I am a primatologist who spends twelve hours most days in the company of a thirteen year old chimpanzee named Bow. I am also an editor with Inverted-A Press.
Yesterday during dinner my daughter and I were talking about our plans for later that evening. We had recently found out it was possible to get Chinese take-out in a neighboring town, so we were planning to do that for a late evening snack on a Saturday night. Meanwhile, we were having our regular dinner in the pen with Bow.
Bow had already had his red apple and his green apple, and the only things left for him to ask for were a pork dish in a bowl and a banana. Usually when he sees these dishes, he just calls them "meat" and that is good enough for me. But Bow took my little finger and spelled:
"תני לי אוכל סיני". "Give me Chinese food."
I looked at his choices on the little white table. The only thing that even vaguely resembled Chinese food was the pork dish, which consisted of little pieces of pork stir fried with diced potatoes and onions and some lemon juice thrown into the mix. Admittedly, my recipe is a little Asian inspired, but it was hardly Chinese food.
"Fine, here's some Chinese food,"I said and handed him the bowl. He took it and ate it all, but when he returned the bowl to me, he spelled angrily: "תני לי אוכל סיני". "Give me Chinese food!" There was only a banana left on the table.
I looked into his eyes, and I realized he was angry that we were excluding him from our late night snack which this time would consist of Chinese food. We always have snacks together in my room on Saturday night after Bow has gone to bed, if we are not going out, and Bow does not seem to mind. But he does like Chinese food, and I guess we should not have discussed that in front of him.
"Okay, Bow," I said. "If I have any leftovers from tonight, I will share them with you tomorrow." This satisfied him.
We ended up getting "General Chicken", which is what they call General Tso's Chicken on the local menu. I can only finish about half of a normal serving, especially if it is my second dinner of the night.
Bow liked the chicken very much when I let him have my leftovers today, but he did not eat the rice.
For the really big morsels. he bent low over the food, so as to avoid dropping it.
All in all Bow is a pretty clean eater. And does like his Chinese food!
This morning, Bow asked to go outside early and started his display on the swing.
For people who are not accustomed to chimpanzee displays, it can seem frightening or be interpreted as a sign of aggression. Bow makes it very clear that what he means is: "I am big and strong" and that his display implies no menace towards anyone who is willing to concede that, yes, he is big and strong.
In the clip above, you can see Bow displaying, then gesturing to invite me over to the bench, once the display is done. He is happy and friendly, and one of the reasons we get along so well is that I don't try to hinder him in his natural behaviors. If Bow needs to tell the world that he is big and strong, that is fine with me. I do not have any desire to stop him or to edit his message to make it more politically correct.
One of the reasons I feel no desire to engage in a shouting match with Bow over our relative strengths is that I am perfectly at peace with who I am. I am a five foot two human female, and I don't need to be stronger than a post-pubescent male chimpanzee to feel good about myself. However, I do know other people who feel threatened by another's attributes, abilities and activities, even when they have nothing to do with them.
Lately, I have seen all sorts of displays by humans about their right to edit the free speech of others. One person, who I really felt should know better, suggested burning every copy of a book, because the book contained "false" information.Who decides what is false? By what authority? If it is false, don't you trust other people to eventually figure it out?
The argument goes something like this: Are you a government certified expert on this subject? If not, how dare you write about it? What if somebody believes you, and they get hurt? How dare you publish this recipe for poppy seed cake? What if someone uses it and gets food poisoning? What if someone reads this false interpretation of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and relies on it to his detriment? Don't people need to be protected from false information?
I have no actual claim to being an expert in the culinary arts, but this does not keep me from occasionally publishing a recipe. Other people may dabble in linguistics, who are not linguists. Even though I am one, it does not bother me. That's what's great about living in a free country. One can try anything and learn from mistakes and get better at it and later publish one's findings.
What makes it okay to call something a lexigram when it looks like a word? I've written about that here:
While I do have a Ph.D in linguistics, any real claim to fame that I have as a linguist is not based on authority or certification, but on the things I have found out for myself and the information I have shared by writing about it and publishing.
