Just Like Us: A Veterinarian’s Visual Memoir of Our Vanishing Great Ape Relatives

By Rick Quinn and Jane Goodall

“Outstanding photography! This book is a valuable contribution to the public’s understanding of our remarkable ‘near relatives.’” —Robert Bateman, wildlife painter and environmental icon

“Just Like Us is an entertaining and informative read that illustrates how one ordinary person can be a catalyst for positive change.” —Jane Goodall, primatologist and bestselling author

"Just Like Us will be a classic and is a must read. The book adds much to what we can learn about ourselves. A beautifully written adventure with great apes, with some of the most difficult and stunning photographs of the great apes ever made." —Thomas Mangelsen, award-winning nature and wildlife photographer and conservationist

A stirring account of hope and survival for the planet's endangered great ape species.

For most of his life, veterinarian Rick Quinn ignored a deep longing to meaningfully protect the endangered animals that fascinated him. Then one day, he read two magazine clippings about the great apes and knew it was time to set aside excuses and find the means to help. Armed with his camera and an insatiable curiosity, Dr. Quinn set off for the front lines of great ape conservation.

Just Like Us is a gorgeous tribute to our not-too-distant relatives as well as the courageous people who are risking their lives to protect them.

In this remarkable memoir, we follow Dr. Quinn’s seven-year journey across seven African countries and Indonesia, where he photographed each great ape species in its natural habitat. Using inspiring stories juxtaposed with stunning photographs, he illuminates the threats to great ape survival as well as the complexity of saving them. The result delivers an empathetic sense that these magnificent beings really are—strikingly so—just like us.

The author will donate all proceeds of your book purchase to Docs4GreatApes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Girl Friday Books
• Release date: Aug 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781954854321

Rick Quinn

Rick Quinn was born and raised in Arizona, earned a degree in anthropology, then hit the road, indulging an admittedly peculiar whim by hitch-hiking to Tierra del Fuego. In one way or another, he's been on the road ever since, living in a dozen diverse locales, from Paris to Peru, San Francisco to Washington D.C., working as a photographer, a coffee farmer, a magazine writer, a postman, a novelist, and, until his recent retirement, a corporate-level financial systems expert with the Postal Service. Rick is a veteran road tripper who has driven both the Alaska Highway and the Pan American. Currently, he's a travel blogger, a landscape photographer, and a contributing writer for RoadTrip America.

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Prologue

Inever saw it coming. I was a content veterinarian. But one day, in the solitude of my home study, something changed.

The chaos on my desk was hiding the document that I was desperate to locate. Happened last week, too, I reminded myself. Albert Einstein’s cluttered desk may have been fine for him, but clearly it’s not working for me. Enough already!

I pledged aloud never again to be messy and set out to clean up my desk. I first attacked the highest, most unstable stack of papers—articles removed from journals and magazines—all required reading that simply could not escape my curious eye. The ruthless culling, however, came to an abrupt end after about twenty minutes, when I happened upon a cautiously torn-out article from a veterinary industry periodical that few people read.

I’d kept the article because it profiled an unusual group of veterinarians in Africa called the Gorilla Doctors. Their surgical theatre was the rainforest, where these brave field doctors were part of an international effort to protect the critically endangered population of mountain gorillas. The veterinarians treated respiratory diseases with medications delivered by darts and removed hunting snares from the strangulated limbs of too-curious gorillas. They managed wounds created by warring silverbacks and often seemed willing to risk their lives in order to save a gorilla’s. As I became absorbed in reading about these daring Gorilla Doctors, the article’s content rang a faint bell in my memory.

I began to recall a National Geographic article from some years before, the narrative unrolling in my mind like an old map. Because it is unlike me to throw out my old National Geographic magazines (thus the office chaos), I eventually located the original article and confirmed the details.

The tragic story began like this: Around 8:00 one evening in the summer of 2007, rangers in Virunga National Park in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo heard gunfire. Early the next morning, on routine foot patrol of the slopes of the Mikeno volcano, they stumbled across a gruesome scene. Three adult female mountain gorillas, named Mburanumwe, Nzea, and Safari—all of whom were members of the Rugendo family—had been killed. Safari’s terrified infant, Ndakasi, was by her side and was rescued by the rangers. The next day, the lifeless body of the five-hundred-pound silverback Senkwekwe, the patriarch of the twelve-member family, was discovered nearby in the dense forest. Some three weeks later, the decomposing remains of Macibiri, another Rugendo female, were found; her infant Ndeze was missing and presumed dead.

