
Both Persson and Osvath, the primatologist, remember three or four previous escape attempts at Furuvik, when some of the chimpanzees had made it on to the roof, doing what Osvath referred to as “King Kong stuff up there”. On some of those occasions, the park was even open to visitors. In the past, Persson and her colleagues had managed to lure them back inside with some ice-cream. “It’s not a big problem. They always come back inside, if you take it easy,” she said.
The problem, many people told me, was management. Not so much Furuvik’s specific managers, they argued, as a larger incompatibility between zoos as animal sanctuaries and zoos as theme parks. “I can’t see the connection between a Tivoli and wild animals. Animals are entertaining, but they’re not entertainment,” Osvath said. De Waal agreed. “The people who take over zoos nowadays are business people,” he told me. “They’re very good at calculating how much they pay and how much things cost. But they do not necessarily have a lot of experience with animals.”
One thing everybody but the zoo seemed to agree on was that Torsten should not have been shot. Tjobbe, as a young dominant male, might have been dangerous. But what threat could Torsten pose, at three years old? “Since several chimpanzees were loose at the same time, we couldn’t go out into the park to try to get Torsten in,” said Wilke, when I put this question to her. “The risk for the veterinarian and animal caretakers had become too great.”
Beldt told me he had relived those days perhaps 1,000 times, wondering if they could have done anything different. Every time, he comes to the same conclusion: no. Chimpanzees can turn, and the line between play and violence is thin. Beldt remembers a time when he sat talking to Linda through the bars of the enclosure, and Manda snuck up and jabbed him with a stick she had sharpened with her teeth, just centimetres from his left eye.
“People without any experience of chimpanzees say: if I had done it, I would have got some bananas, and they would have gone back,” Beldt said. “And maybe, but maybe not. Maybe you would have ended up in a body bag, or in 1,000 body bags, because chimps like to tear things from limb to limb.”
* * *
In 1977, the writer John Berger published an essay called Why Look at Animals? He argued that zoos are in principle places where animals are collected so we can study and even preserve them, but what we see in a zoo will always carry an edge of discomfort. No matter how closely you look, or how close the animal is to the glass that separates you, “you are looking at something that has been rendered absolutely marginal,” he writes. A creature that has been robbed of its freedom, its proper context.
The traumatic events of last December haven’t changed Beldt’s views on animal captivity. He still thinks zoos should exist, to preserve endangered species and for research. That little zoo nerd is still alive in him. But over the past few years, he has come around to the idea of climate-specific zoos. Given that chimps can only be outside six months of the year in Sweden, he thinks perhaps they shouldn’t be in captivity here. Many in the international zoo community believe this is the way it will go, over the next however many years.
Persson’s view, however, has changed. She would prefer climate-specific zoos, but she would go one further. “The best is not to have them at zoos at all. It’s better to help sanctuaries in Africa, who can hopefully bring them back to the wild again,” she said. Persson now works raising money in Sweden to send to these sanctuaries.
A year on, Furuvik continues to operate under a shadow. Two separate legal investigations into the park over their conduct are ongoing, one for the alleged crime of neglecting human safety in allowing the chimpanzees to escape, and another for violation of Sweden’s Animal Welfare Act in killing the four apes. This past summer, attendance at the zoo was down 25% from the summer before the killings. (Furuvik maintains that visitor numbers at zoos across Sweden were lower this summer, owing to the uncertain economic outlook and poor weather.)
For those who loved the four dead chimpanzees, though, no decline in visitor numbers or legal decision will ever make up for the loss of Santino, Linda, Manda and Torsten. For Johnny and Ing-Marie, the animals they love have always been everything. “I am thinking of them every day,” Persson said. “We were like a little family.” On the mantelpiece in their living room, Ing-Marie Persson has a painting of herself and Santino, which she commissioned this summer in his memory. It’s based on a photograph of them together. In the painting, Persson and Santino rub their faces together as she scratches under his chin. Their ears share the same curve, their skin is the same shade, and they look into each other’s eyes, heads level, as equals.
Names marked with an asterisk have been changed
• This article was amended on 7 and 8 December 2023. A previous version stated that attendance at Furuvik zoo this summer was down 31% from last summer; it should have said 25%. And an unverified reference to Torsten “running around in distress” has been removed.
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