A thousand cups

My friends at the Duke Pirate Center...um, I mean, the Duke Primate Center...are now enjoying a supply of 1,000 paper cups. Back in August, I heard from a corporate cafe manager about a palette of paper cups that were going to be thrown in the trash, because they leaked. The cups made me think of of my prosimian mates at the center, since I had read that paper cups were on a list of "enrichment items" they could use.

So I wrote them asking if the defective cups could still be used as enrichment items. The response was a "yes." They could put non-liquid items in them and it would still be very helpful. A wonderful convergence of people, animals and things, I thought. The next step was getting approval from the company to donate the cups. (In this case, I couldn't take my usual piratical means.) But that turned out be easy. Who doesn't love a lemur?

The next part to figure out was how to get the cups shipped from the Upper Midwest to North Carolina. (My supply of gold coins was pretty low.) But I found another kind manager who arranged for the boxes to be picked up and delivered for free. And now, my dear friends in Durham are using the cups.

Kali the Aye-Aye with a messy face:

And Romeo a Diademed Sifaka peering into his cup.

Cheers, mate!

If you'd like to make you own donation of some kind, go here for options.