I placed the articles side by side on my desk. Sure enough, the same group of veterinarians I had just been reading about—the Gorilla Doctors—had been called to the scene. Autopsies confirmed what most had suspected: the gorillas had been executed in a manner eerily similar to the way two other gorillas had been killed several weeks earlier. Heartbroken villagers had wept as they carried the gorillas from the forest on makeshift bamboo stretchers in regal procession. Images of the slaughtered gorillas were circulated around the globe.

At that time there were only 720 mountain gorillas known to be remaining in the world and Virunga National Park was home to approximately two hundred of them. Every loss felt catastrophic. Most people assume poachers committed the murders, but they were not on the list of suspects in this case. Poachers would have severed the hands and heads to sell as souvenirs and taken the babies to be sold on the black market.

On that day in my home study I learned about another threat to the gorillas—perhaps even more prevalent and dangerous than poachers—human overpopulation and poverty. Illegal charcoal production was considered the single biggest threat to the park and was presumed to be linked to the killings from the outset. Charcoal was widely used in urban communities surrounding the park for boiling drinking water, cooking, and heating, and it was desperately sought after. Old-growth trees were cut within the park and reduced to carbon in mud ovens. The supply chain had been controlled by militias that resented protection of the gorillas’ habitat, and how it interfered with access to old-growth trees.

Now, as I clutched the industry article that had triggered the memory of the National Geographic piece, I pondered the terrible spectacle of the killings—murders, really, I thought. Murders of animals that are so much like humans in so many ways.

How random that both stories would surface that particular day, both having the Gorilla Doctors as central characters. I tried to imagine how despondent the veterinarians must have been while attending at the site of the gorilla massacre.

I contemplated how wildlife veterinarians have adapted their skills and knowledge base to work with very different patients. Presumably, as veterinarians, our early training was similar. But their day-to-day work was so foreign compared with mine. The veterinarians in the article worked on animals more like humans than most veterinarians would ever treat. I was also thinking of the safe, climate-controlled, sterile animal hospital where I provided treatment; the Gorilla Doctors would treat their patients under dramatically different conditions. It was so physically challenging to even access their injured or sick patients in mountainous rainforest terrain. The veterinarians were dosing and delivering medication, including anesthesia, by dart, surrounded by a team of guides, trackers, and porters. They faced uncertainty and danger when other family members reacted, particularly the huge dominant silverback.

I had just discovered a whole new world of veterinary medicine and heroics, along with a significant ongoing threat to an important wildlife species. In recent years, I had participated in wildlife expeditions to photograph grizzly and spirit bears and humpback whales in western Canada. I made use of the images, along with those from a similar trip to the Galápagos Islands, in lectures given at veterinary conferences to share those experiences. I was inspired by a series of lectures I attended by Jean-Michel Cousteau, son of the famous undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau, detailing the accomplishments of his Ocean Futures Society, a marine conservation and education organization. I recall wishing there was a way that I could use my knowledge and skills as a veterinarian to contribute in a meaningful way to preserving the natural world.

A hopeless romantic, I am forever drawn to stories whose main characters, against all odds and at great personal risk, use their skills, passion, and limited resources to right the wrongs of social injustice, wrongful conviction, or some environmental disaster. People stirred to move off the sidelines—to become involved, build awareness, influence government policy makers, and do good. But alas, soon after exiting the movie theatre or closing the book, I would carry on with my busy life without any further action.

I read and reread every detail of both articles. Wildlife being threatened, veterinarians at the forefront and against all odds: every part resonated with me and piqued my curiosity. If I were willing to listen to my inner voice this time, it could be rewarding. I had no idea that what began as a curiosity would become a mission.

The desk project would have to wait.

Mountain gorilla mother and infant, Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda.

1

We Are All Great Apes

My desire to somehow have veterinary contact with the Gorilla Doctors and get up close to the gorillas started to become a compulsion. It made no logical sense; nonetheless it would not go away. Eventually I crafted a plan that involved roping in Dr. David Ramsey, a close friend and fellow veterinary ophthalmologist. Together we would escape to the wilds of East Africa on a unique veterinary mission.

The plan went like this: We would offer the Gorilla Doctors our well-worn lessons on eye problems in our animal patients, shaped from years of teaching in North America’s veterinary schools. In exchange, they would give us their stories of true veterinary adventure from the jungles of the Virunga Massif—and, if we happened upon a nearsighted or squinting mountain gorilla, what an incredible photo opportunity it would be.