We have some new readers for this blog, some of whom are unfamiliar with Project Bow and with the meaning of the term "cross-fostering", and who don't know our long history. Some of them seem to still think that Bow is a baby, and they warn me about what may happen when he turns three or five or six or seven. They don't realize that in February, he will turn thirteen. For those people, I am sharing these links, so that they may learn about our experiences at the ages they mentioned and beyond.
When I published "When Sword Met Bow" as a book for children, the intent was not to scientifically explore the phenomenon of cross-fostering. Instead, the book was meant for anyone bringing home a new baby to help their older child with the transition. It was a lyrical picture book, intended for a young audience.
However, now there are people who are worried that it will encourage others to adopt chimpanzees, and one such person has seen fit to write a "review" of the book without having read it, warning about all the stages of chimpanzee development.
And here I am, wondering whether I should put on my expert hat or my libertarian hat. Should I explain that I do in fact know a great deal more about it than these people assume? Or should I simply remind them that this country was founded on the principle of live and let live?
I am a linguist and a primatologist, and I do have scholarly publications on this topic.
But more important than any claim I might offer to expertise is this: we live in a country that was founded on the principle that all men are created equal and have the right to pursue happiness at their own expense. No expertise is required to pursue science or art, and no license is required for the publication of our results.
Other people do not adopt chimpanzees primarily because they do not wish to do so. Chimpanzee owning citizens are a minority, but one that needs protecting.
I once sat at a restaurant with a group of scientists, among them a noted primatologist, and all of them were complaining about how hard it was to get funding. Then in the same breath, one of them said something about money being the root of all evil.
Money is not evil. Trying to get it by force is. Respectable ape language researchers have been pushed under the bus. Their funding has run dry. They have been forced to try to escape to the private sector, but Federal regulations still leave them very much under the government oversight committees. The only hope is going totally private, and this means giving up the protections afforded by "expert" status.
Bow is not a "pet". But it's only because private ownership is still allowed that Project Bow is possible. That -- and the first amendment to the United States constitution -- is something I am very grateful for.
Yesterday at dinner, in addition to other choices, Bow had three bananas to choose from. One was very fresh and had completely yellow skin. The other two were a bit over ripe, with brownish mottled discolorations.
When Bow decided that he was done with apples and was ready to start choosing bananas, he told me: "Give me the good banana." Since it was obvious he meant the one that was not overripe, I went ahead and gave it to him. When he was done, he spelled: "Give me the good bad banana."
"What does he mean by that?" Sword asked.
I looked at the remaining two bananas. One was somewhat less ripe than the other. "I think he means this one," I told Sword. "It doesn't have as many brown spots."
When he was done with the second banana, Bow told me he wanted the "bad bad banana." Since there was only one banana left, nobody asked which one he meant.
Yesterday had a special looking date: 01/01/11. One /One/ One - One. But it did not look to be that special a day when it started out. Sword had a friend over for a New Year's sleepover the night before. They stayed up much later than I could allow myself, because for me the start of the new year was a regular day and I had to be back in the pen at six-thirty a.m.
Since Sword was celebrating that night, I was not even going to suggest that she practice the piano, but oddly enough her friend asked her to play something, just for fun. Sword played the Siamese Cat Song from Lady and the Tramp. It was much later than she usually practices her piano, and I wonder in retrospect if Bow heard her in the pens and whether it woke him up.
The next morning, the girls slept late, and Bow and I had our breakfast in the pens without them at the usual time, and I was back on the computer doing my regular stuff by seven a.m. When the girls came in to breakfast, even though the guest was very polite to Bow on entry, Bow's hair stood on end, and he puffed himself up to twice his normal size and insisted on displaying his strength and might at them by rattling the doors and rebounding off the glass for at least five minutes. The girls more or less ignored this display, but it bothered me that he was behaving this way.
