[monkeywire] Book review: This chimp was no monkey
Josh Greenman
josh.greenman at gmail.com
Sun Mar 30 14:51:57 EDT 2008
http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/27/lifestyle/nim_chimpsky.fortune/
Book review: This chimp was no monkey
A fascinating look at the life of Nim, the chimpanzee who was raised
in a human household on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
By Daniel Okrent
(Fortune Magazine) -- Sometimes I stumble across a book that leaves
essential details unexplained and critical questions unanswered, that
stacks the deck in its identification of villains and heroes, and
whose author tries to adopt a pose of cool disinterest but can't
suppress partisan passion.
In fact, I stumble across books like that frequently, and almost
always I close them quickly. But every once in a while I encounter one
like Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human (Bantam), a book so
surprising, so persuasive, and so damn compelling that I raced from
page one to the end forgiving its flaws and emerged genuinely changed
by the experience.
I realize this is saying a lot. But so does Elizabeth Hess's book. In
1973, a Columbia University psychologist named Herbert Terrace, aiming
to disprove the linguistic theories of Noam Chomsky, set out to teach
American Sign Language to a chimpanzee. The adorable creature picked
for the experiment (and named so purposefully) would be raised as a
member of a human family, and as much as possible socialized into
human ways.
The short version of the story is that Nim may have been the most
engaging playmate, the most promising student, and the cutest damn
toddler on the entire Upper West Side of Manhattan. (Let me point out
here that I am generally indifferent to animals and believe in the
necessity of using some species for medical research.)
Human identity
He learned a remarkably large vocabulary, took on innumerable human
habits and inclinations (this being the 1970s, those habits included
cigarette smoking), and bonded not only with his human siblings and
parents but also with Homo sapiens as a species. At one point, asked
to sort through a stack of photographs of humans and chimpanzees and
separate them into appropriate piles, Nim put his own picture in with
the humans'. As one of his babysitters said, "I don't think Nim had
any concept that he was a chimpanzee."
Which, Hess demonstrates, turns out to be the unacknowledged reality
lurking within the best-intentioned of animal studies. For when Nim
grew too large, too strong, and too temperamental to continue what had
become a domestic charade, there was nowhere to go. Far more fortunate
than most chimps used in similar experiments, after bouncing around
from facility to facility Nim eventually ended his days in a cage on
an animal preserve in Texas, where he passed the time vainly trying to
use ASL to communicate with unknowing tourists who came by to gawk.
This tale is not entirely a grim one; Nim was one fascinating ape, and
the people whose lives he touched are a compelling bunch. (I do think
the author is unfairly rough on Terrace, whose instincts and motives
seem nobler than Hess believes them to be.) But at one point in his
post-Manhattan, pre-Texas travels, Nim was locked up in a laboratory
in the Hudson Valley, where chimps bred for medical experimentation
were imprisoned in substandard cages, cramped and isolated.
Though Nim had to abide the grim conditions, he was spared the
experiments. But the doomed chimpanzees who endured them, largely bred
for the purpose, were in fact better off than Nim was. They had never
known the reward of human love and companionship, and then had it
ripped away from them.
The reality, writes Hess, was that "Project Nim had no exit plan." Of
course not: from the beginning, Project Nim was not really about Nim,
but about the species that chose to study him.
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