Our campaign to travel to Africa was based on a whim. There was nothing truly noble about the excursion—perhaps it was even irresponsible to be absent from our busy practices and families for such an extended period of time. It was a chance to see new things, paid for in continuing education currency.

Even so, our household lobbying was relentless. David and I proposed that the trip would be no less than an international opportunity to advance the frontiers of modern veterinary medicine. We anxiously watched as the price of flights increased in the weeks that it took our nervous families to be convinced of the dire necessity of the trip. After about three weeks we finally managed to get our significant others on board, and with a carefully coordinated international effort, David and I purchased flights online while conferring on the phone—David from his animal hospital in the US and I from my roost in Canada.

There was still one remaining problem: our embarrassing lack of knowledge. Reality struck us when we sat down to figure out the content for a short course on the medical and surgical treatment of diseases of the gorilla eye. The eye was not the issue. Surely the gorilla eye must be somewhere between the human eye and the more typical animal eye that was our daily fare. The truth was that we knew almost nothing about gorillas—or, for that matter, any of the great apes! Two supposedly well-educated veterinary specialists couldn’t even explain the difference between a great ape and a monkey, although we were sure that they, like us, were primates. We had a few months to figure it out.

Refurbishing the Teachers

Our self-designed crash course brought us to the early eighteenth century and the work of Carl Linnaeus in southern Sweden. Determined to prove his secondary school teachers wrong—they publicly declared that he was not university material—Carl devised a naming or classification system for all living things. He created order out of the chaos of the natural world and enabled people to understand first plants, then the animal kingdom. He observed and compared features like teeth to decide whether animals were related. He was the father of what we now call taxonomy.

His two-part naming system, the genus and species, as in Homo sapiens, is used to this day to identify each animal precisely and to suggest its niche within its family tree. When animals are in the same genus (plural genera), they are very closely related. You may not even be able to tell them apart by looking at them. As you move up the hierarchy, multiple genera are grouped into families, families into orders, orders into classes, and so on until the broadest category, the kingdom, is reached.

We were determined to make sense out of this and to remember it. Domestic horses (Equus caballus) and zebras (Equus quagga), obviously different in appearance but also rather similar, belong to the family Equidae; dogs (Canis familiaris) and wolves (Canis lupus) belong to the family Canidae. At the next level, the families are clumped together, based on physical similarities, into orders. The dogs and wolves of our Canidae family example end up with polar bears (Ursus maritimus) and brown bears (Ursus arctos) of the Ursidae family as part of the order Carnivora. Seven levels of hierarchy later, all are considered members of the kingdom Animalia. Odd that Carl’s teachers couldn’t have seen this coming.

Where do primates fit in Carl’s masterpiece? Primates are an order of animals, occurring at the same level of the order Carnivora that lumped together dogs, wolves, polar bears, and brown bears. Primates include humans and our relatives the apes, lemurs, monkeys, and tarsiers. You wouldn’t expect a polar bear and a wolf to share the same parents, but when you think about what they eat, their physical structure, and their teeth, you certainly can see how they might be related. The same goes with humans and apes, members of the order Primates.

How We Are Alike

We learned the many shared features between primates and humans. Hands and feet tend to have opposable thumbs and big toes to help grasp branches and food. Claws have been replaced with flattened, shield-like nails that protect the sensitive tip of the finger or toe; most primates have fingerprints. They tend to have forward-facing eyes, protected by a bony socket or orbit, with well-developed vision. We paid attention to the eye details, considering the subject of our talks. Senses such as hearing and smell are typically less developed than in other animals. Primates have a relatively large brain for their body size, providing the capacity for higher intelligence and the ability to learn a more complex repertoire of behaviours.

The term apes has been used to describe a single group of primates, a so-called superfamily. More recently, apes have been divided into great apes (Hominidae) and lesser apes (Hylobatidae), each one a family of the order Primates. Gibbons are lesser apes. Humans, orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos are the great apes.

We also answered our embarrassing, but apparently quite common, question: how are great apes and monkeys different? Large size and intelligence distinguish great apes from monkeys. But one of the easiest ways for humans to tell the difference is that monkeys almost always have tails and great apes never do. Monkeys also have a chest that is flattened from side to side, like a dog or cat, with shoulder blades attached to the sides of the chest wall—the perfect slender package to allow them to walk on all four legs on top of and between branches. Great apes have a barrel-shaped chest, shoulder blades attached to their back, very flexible shoulder joints, and longer arms. These adaptations provide much greater mobility for a life of swinging from branch to branch. All are primates, and all are related to each other—some more closely than others. But all are definitely distinct.