After they were done with breakfast in the pen, the girls stayed a little longer and played charades. Bow sat and watched, and he was calm now and very interested in their game. But he didn't try to guess on any of the charades, and when Sword's friend asked him if would like to try one, he only hunkered down as if looking at her from under the lower grid.
"A snake?" the little girl guessed.
Bow took my hand and spelled: "Yes." But I didn't believe him. I felt that he just said that because he hadn't really thought of anything.
The rest of the day was devoted to answering comments and cleaning out my email account of things that had accumulated there and were filling up the disk space. They disabled "ftp" at the well this year, and so it took me a while to learn how to use the new method to transfer data, which is why I had a backlog of old emails that needed to be downloaded and archived.
Bow asked for his shoe to play with and his blanket. Eventually, he made a small hole in the blanket and separated the insole from the shoe. The shoe had already lost the shoestring it came with at Christmas. I felt disheartened that he was up to his old destructive behavior. He made a soft, "ooh ooh" sound when the insole came out, to alert me that something unexpected had happened. (He also did that the other day when he discovered a spot of dirt on his blanket and decided he should clean it.)
I took away the insole and the blanket and went back to cleaning out my email account. It was a long and laborious process. But Bow was not happy. He made raspberry sounds. I went back in with him, quite irritated. "I left you your shoe. Do you want me to take the shoe away?"
He handed me the shoe and gestured that he needed my hand, so he could spell things on the glass. I gave him my hand. "What do you want, Bow?"
"I want to play music like Sword," he spelled.
I gave him a skeptical look. We had tried so many times to interest him in making music, but he never once took to it. All he ever seemed to want to do was break the instrument. "You want to play music?"
"Yes. Like Sword..."
That seemed to be the big point with him. Not the music, but the competition with Sword. "Bow, you can't play music like Sword," I said, sighing.
He spelled: "Then don't let her." He looked me straight in the eye, in the usual challenge that I suppose every parent with more than one child has to face. Do you love her more than me? he seemed to be asking.
"Okay, okay, fine. I'll have to go look for the old keyboard."
I ran to my room to fetch it, before he could get into any more mischief. The old keyboard was a Casio that my father brought home one day sometime around 1980. He said it was for the whole family, not just for one of us. It was the keyboard I used at all my filksings in Grand Prairie. Sword was using it to practice her piano up until my mother bought her a full sized Yamaha a couple of years ago. Since then, the Casio has been in disuse. I found it on top of a chest and under some pillows that my dolls had been reclining on.
I hurried back to the pens with the keyboard, but when I turned it on, it had no power. "I have to get new batteries, Bow." I rushed to the kitchen for a package of batteries. Back in the pen, Bow watched me open the battery compartment and replace the batteries. But after I did that, it still didn't work. There still wasn't any power.
"I'm sorry, Bow," I said. "The keyboard doesn't work, anymore." I brought it in to show him.
Bow tried the keyboard. Then, when nothing happened, he turned it over and opened the battery compartment.
"No, don't do that!" I was afraid he would break it, but actually he opened it correctly, without breaking, and I was able to close it again. Then Bow picked the keyboard up and held it over his head and shook it. Suddenly, it started making sounds.
"Bow, you fixed it! It works now," I said, very much surprised. "Put it down and play it now." And he did! This is the first time ever that he has fixed something! How about that!
He pounded on the keys for a very long time, enjoying the sounds he was making. Sword came by from her room to see what was going on. "Is that what the noise was?" she asked, when she saw it was Bow playing the keyboard. "I thought you were watching something on YouTube."
"No," I said. "Bow has decided he wants to play the keyboard."
"He's not playing it very well," she said, and went back to her room.
I only got a chance to film the very end of Bow's playing. After that, he gave me back the keyboard and spelled: "I need to learn to play like Sword."
"You want lessons? But Bow, the teacher can't go in with you."
"Tell her to try," Bow spelled. Then he gestured for me to take the keyboard out, because he was done with it.
But what about proof? Am I really trying to prove that Bow can use language? Why have I spent so much time on proofing books for children, and so little time on trying to prove that Bow can read? What is more important here?
