The Talking Animal

I've been reading a bit about Nim Chimpsky, the chimpanzee whose life is now the subject of a documentary, Project Nim, by the film-maker James Marsh. As a bit of a spoiler, the animal was taken from his mother in infancy by a psychologist, Herbert Terrace, who wanted to teach him sign language, and was initially raised pretty much as a human. When this went wrong, he was caged up in a research centre, and finally in a zoo, where he died prematurely from a heart attack, possibly caused by all the joints he used to smoke with his 'parents'.

His name is, obviously, a pun on Noam Chomsky, the linguist. Now, if I don't love a terrible pun then I don't love anything (I have long dreamed of having two  dogs called Philip Ruff and Virginia Woof) but this smart-alecy naming of 'Chimpsky' signals the misguided nature of the whole experiment. 'Nim Chimpsky' is a bastardisation of a man's name, and there is no way that a talking ape, in little trousers and all, was ever going to be anything but a grotesque parody of a human.

That is not because chimps are  grotesque. The problem lies in the anthropocentric outlook that led to this animal being seen as an unevolved human, rather than a fully evolved ape. Some animals can communicate with humans but, as Terrace was forced to conclude, not in terms of human conversation; they communicate according to their own needs.  It seems to me that a lot of cruelty is rooted in a divided view of animals, either as completely other - they are not people, so we can do what we like with them - or as inferior versions of ourselves that we can narcissistically relate to but do not have to respect because they are incomplete.

I find it particularly chilling that after his unnatural early life in the bosom (sometimes literally) of a human family, the animal was transferred to a research facility, where he was caged among other apes (having been totally separated from his own species since he was born) who were destined to be sold to a research lab for Aids and hepatitus vaccine experiments.

This development shows a more extreme form of the exploitation that arises from finding the links between humans and other large mammals. They can be interesting to us both egotistically and scientifically, though their usefulness as the subjects of experiments is limited by the same fact that made this experimentation acceptable: they aren't human. We are well aware of the similarities and differences between humans and animals. It is taking a long time to reach the conclusion that neither similarity nor difference justifies a sense of ownership, and that animals are neither hilarious hairy little men, nor material for experiments.