As we prepared for our gorilla adventure, our strategy was to be reasonably knowledgeable about at least the largest primates that might swing past us as we stumbled through the rainforest. Imagine attending a family reunion of great apes. The invitation list would include each of the eight living species from the four genera: Gorilla (gorillas), Pan (chimpanzees and bonobos), Pongo (orangutans), and the ever-problematic Homo (humans). The gathering would certainly be much less awkward if you had some idea whom you might end up meeting and how distant they were from you as relatives.

Just How Close Are We?

And finally, the issue of relatedness: Are we really the fifth great ape? Admittedly, I have noted a strong gorilla-like element in my unshaven, grunting brother-in-law while in full reluctant camper mode. Carl Linnaeus lumped us in with primates. Charles Darwin, of On the Origin of Species fame, suggested that we share a common ancestor with other primates. And it turns out they were both right.

Fossil records suggest that long ago, well over one hundred species in forty genera of apes existed in the tropical forest canopies across Africa, Asia, and southern Europe. Most died off slowly without leaving any descendants. Many factors may have influenced great ape evolution, including environmental change: the contraction of forests, the emergence of predators, and the appearance of competing species. Scientists consider anatomic similarities and fossil evidence, and, more recently, have used comparative DNA testing as a sort of molecular clock to establish distinct evolutionary lineages and their timeframes.

Orangutans, the least terrestrial of the surviving great apes, were the first lineage to split from the common ancestor of the African great apes (gorillas, humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos) some fifteen to nineteen million years ago. The remaining cleavages from the family tree appeared relatively close together. The predecessor of the modern-day gorilla separated from the line and the common ancestor of humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos nine to eleven million years ago. The human ancestor was next to leave the line, approximately five to eight million years ago, with the chimpanzees and bonobos the last to separate, as recently as 800,000 to 2.6 million years ago.

Chimpanzees and bonobos are our closest living relatives, sharing an astonishing 98.4 percent of our DNA. Gorillas and orangutans follow closely behind, with 97.7 percent and 96.4 percent similarity in DNA, respectively. This surprising closeness recently enabled scientists studying malaria—the disease that has caused the most human deaths in all of history—to uncover the molecular explanation for how the parasite jumped from gorillas to humans. They made their discovery by examining a fifty-thousand-year-old gene segment of gorilla DNA that we humans share.

After absorbing all of this, my colleague and I realized that our mission had suddenly expanded from advancing the frontiers of veterinary medicine to preparing for a family reunion.

Our Next of Kin

Above left: Adult western lowland gorilla silverback Makunda, dominant male of the Makunda group, near Bai Hokou, Central African Republic. Western gorillas typically have a shorter greyish-black coat with a distinctive red tinge to the hair on the top of their heads. Above center: Silverback male mountain gorilla of the Pablo group, Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda. In addition to vocalizing when annoyed, mountain gorillas often stamp their back feet into the ground and use their hands and mouths to tear off and shake vegetation in threatening gestures. Both eastern and western gorillas have silver hair along their backs; however, eastern gorillas tend to have longer, shaggier black coats. Above right: Chimanuka, an adult Grauer’s gorilla silverback, dominant male of the Chimanuka group, Kahuzi-Biega National Park, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Grauer’s gorillas are a subspecies of eastern gorillas and are considered to be the world’s largest primates—adult males weigh up to five hundred pounds. Some of the Grauer’s defining characteristics are the shorter hair and narrow facial structure.

Genus Gorilla—Gorillas

Members of the genus Gorilla are the largest of the non-human family members, weighing in at up to 500 pounds for adult males and up to 225 pounds for adult females. Gorillas live in the central African tropical rainforest and savannah. Over two million years ago, their ancestors divided, becoming two separate species on either side of the vast Congo River basin.

Eastern and western gorillas share several physical features: large heads, broad shoulders and chests, and hairless, shiny faces. Maturing adult males have a distinctive silvering of the hair on their backs and along a prominent bony ridge in the midline at the top of the skull—hence the name silverbacks. Western gorillas live at or near sea level in present-day Cameroon, Central African Republic, Congo Republic (Congo-Brazzaville), and Nigeria. They sport a sleek