What's most important, of course, is for all of us to survive. And in order to do that, I have to start generating an income stream. We have to eat.
I set up an experiment, the goal has been achieved, but proof is hard to come by. And it's not just hard for me. It's hard for every animal language experimenter. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh is still publicizing that Kanzi has English comprehension at the level of a two and half year old, when Kanzi is a very intelligent thirty year old. But knowing what he knows and being able to prove it are two different things. Irene Pepperberg worked with the late Alex, an African Grey parrot. He didn't need to point at lexigrams or words, he could vocalize comprehensible English. But in order for her work to be accepted, she had to make cognitive, not linguistic claims. Linguists who are receptive to her work like to point out that Alex's production and comprehension of English wasn't "language". He was just manipulating "auditory symbols". I ask you: when somebody says "green" to refer to a green object, and that person is a human, is the word "green" just an auditory symbol? Or is it a word? But when a parrot does the same thing, do we have to use different terminology to label it? And this goes on without having the problem that we're having: that Bow won't point at letters without using our hands.
Lawrence came back from his trip very eager to make progress with Bow. He has a really positive attitude, and he's trying to think of ways to get Bow less dependent on physical contact with us when he writes. He's thinking of things like taking letter boards outside with Bow, so that he can spell outdoors as well as in. (Of course, we did do that, but he tore them up, and it's just much better when he can't directly harm the letters he is pointing at, because they are behind the glass or beyond the grid.)
"Yeah, so you tried that," Lawrence said to me yesterday. "But maybe he can do things now, that he couldn't do before. Maybe he's maturing."
Lawrence may be right. We can try these things again. We can write letters in chalk on the concrete, we can wear T-shirts that are letter boards, we can re-try a lot of things we've tried before. But... while we're trying all that, we still have to eat.
I'm hoping to start filming again in the coming year on a regular basis, and I hope that I'll be able to capture more footage of Bow spontaneously spelling, whether on the glass or on his touch screen.
"How many videos of him doing that will be enough to prove that he can?" Lawrence asked me yesterday.
I laughed. The truth is that I could have a million such videos, and it still wouldn't be enough. Doubters would want any possibility of "cuing" to be eliminated. They would want to see him doing this with no one in the room. They would want to see him doing it with people he doesn't know. They would want him to talk to complete strangers. They would want him to answer multiple choice questions, over and over again, till he was bored to tears, so everything could be "replicable" and "objective." And even if he did all these things, it might still not be enough, because he would be accused of doing it by rote, and the utterances would not be spontaneous. So, while I'm never going to give up, I'm also not holding my breath.
The difference between me and Herbert Terrace is that I have a real relationship with Bow, and I don't see him as just a means to an end. Even if we never prove anything, Bow and I are still going to be together, and we still have to eat.
Which is why at the end of this year, I am putting more energy into proofing books, and less into trying to come up with proof. The next book I plan to publish, When Sword Met Bow, is going to come out sometime in December. If you buy it, please be sure to review it on Amazon. It might help us buy more bananas and grapes and apples.
This morning Bow and I went outside. I was hoping that he would enjoy playing on his new swing. Actually, it's an old swing, but he hasn't had the opportunity to use in a while. Yesterday, Rex the welder came by to reinforce one of our inner doors, and he also installed two iron rings in the outer pen so we could hang a swing. It was one of the swings Bow used to use regularly, before the sun room was converted into part of the pen system. It used to hang from the beam that is now inaccessible to those of us inside the pen.
Yesterday, Lawrence installed the swing for Bow after Rex left, and Bow had a good time with it. But this morning it was cold, and Bow didn't want to swing. He lay on the outer chair that is not intended for him, so much as for the human with him, and he wrapped himself up in his own body heat.
He did make a few cursory attempts at swinging to appease me, but he really wasn't into it.
Eventually, we went back inside, and soon thereafter Mark, the Schwan's delivery guy, came by to take our order. Bow and Mark are well acquainted, and Mark greeted Bow the usual way: "Hi, there buddy, how you doin'?"
