Just another member of the family?
People's efforts to humanize chimps generally end badly. This week's vicious attack is the latest example

MARGARET WENTE
21, 2009

In Connecticut this week, a 14-year-old 200-pound pet chimpanzee mauled a woman nearly to death. He was shot dead by police after going on the rampage. "Furious George," screamed the New York Post, even though the chimp's name was actually Travis. The photo showed a fearsome creature baring its enormous fangs.

The details of the attack are horrific. But I couldn't help feeling immensely sorry for the chimp. Travis was a washed-up former entertainment celebrity who had shilled for Old Navy and Coca-Cola and had appeared on B-grade TV shows. He'd been raised to think he was human. How cruel is that?

"The whole burden of this mishap lies on the behaviour of the owner," says Stephanie LaFarge, a psychologist with the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Travis's owner was Sandra Herold, 70, who treated him as a member of the family, and then some. She gave him the finest food and wine, which he drank from an elegant glass. He brushed her hair each night. They bathed together, and slept in the same bed. When she went out, he'd kiss her goodbye. It's fair to say they were overly attached. He attacked Ms. Herold's friend after he had escaped from the house, and the women were trying to lure him back. Chimps instinctively protect their mates and turf, and he probably perceived the other woman as a threat or a rival.

On the Today show, Travis's owner denied any part of the blame. But she couldn't explain why her chimp went ape. "Chimpanzees share 98 per cent of their DNA with humans," she sobbed.

But people's efforts to humanize chimpanzees generally end badly. The ASPCA's Ms. LaFarge knows this first-hand. She was part of an unusual experiment - the effort to show that chimpanzees could be taught to communicate with humans using sign language.

For two years in the 1970s, Ms. LaFarge was the surrogate mother to a young chimp, whom she raised along with her own children. He wore children's clothes, ate human food - and picked up a taste for good red wine. The idea was to immerse him in a world where he would be taught sign language in the same way a human child would. He was named Nim Chimpsky - a playful twist on Noam Chomsky, the famous linguist who argued that the language instinct was innate only to humans.

Life with Nim was a challenge. Although no bigger than a two-year-old, he was immensely strong. He learned how to pick locks, and was a talented escape artist. He often went on the rampage and trashed the place. He could be dangerous, and he bit. All chimps become much more difficult to handle as they get older and, eventually, Ms. LaFarge had to give him up.

The whole wacky, fascinating and ultimately sad tale is told in a new book, Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human, by Elizabeth Hess. Nim did learn how to sign - but whether he'd learned language was a debate that raged for years. Eventually, the experiment was pronounced worthless. Nim was sent away to live in a cage, then sold to a medical lab for tuberculosis studies - a common fate at the time for discarded primates. Although public outrage saved him, he died at the relatively young age of 26. (Most chimps live to be 40 or more.)

Nim had a remarkable personality, by all accounts. And in many ways, he was deeply human. For instance, he never forgot how his human mother had abandoned him. When Ms. LaFarge visited him many years later, she unwisely entered his cage. He seized her by the ankle and twirled her around a couple of times to express his displeasure. She thought he'd bash her skull in. But he just wanted to send a message.

Today, Ms. LaFarge still feels guilty for abandoning Nim. And she thinks the project was unethical. It tricked the chimp into thinking he was a human being. And no one ever thought about what would become of him after it was over. The chimp who thought he was a person wound up as just another discarded animal.

Even so, Ms. LaFarge understands the human desire to connect with animals. "Many pet owners will tell you that their pet understands them better than their spouse does," she says. A lot of us treat our pets like people, and she says her own emotional relationship with Nim was extremely rewarding. After all, chimps spend their lives reading and responding to the emotions of the others in their group, and Nim was wonderful at that. But the two species have separate needs, and they have always lived separate lives. "A wild animal stuck in a domestic environment is essentially trapped," Ms. LaFarge says. "It is our prisoner."

When Travis viciously attacked her friend on Monday, Sandra Herold, his owner, placed a hysterical call to 911. Then she tried to help her friend by stabbing Travis with a butcher knife and clubbing him with a shovel. It didn't stop him. When the paramedics arrived, the chimp took off. When he tried to get into a police cruiser, an officer shot him several times. The blood trail led back to the house, and he was found in his bedroom area with his toys. The desperate chimp had been trying to go home.