Letters to the Editor
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Most interesting factoid I've heard
Is this: Cheetah is still alive. Yes, the original Cheetah from the Tarzan films. He's 75 years old -- ancient for a chimp -- and I guess his owners must have provided an excellent (and air tight) trust for him, as he lives in California in his own home, with a number of attendants. He likes to watch TV and sit out by the swimming pool.
I heard this on an interview on NPR; the narrator said that Cheetah's retirement was not unlike that of Bob Hope, LOL. However, Cheetah was (and is) exceptional.
The program went on to describe a couple of truly excellent chimp retirement centers, where they get to live a fairly natural life in an open environment. Hopefully this can become the norm.
It might be even better if we stopped experimenting on them, or using them as "funny critters" for TV, and just left them to live in their native settings, of course.
Another interesting fact was that most of the chimps that need to be cared for in old age are chimps that were bred expressly to be used as subjects for the testing of AIDS vaccine...until they figured out that chimps don't get human AIDS. Thousands of animals then had no real function or anyplace to go.
The book about Nim sounds very interesting, and I plan to read it as well. He had a very tragic life due to human selfishness and coldness, and we have a lot to learn about the human treatment of such animals.
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A sad tale
I met Nim while I was an undergraduate at Columbia. They were feeding him on the campus. Being told his name, I thought "oh, how clever." I am saddened to hear of his last days - I look forward to reading the book.
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Sometimes
it's depressing to be a human.
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Great Interview
Growing up in the 70s I remember a family down the street kept a caged chimp in their living room and the poor thing was mean and dangerous. Of course.
I hope this article and book inspire people to think about all animals as indeed sentient and in need of our protection and activism.
I will buy this book.
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A monkey is smarter than Noam Chomsky
Just remember that Saloniks
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A chimp is not a monkey
Just remember that, Electro Robot.
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A chimp is smarter than Noam Chomsky
Just remember that Saloniks, that is if you've taken your OCD meds today.
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Electro Robot?
Wow Electro Robot - all you can do to defend your ignorance is throw personal insults around. Good job. Very smart.
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One funny moment
LOL D. Cloyce Smith!
That comment was the only funny aspect of this very sad story. For those of you interested in animal intelligence and current related studies, National Geographic featured an outstanding article on the subject a couple of months ago. Fortunatly, it seems science if finally opening up to the idea the animals - including dogs, chimps, birds, etc - are much more intelligent and emotional than previously believed. Hopefully this insight will lead our selfish species to treat our fellow furry, feathery, leathery, and hairy creatures with greater dignity and respect.
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Cheetah is still working to support himself
Laurel962- Cheeta does not live in his own home and was not provided for by his owners, even though his labor provided an income for his owners for many years. Cheeta lives at C.H.E.E.T.A Primate Sanctuary, a non-profit corporation that seeks to provide a nurturing and interesting environment for primates who formerly worked in the entertainment industry. These primates are used to living with human, and would be miserable if they were stuck in zoo or habitat with other members of their species. The organization is funded completely by donations, because sadly primates are considered disposable property under our laws, and owners are not required to make any provision for their care. Cheeta helps support his home by the sales of his painting, a hobby that he took up after retiring from show business.
http://cheetathechimp.org/
Sadly Nim's story is a common one. Many other chimps were raised by humans, taught sign language and then dumped in some lab or zoo when the experiment drew to an end. I don't understand why otherwise rational people are so unwilling to believe the obvious about non-human communication. Language, like every other attribute of humanness did not spring into being out of thin air, but is a result of incremental changes over eons of evolutionary change. It seems to me this desire to claim it as something uniquely human is either a belief tied to the religious view that humans occupy a special place in creation, or simple arrogance. Rather than asking, if other animals are capable of using language the way humans do, we should instead be asking how did animal communication lead to human language.
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Chimpsky in fiction
By sheer coincidence, I just finished a novel (published last month), Debbie Lee Wesselmann's Captivity, based in part on this story and on the Washoe Project. The novel, about a sanctuary for chimpanzees, not only describes the effects of experimentation on chimps but also imagines the psychological impact on the children who had these erstwhile family members torn away from them when the experiments were over. It's an extremely well-done novel; while critical of the way our society uses other primates for whimsical purposes, it's also compelling fiction about a oddly (yet typically) dysfunctional family.
What's ironic about Project Nim is that Terrace's conclusions--that chimps could not learn and use language in the same way humans could--while hotly disputed to this day, may have helped to end the funding for future experiments of this nature. That's not to say, unfortunately, that it "saved" chimpanzees from whimsical or cruel research--as Elizabeth Hess reminds us, we have only to remember the HIV testing conducted in the 1990s to find further evidence of the human callousness toward our fellow primates.
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Conversations with a chimp
If it's really so evident that chimps can learn language just like humans, why have I never read a coherent transcript of chimp-human communication?
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Occam's razor?
"One of them suggested to me that Nim might have thought he was going to grow up, lose all his facial and body hair and eventually look like the people who were around him. That would be a reasonable supposition."
That would be a totally ridiculous supposition. It would require that the chimp does some kind of mental extrapolation, which, as Chomsky theorised (and was proven) does not happen. Primates (and other animals) only respond to direct stimulus. If a chimp sees a bunch of bananas hanging from the ceiling and some boxes scattered all over the floor, he may be clever enough to build a tower to get to the bananas. But if you could somehow communicate and tell him there were bananas and boxes in another room, he could not describe how to get the bananas.
So, leaving aside airy-fairy rubbish about the chimp somehow believing he'd turn into a human, there is a much simpler explanation for his "nervous breakdown" when returned to a predominantly chimp environment - the poor thing was not socialised for that environment - he was trained to respond to human cues. In the absence of those cues, and given the fact he had not learned to respond to other chimp cues, no wonder he went into a withdrawn state due to the massive culture shock.
Imagine a native English speaker being suddenly dropped into a situation where they were surrounded by French deaf people who only communicated in sign language. I think most of us would find that challenging, to say the least, even given our being members of the same species and having at least some facial expressions and body language in common.