"Could you keep talking to Bow while I get my purse?" I asked Mark. (Actually, my fanny pack was right there in the pen, but it was covered up, and I couldn't see it.) Mark dutifully kept up the chit-chat with Bow, but when I came back, he told me: "I think I said something that made him mad."
"What did you say?" I asked, going back in to get my wallet.
"I asked him wouldn't you like to go outside and swing from one of those trees?"
Apparently, this set Bow off and canceled all the good will that Mark had built up with him.
After Mark left, I asked Bow why he got mad. Bow spelled: "He's trying to kill Bow."
"You mean because he was trying to tempt you to leave the pen?"
"Yes," Bow spelled. "It's dangerous."
Bow is aware of what happens to chimpanzees who venture outside their homes. He has heard about recent events, and he wants nothing to do with it. He even objected to this line from one of my Debt Collector songs: "I would rather be free than live trapped in a cage." The cage is safer.
Yesterday, when he was out with Lawrence in the outer pens, Bow asked to come in. He took Lawrence to the glass and spelled: "I think it's going to rain." Then he asked to go back out again. Apparently, the only reason for going in was in order to share the insight. (Bow has no letters and no computer outside, so if something occurs to him out there, he has to go in to spell it out.)
Well, it didn't rain. The weather was blustery, and the tree limbs swayed and the leaves fell, but there was no rain. Later in the day, when they were next to the computer, Lawrence asked Bow: "Why do you think it's going to rain?"
Bow took the chopstick, pressed a few letters and the computer said: "Why is..." But the question was never finished. Lawrence speculated that Bow was trying to say something like: "Why is the wind blowing?" But that's just one guess out of many.
All day, there were gusts of wind, and you could even hear it blow, but there was no rain. It did rain a little in the middle of the night.
This morning I mentioned this to Bow, and he spelled: "Yes. Bow is smart."
Last Monday, when Lawrence was sitting with Bow, Bow asked him if he could have an apple. I was out with Sword at the time, so Lawrence went to look for an appropriate apple to give to Bow. Now, I keep apples handy out on the dining table, in big bowls right next to the bananas. And I keep other apples, the ones that are in reserve, in case the first apples run out, in the refrigerator. But it was around three-thirty, and Lawrence knew that we eat dinner at five, and he didn't want to spoil Bow's appetite, but he did want to comply with the request. The apples on the table were big, red apples and big yellow apples. The red apples had come in a large bag, and we were down to the last couple of them. Lawrence felt the apples in the bowl, both yellow and red, were too large for just a snack. So he went looking for smaller apples in the refrigerator. He found an unopened bag full of yellowish/red apples, and he took one and gave it to Bow.
Lawrence told me that he'd taken an apple from the refrigerator to give to Bow before he left that day. It was not a problem. So when I served dinner, I decided to give Bow one of the big red apples. And the next day at lunch, I gave him the last of the big red apples, while I took one of the smaller yellowish/red apples for myself.
Bow threw a fit! He would not finish eating his red apple. I came and looked at it, to make sure it wasn't rotten. It wasn't. It was fine. "Bow, why won't you eat your red apple?" I asked.
He gestured at my tray and then spelled: "Uncle Lawrence gave you those apples to give to me!"
I was shocked. "No, Bow, he didn't. Those are my apples. I bought them at the store with my own money. Lawrence let you have one of them as a snack, but he didn't bring them, and they don't all belong to you!"
It took quite a while to convince him. Because Bow had never seen any of those apples until Lawrence gave him one, he assumed Lawrence had brought them. He thought he knew all my apples and that those were not mine. However, I did convince him, and he did eventually finish eating his big red apple.
It's true that many times people do bring by food just for Bow. Once Rex the welder and his wife brought shiny red apples that had grown on their own trees just for Bow, and only Bow got to eat them. Lawrence does sometimes bring special snacks just for Bow. Tracey brought sweet potatoes he had grown himself just for Bow, and only Bow got to eat them. Bow received a shipment of pears a few times as a present, and we were so anxious to honor Bow's property rights, that when he refused to eat them, we let them rot. But the second time that happened, we decided that if Bow refused to eat the pears when they were overripe, then others could do so, because it is really very wasteful.
