153 - Sukhumi's Primate Correctional Facility (Sukhumi, Abkhazia)
"I love mankind, it's people I can't stand."
— Charles M. Schulz
ON A HILLSIDE OVERLOOKING SUKHUMI’S CENTER stands the Research Institute of Experimental Pathology and Therapy administered by the Abkhazian Academy of Science. If you’re ever in Sukhumi and feeling too chipper for your own good, I recommend a visit. Combine “experimental” with the resident baboon and monkey population, then add dismal accommodations and callous tourists. Et voilà, enjoy a soul-crushing festival of despair. Yes.
Why go? Even cursory research informed my expectations. Sometimes you have to see shit to understand it, even if it’s repugnant, especially if it’s repugnant. Why did I attend the largest animal sacrifice on Earth (See The Wrath of Gadhimai )? Why roam Dhaka’s streets knowing I’d face human suffering on a level I’d never imagined (See Life is Flimsy, Bow to Whimsy)? I’d like to believe it’s more than morbid curiosity. Would I pause roadside to ogle emergency crews mopping up a fatal collision? That, at least in a cultural sense, would be mundane, objectively pedestrian. Just gory tidbits and tragic personal details. But with the animal sacrifice, with life on the streets of Dhaka, and with this institute, there’s an opportunity to peek deep inside unsavory aspects of the human condition. It ain’t pretty. Sometimes there’s no inspiration in sight, only darkness. Is that not life sans peaches and sunshine? See it all, or you see nothing. Face it all, or live in a bubble… or I’m a self-rationalizing shitface.
The institute began as a Soviet project to create a race of hybrid super humans with the strength to carry out the laborious work of industrialization without the mental capacity to complain about it. Scientists injected human male sperm into female chimpanzees without success. Allegedly, they took it a step further, inseminating human females with monkey sperm, though no one has ever admitted this publicly. I’m guessing if you’re willing to do the former, the latter ain’t so much of a reach. (For more info, see Stalin's space monkeys). It wasn’t all mad science and bioethical wormholes. Monkeys trained there for space travel. It’s also where the Soviets developed the polio vaccine and researched all major 20th-century diseases. In time, the institute became so well respected, the US government set up seven similar institutes. Monkey see, monkey do.
The place has seen better days, as it is now underfunded and forlorn. Not only are well-trained scientists scarce, but they’re having trouble appropriating more “volunteers.” Can't just make an expedition to Nigeria for a monkey shopping spree like in the good ole days. Food also seems to be an issue, which is where the tourist subsidy comes in. Visitors buy fruit, then sit and watch as primates scream and go ape-shit (pun intended), laughing and giggling as the poor bastards screech and thrash around like lunatics in a 19th-century asylum. Where are the animal rights activists when you need them? Nowhere to be found in Abkhazia or Russia. According to an article I read, security isn’t a problem, as the thought of someone causing havoc for the sake of the animals is unheard of. Frown.
There was a special zone in the nearby mountains where up to a thousand monkeys roamed free, but this fell apart after the Soviet Union’s collapse and subsequent war in Abkhazia. It’s theoretically possible nomads might still exist somewhere, biding their time for a “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” scenario. The revolution is coming.
