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98
SIGNS IN THE WILDERNESS
Once admired for her skill with sign language, Lucy,
a laboratory-bred chimp, must now adapt
to the jungle — or die
by Eugene Linden
1)
Though her appearance and behavior make her all but indistinguishable from other wild chimps,
Lucy was born twenty years ago in the United States, which puts her roughly halfway through the normal
5
lifespan for chimps. Until she was eleven, she was raised as part of a human family in an affluent neigh-
borhood in Norman, Oklahoma. She did not meet another chimp until she was nine. Twelve years ago Lucy
achieved some celebrity for her role in experiments exploring the use of American Sign Language by
10 chimpanzees. But since 1977 she
has been weaned gradually from everything she learned about human
civilizatin during the first part of her life and has been taught the ways of wild chimpanzees. Lucy is the only
chimp bom and reared in America ever to have been reintroduced to the wild.
15
2) Some thirty chimps participated in the language experiments of the 1970s. In the years since, these
chimps have fulfilled various destinies. Washoe, the original sign-languageusing chimp, is still with
20 Dr.Roger Fouts, who has worked with her since the late 1960s, when he was a graduate student. Two other
chimps, named Nim Chimpsky and Ally, became the center of a cause celebre when they were sold for
medical research. Some veterans of these experiments were used in batch— testing of hepatitis vaccines, and
25 the remainder live out their days in other laboratories, game parks, and zoos. All of the chimps, however are
imperiled by a growing surplus of adult chimps in the United States, which increases pressures to use these
animals in «terminal» research.
3)Before her trip to the wild, at the age of eleven, Lucy's experience of the jungle was confined to
30 pictures in magazines that she would leaf through at her house in Norman, Oklahoma. At the age of two
days Lucy was given to Maurice and Jane Temerlin to raise. Maurice Temerlin is a psychologist, and Lucy
was to be the subject of an experiment to determine how a chimp raised in an «enriched» human
35 environment would develop. Later, because pioneering studies showed that chimpanzees had the capacity to
learn and communicate with human beings through the sign language of the deaf, the Temeriins hoped they
might actually have two-way communication with Lucy. It's one thing to tell an animal to get your slippers
40 and have it respond appropriately; it's quite another to have the animal use a human language to tell you that
it has hurt its knee or that it is feeling sad.
4)
The language experiments with apes have provoked a great deal of controversy over the years.
45 Critics have raised doubts about whether the chimps who used sign language were actually demonstrating an
understanding of the language or were in fact dumbly responding to cues given by human beings in the hope
of getting some reward. Proponents of this experimentation deflect the criticisms on several grounds.
50 Twenty
years after Washoe first made the sign more, the debate is still unresolved and most of the
participants in it are wearied, if not embittered. Moreover, science continues to lack a serviceable definition
of language against which to judge these experiments: whether or not what the apes are doing constitutes
55
«language» still seems to be in the eye of the beholder.
5)
Dr. Roger Pouts, a comparative psychologist affiliated with the University of Oklahoma, was in
charge of Lucy's language training, which began when she was five years old. Although this was a
60 relatively late start, Lucy acquired about 130 words in the course of the various experiments. Fouts ran to
study her language use.
He was less interested in teaching Lucy an enormous vocabulary than he was in
determining the ways she used the signs he taught her. For instance, in one landmark study he asked Lucy to
65
describe objects for which she had no 65 words. Presented with a radish, Lucy described the object as a
«cry hurt food.» A watermelon was a «drink fruit.»
6)
As a member of an upper-middle-class household, Lucy had lots of toys and a rich array of games
70
and people to amuse herself with. She would pretend to swallow objects while looking in a mirror, and then
sign swallow to herself as she did so. She loved to play chase-and-tickle games. Indeed, one of her most
frequent statements was «Roger tickle Lucy.» One day, while visiting, I suggested that Roger say «Lucy
75
tickle Roger», to see how she would respond. After looking at him incredulously once, and correcting him
once, Lucy grasped the difference and rushed to tickle Roger.
7)
When Lucy was nine, the family acquired an infant chimp named Marianne as a companion for her.
80
The next year they hired Janis Carter to help take care of both chimps. Carter was 80 then twenty-six. The