As a firm believer in property rights, I have raised Bow to be aware of what is his and to claim it. However, it was really disconcerting to be mistakenly accused by my little boy of stealing what he believed to be his apples!
Bow is not always that cooperative, so the word "yes" is not often on his lips. Or on his keyboard. Or one that he spells on the glass. He is usually not a "yes-man". But yesterday the word for the day was "yes".
After lunch, Tracey, our computer consultant, came by with my old Gateway laptop that recently lost its hard drive. He had saved as many of my data files as he could, and had backed them up on the new hard drive. The old operating system with all my installed programs could not be saved, and so we were in the process of trying to replicate it, when Lawrence came back from lunch.
Bow greeted Lawrence very noisily, with lots of chimp vocalizations, and rattled the door, and tried to display how very big and strong he was. It was quite a bit more of a display than Lawrence would have gotten, if Tracey were not there.
Tracey and I kept working on the computer, while Bow and Lawrence played in the adjoining pen. Then Bow took Lawrence to the glass and spelled out that he wanted to go outside. Lawrence escorted him out, but Bow made a big point of rattling the door right behind where Tracey was sitting, working on my Gateway.
Tracey turned around and asked: "Bow, are you going outside now?" And Bow said "Yes." After which, Lawrence opened the next door, and the two of them went outside to play.
What do I mean, he said "Yes"? Well, it really was more like "eh", but I just know he meant to say "yes". The consonants weren't there, because he can't make them. All he can make is the vowel, and the intonational contour, and let me tell you, those were perfect! Lawrence and I both thought he was saying yes.
Am I completely deluded? Well, no, I'm not making a scientific claim here. I realize that this would carry no weight with the scientific community. But here are some of the reasons that it makes sense to us:
It wasn't a chimpanzee vocalization. Bow's chimp cries express emotions more than specific thoughts, and as such they tend to be repetitions of the same vocal patterns over and over again.
This was a single syllable he uttered, very crisp, with the correct vowel, and with no repetition.
In the context of the short exchange with Tracey, it sounded as if he said yes.
After that, Tracey and I started talking about how hard it is for humans to express themselves in writing in real time, when their larynx is injured, and how hard it is for Bow to use his touch screen computer to spell out words.
Meanwhile, Bow and Lawrence wrestled outside, and Lawrence told me afterwards that Bow had been working really hard to beat him, probably because he wanted to impress Tracey. Finally, Lawrence gave in. "You win," he told Bow, and Bow, feeling satisfied, decided to go in to use the potty.
Afterwards, when Lawrence was emptying out the potty, Bow picked up the chopstick he uses for his touchscreen. Lawrence, who was already in the corridor, said to Bow: "Now don't you be playing with that. You either put it down or use it to say something." (I can't tell you how many chopsticks we've lost as a result of other uses that Bow has put them to.)
In response to Lawrence's admonition, Bow picked up the chopstick, poked at the computer about three times, and the computer said: "Yes."
I was stunned. "It sounded like yes! Did it sound like yes to you?"
Lawrence and Tracey both agreed. "It didn't sound like anything else besides yes," Lawrence said.
I've been busy writing on Hubpages, while Bow has been making rasberry sounds all day. Every once in a while I go in to deal with potty issues, and I always ask him if he wants anything. "Bow, do you want anything?"
Finally, after the umpteenth time, Bow spells: "Two things."
"What two things?"
"I want not to hear about locks."
"Okay." I've been writing about locks all day. "And what else?"
"I'm bored."
I guess it's time to stop writing, and time to start jumping around. So I'll make this post brief.
While I was away for four days, Lawrence and Bow watched two videos together. The first was Phantom of the Opera. After they had finished watching, Lawrence asked Bow: "Did you like the movie?"
