Washoe has astutely reacted to the feelings of others as well. One
of our longtime volunteers, Kat Beach, became pregnant in the summer of
1982, and Washoe was fascinated with her swelling belly, often asking her
about her "BABY". (Washoe understood what babies were and where they came
from, since she has been pregnant twice and lost both offspring--one to a
congenital heart defect, one to a respiratory illness. She showed signs
of depression each time. She also seems to know what the parent-child
relationship involves. My wife Debbi and I thought we had Washoe fooled
about our relationship until one day we asked her who she thought our
5-year-old daughter Hillary was. Washoe signed "ROGER DEBBI BABY",
leaving no doubt about Hillary's identity and her relationship to
us.)
Unfortunately, Kat eventually miscarried, and couldn't visit the
chimpanzees for several weeks. One facet of Washoe's personality is that
she has extremely high expectations of her friends. People who should be
there for her and aren't are often later given the cold shoulder her way
of informing them that she's miffed at them. Washoe greeted Kat in just
this way when she finally returned to work with the chimps. Kat made her
apologies to Washoe, then decided to tell her the truth, signing "MY BABY
DIED." Washoe stared at her, then looked down. She finally peered into
Kat's eyes again and carefully signed "CRY," touching her cheek and
drawing her finger down the path a tear would make on a human.
(Chimpanzees don't shed tears.) Kat later remarked that that one sign
told her more about Washoe and her mental capabilities than all her
longer, more grammatically perfect sentences. When Kat prepared to leave
that day, Washoe did not want her to go without some emotional support.
She signed "PLEASE PERSON HUG."
Hair-Brained Schemes
Chimps' softer, sweeter emotions aren't the only evidence of their
intellectual capacity. Their minds are also, like ours, capable of
deception, strategy and manipulation.
Washoe adopted Loulis when he was 10 months old after having lost
two of her own babies. She doted on him. So Loulis would often abuse his
special stares and Washoe's loving nature to get his way--and to get
other chimpanzees in trouble. All he had to do was scream, and Washoe
would come running. She would sign "HUG" to him and then, after
comforting him, she would discipline the perpetrator. This turned Loulis
into a bit of a spoiled brat. We observed that sometimes another
chimpanzee would not even touch him and he would scream and point at an
innocent bystander, just to get attention.
Dar was the one who finally figured out how to use Loulis' game to
his own advantage. Dar went over and pinched Loulis hard for no reason
that we could see. This started a screaming fight between the two. When
Washoe rushed in from another room Dar immediately threw himself on his
back and started screaming and signing "HUG HUG HUG", alternating it with
a look toward Loulis. When Washoe started swaggering in Loulis' direction
to exact punishment, he stood for a moment as if he couldn't believe his
eyes, then retreated rapidly from the room. The tables had been turned.
Washoe then comforted a smug Dar, grooming him until he calmed
down.
Chimps are People, Too
Before I started on Project Washoe three decades ago, I believed
what I had been taught by society: that humans were intellectually and
emotionally superior to all other species. We were like the pigs on
George Orwell's Animal Farm, where all animals are equal, but some are
more equal than others.
But as my observations of Washoe in natural social situations show,
we're not as unique as we believe. Ironically, chimpanzees' remarkable
similarity to humans has served not to protect them, but has actually
worked against their welfare. The biomedical community justifies
experimenting on chimps, ravaging them with the AIDS virus, organ
transplantation, hepatitis and brain injury, by claiming that chimps'
physiology and biology is so similar to humans that the findings they
yield are likely to apply to us as well. What they ignore is that
creatures who are so physiologically similar to us may also be
psychologically and mentally similar to us. They ignore the ethical and
moral implications of experimenting on creatures that, by the
experimenters' own admission, are so close to us. They can't have it both
ways.
Changing this mindset was one of the most difficult things that I
personally have ever done. Working closely with chimps forced me to
recognize that I was a part of a research project whose prime subject was
a helpless baby taken from her mother and her African homeland. It was a
project that condemned a young girl to a life in which she would always
be out of place and, in effect, in prison. While Washoe's circumstances
are better now, with caretakers who love and respect her rather than
owners who do not appreciate her, she can never go home again. She was
never taught the skills she would need to survive in her native Africa,
and yet she does not entirely belong here in the human world, either.
Given my current knowledge of free-living chimpanzee culture and
emotional life, I would never support or be a part of a project like
Project Washoe again. I have to accept that Washoe is a person by any
reasonable definition, and that the community of chimpanzees from which
she was stolen are a people. I regret that I cannot ever return her to
her home.
Tags:
33 years,
american sign language,
behavior,
big hug,
chain link fence,
chimpanzee,
clinical psychology,
cousins,
emotions,
experimental psychologist,
experimental psychology,
first glimpse,
genes,
laboratory methods,
mathematical precision,
reno campus,
research background,
surrogate father,
sympathy,
university of nevada,
university of nevada at reno
