Nature's Experiments, Society's Closures

While the point is perhaps less starkly obvious, I think a similar point applies to ape sign language research, by way of a footnote to this discussion. Since the cases are few, I will revert to personal experience. In the spring of 1980, I was graciously allowed to visit the primate installations of Roger Fouts and others at the University of Oklahoma. Fouts had been a graduate student of Alan and Beatrice Gardner, the original ape sign language researchers, and Oklahoma had since long been the depository of the aftermaths of the Gardner's and others research.

Research, particularly close contact signing research, with chimpanzees works best with one to five year olds, as La Metric suggested long ago (La Mettrie 1748[15], p. 39); as puberty nears strength increases and docility disappears, so the close contact signing research has to stop. But chimpanzees are likely to live on for thirty-forty years or more. At Norman, Lemon's farm held a dozen or so Gardner chimpanzees and others in a sixty by twenty, spartanly bare cage (plus Herb Terrace's Nim Chimpsky in another small enclosure). They had received intimate human tutoring, free run of a lively garden and large trailer home with an enriched environment for four years, along with all sorts of games about symbols and signing by earnest and loving humans whose research depended upon them, only to go on to this decades long imprisonment. No wonder that you felt, looking at them, that their deepest wish was to wreak havoc on those who had given them a loving and happily rewarded interaction with humans, and then unaccountably locked them up in a boring, crowded, and hence dangerous, environment. A graduate student I talked to said that when she would go out to feed them in wintry weather, individuals would sneakily suck in a huge mouthful of water before she came near them, with their backs to her, and then whirl about to squirt freezing water on her. She appreciated both their malevolence and its justice. She told me of a graduate student who tried to take two such chimpanzees back to Africa in order to teach them how to fit back into their native environment. She had begged tiny amounts of money from individuals to keep on with the project whose success was uncertain. There was of no federal or foundation money for such an undertaking.

At Fout's lab, I observed Washoe, the original of ape/language research, incommunicative in her ten by ten cage, impressively muscled, grumpy, grim, and largely gestureless. She had not been out of her small cage for a year and the graduate students only half-jokingly practiced chimpanzee-style "submission postures," preparing for the eventuality that if Fouts were to take her out, she would escape and threaten them (she was let out a number of weeks later and promptly took off a good portion of a visitor's fingers). I spent much of several days with Moja, a near seven year old Gardner reject, who had come to Norman nearly a year before. She was on a ten foot leash from her cage door and the graduate students didn't get much near her range; prudently, for she had bit some of them and there was no viable research program that involved her. She had a scabbed, pus-ringed sore on her ankle, which she scratched and hence had preserved I was told since she arrived at the Norman installation from the comfort, love, and variety of the Gardner Nevada installation. I felt some conceit in that the wound mostly healed while I was there, and in that Moja and I had a friendly relationship for several hours each day (she delighted in examining my nose and my teeth, from which she carefully scraped plaque, and in feeding me with a spoon, the only injury I suffered was when she decided to further groom me by removing a freckle from my ear). She began to test me the last two days and doubtless she would have done me some more serious injury had I been able to stay around. Soon she would become large and strong enough so that she would be sent to the large cage (she was not as it turned out, and the situation for some of these animals improved; I am simply after what might be the best general practice). So the humdrum conclusion I wish to suggest is that ape language researchers should explicit provisions to insure a reasonably happy aftermath for the animals in question, whether a suitably enriched partly human environment of the sort they grew up in (for example the environment P. Patterson apparently has established for gorilla KoKo, with modifications for chimpanzee peculiarities), or retraining and reentry into Gombi or some such preserve.