Bow spelled: "I liked the music but I didn't like the movie."
The second video they watched was The Wizard of Oz. When Lawrence asked Bow about it, Bow had no reservations. "I liked the movie," he spelled.
I am planning a trip to visit my mother at the end of the month. The last time I visited there was in 2005, with Sword and Bow. Sword celebrated her sixth birthday there. Bow had to be carried by me throughout the house, as it would not be wise to let him loose. At night, while Sword stayed with my mother, Bow and I went to a motel room, where, to work off all that pent up energy from being carried all day, Bow would leap from one bed to the other, over and over and over again, before he would settle down
to sleep. Amazingly, the motel room did not sustain any damage from serving as Bow's play gym.
This time, Lawrence will stay with Bow, and I will fly with Sword to my mother's place for a long weekend. We will sleep in her guestroom, and I won't have a chimp on my back. The load will be lighter, but something will be missing, too.
This morning, Bow took my hand and spelled: "It's not good that Mommy will go to grandma's house without Bow." He would like to come, too.
Yesterday, Megan came in to see Bow in the afternoon. It was prearranged so that she would be able to serve Bow his supper and put him to bed. Once a week she will be doing this, and there are many benefits, not the the least of which is the growing intimacy between Megan and Bow.
I explained many minute details of the procedure to Megan, before I left, but apparently one thing hadn't been made clear: when serving Bow a meal, we serve one item at a time. The whole dinner is displayed to him on a white folding table on the other side of the glass, but Bow chooses one course at a time.
Why do we do it this way? To avoid waste. Bow can have the whole dinner. But until he finishes one serving, he doesn't get another one. If we did it any other way, here is what would happen: Bow would take one bite of each item, but if he didn't think it was all that great, he would go on to the next. He would eat only the choice bits of each fruit, leaving the rest to rot. He would exercise his right to choose by exploiting the best parts of everything, not caring what lesser being later consumed his leavings. In some cases, he would also smear food around, allowing ants and other insects to clean up after him, unless we immediately washed the floor afterwards.
In nature, there is no waste. Those higher up in the social order eat all the best bits, and those lower down eat what is left over, but everything gets eaten. In our modernized human society, we pretend that everyone is equal, and everyone gets the best bits, but if we have leftovers, we can't give them to the poor. The poor have to be given brand new food, and if people see other people picking through their garbage, they are greatly offended. Also, even the ants are banned from our homes. We'd rather have things go to waste than have it get messy!
In my house, it's not quite that way. Our dogs and the chickens do eat scraps, and we have no garbage disposal. Still, I discourage Bow from going for just the best bits of every item. Unless he finishes the first thing he asked for, he doesn't get to ask for another. (There are certain reasonable exceptions: if he shows me that part of the apple he got is rotten on the inside, I don't make him eat it.)
Anyway, I neglected to explain all this to Megan, and she didn't know. However, Bow got the point across to her just fine. She asked him what he wanted, and he said he wanted an apple, and she asked him what else, thinking she would give him more than one item at a time, but he kept answering apple, until she gave in and got him the apple. In this way, Bow helped enforce the rule, and all went off without a hitch.
Afterwards, Megan asked me: "Do you just give him one item at a time?"
Yesterday I had interesting exchange on Facebook with an old friend. She said she wanted to leave these comments here, but she's not on Blogger and didn't know how. She was referring to some of the entries about Bow and Megan. Here is some of what she had to say:
Not suggesting that Bow is anxious, just that he might sometimes want to or need to return to a more "natural" state for a primate and not have to talk. Sometimes I need that too. A friend around which you can just hang out and you don't have to work to make conversation.
I explained that Bow can go for hours without talking to me, too. He isn't required to constantly talk. But as far as his motives for remaining silent with Megan, I replied as follows: "We're all primates, so... I don't think that's the issue. It has more to do, I think, with social isolation and breaking into a relationship. It happens this way with every new volunteer until Bow accepts them as a member of the family. He just won't talk to strangers."
