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 mining company. The company’s 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 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 pet chimps suddenly turning on people.
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.
WORST-CASE SCENARIO
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, about 160km north of Stockholm. Outside, it was-15C, and even inside the lecture theatre, people were wearing their jackets
