Popi, the scene-stealing orangutan who starred opposite Clint Eastwood 30 years ago in a blockbuster movie and headlined a Las Vegas floor show, is writing her own script at Great Ape Trust of Iowa.

Popi, now 37, is the third of eight orangutans moving to Great Ape Trust from the Los Angeles area, where a company specializing in providing trained animals for the entertainment and advertising industries privately owned them. The company, Steve Martin’s Working Wildlife has decided to discontinue the use of orangutans in entertainment and donate the orangutans to Great Ape Trust.

Popi, one of at least three orangutans who appeared with Eastwood in the 1980 hit “Any Which Way You Can,” also was the featured orangutan in Las Vegas nightclub performer Bobby Berosini’s Lido de Paris floor show at the Stardust Resort & Casino in the 1980s. She also appeared with Berosini in Branson, Mo., before retiring from show business around 2001 with her move to Steve Martin’s Working Wildlife.

The Martins’ business was the sole supplier of entertainment orangutans on the West Coast, and their decision to shutter that part of it had a significant impact on the use of orangutans in entertainment, said Dr. Rob Shumaker, Great Ape Trust’s director of orangutan research and a member of the board of the orangutan Conservancy. He said the Martins were driven by genuine welfare concerns, and it was important for them to find a destination they approved of for their orangutans.

“In this new chapter in Popi’s life, she appears to be delighted by all the new things around her and the additional choices she can make,” said Shumaker, pictured above with Popi.

The seeming ease with which Popi has adjusted to her new life is a happy surprise for Shumaker and the rest of the orangutan staff. “She is gentle, sweet, shy and unbelievably resilient,” Shumaker said.

“Popi spent essentially 30 years in the entertainment industry and has the most unusual background I know of any orangutan anywhere in the United States,” he continued. “The big impact to me is how resilient she is after a highly unusual life that included appearing in two live floor shows a night, traveling and being on a movie set.”

Two other retired entertainment orangutans – 4-year-old Rocky and his biological mother, 19-year-old Katy – moved to Great Ape Trust in July from Steve Martin’s Working Wildlife. The Trust offers expansive vertical living quarters that allow the orangutans, the most arboreal of all the great apes, ample room to climb. Other enrichment opportunities are found in The Trust’s recently opened 3-acre outdoor yard, one of the largest for captive great apes in North America.
Popi and Katy, who knew one another in California, have rekindled their friendship, and Popi is slowly being introduced to orangutans Azy, Knobi and Allie, longtime residents of Great Ape Trust.

“We’re in the process of introducing Popi to all of the others, but with regard to her history, we anticipate doing this more slowly than when we introduced Katy and Rocky to the others,” Shumaker said. “We want her to set the pace.”

(Source: www.greatapetrust.org)