Shirari Industries :: Blog :: Nim Chimpsky, humans, and the animal family

An activist friend of mine, Jesse Lokahi Heiwa, sent me a link to Chris Colin's The chimp who thought he was a boy, a Salon interview with Elizabeth Hess on her new biography, Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human. What a read. I was once interested in doing sign language research with primates, and today am very glad I didn't end up going that route. On the one hand you get this real sense of our connection with our ape cousins, and a new illumination of their personhood, but on the other, you can't really forge such a close (and arguably productive) relationship without harming the ape you're communicating with. Apes aren't meant to be pets, actors, research subjects, or companions to humans - they're evolved to hang out with other apes. The interview, and I'm sure the book, paint a very sad picture of how hurt Nim was when people stopped treating him like a human and started treating him like an ape again.

The article begins "Sometimes we're animals." Colin means it in the sense that what members of our species did to Nim was "bestial," inhumane (inhuman). But I think he's got it backwards. Humans are always animals; the other animals are our family, like it or not. We may try to "elevate" ourselves from their ranks, call human actions moral ones, and equate animals with lawless cruelty. But when we treat our cousins badly, our behavior isn't bestial but all too human. Only we set up research labs, and only we have the power to call the shots on our brothers' and sisters' lives with impunity. I think we need to spend more, not less, time thinking of ourselves as animals, and develop some empathy out of that connection.