At this point my friend said something that really got me to thinking: "Good for him. He will cuddle with them but not talk to them. So physical intimacy is less scary than mental intimacy."
Wow! That's true, isn't it? Unexpected but true. We often think of cuddling as being more intimate than talking. But is it? Then why is it we find it easier to cuddle with someone who is non-verbal? Isn't it easy to cuddle a baby or a dog? Doesn't it become harder once it is someone who can talk and express an opinion?
As adult human beings in this society, we can't just go up to a stranger and cuddle, but we are allowed to talk. Talking opens the way to other, more physical relationships with adults, but if you fail the talking test, then you never get to cuddle with that person! Not in a million years!
Language can be a form of intimacy, but it can also be a barrier. Language is seen as a test of intelligence, but it is also a test of group affiliation. Would you cuddle with your dog, if you knew what he was really thinking? I've had the experience of being a stranger in a strange land a number of times in my life, when I didn't speak the language of the people around me. It prevented me from speaking my mind, but it also made people act nicer to me. Until they know what you really think, people tend be warmer and more accepting!
The easy intimacy of two beings who share a tactile relationship but no words can be deceptive. You never really know someone until you have experienced him verbally! Which means that the real test of Bow and Megan's relationship is just now beginning!
Bow and Megan get along splendidly, and there have been no more infractions, no incidents, not even so much as a broken chopstick. At one point today Bow put the chopstick in his mouth, and Megan told him that in that case he should not have it, and Bow gave it to her, and she put it away! Have you ever heard of such a well behaved chimpanzee or such a competent caretaker?
The only problem is that Bow has not spelled with her since that first time. He explained it to me like this: "I'm trying not to talk." Why is he trying not to talk? No answer. However, Megan is taking this silence in her stride, and she has found all sorts of things they can do together. When I came to relieve her this afternoon in time for dinner, she was showing Bow how to whistle into his hands. She cupped her hands into a sort of shell and whistled into them. Then she shaped his hands into the same shell, and he actually tried to blow. No sound, so far, but it's a very promising start! What if he could learn to make music without a flute to break? That would be something!
This was Megan's third day. All is still calm and nearly idyllic, but Bow has drawn an invisible line in the sand -- or rather the concrete. He won't spell. He won't ask for things that he obviously wants. And he's been breaking chopsticks.
The first chopstick he broke today was on my watch. I took over for lunch, and as I was out in the kitchen getting lunch, the chopstick having been inadvertently left in the pen alone with Bow, he broke it. This got him in trouble, and he did not get as big a lunch as he might otherwise have had. But I saw this as an opportunity, so I told Megan about the chopstick incident, gave her a brand new chopstick for Bow to use with his touchscreen, and suggested that I would bring a snack for Bow to select around 3:30pm.
Bow hasn't been using his touchscreen computer much, and in a way, it's hard to blame him. It's not easy work spelling out words on that screen. We need help programming a more user friendly text-to-speech program for him, and with that end in mind, I posted an ad for a programmer today.
Anyway, at 3:30 on the dot I brought out three possible snacks: grapes on plate, a red apple and a small glass of pomegranate juice. I put them outside the glass door and spoke out their names for Bow and Megan to see and hear. Then Bow was to select one. Only he refused to spell anything, on the glass or on the computer. I left the snacks out throughout the day, but he never did ask for one. When I came to relieve Megan at 5:00 pm, the three snacks were still there, untouched.
It still didn't seem so bad, as Bow was gracious and gentle with Megan all day, cuddling with her and using the potty properly. No accidents. But just when I thought he had been perfect, I saw the broken chopstick --cleanly broken in two, no shards -- on the side of the glass away from Bow.
"Did he break another chopstick?" Sword asked at dinner.
"Yes, but I don't know how it happened. Did you break it when Megan didn't see?" I asked Bow.
Yesterday, I started to take action with regard to my long term plan to help Bow become acquainted with other chimpanzees. I contacted some other chimpanzee owners, and I spoke to them about introducing our chimps to each other via Skype. There are no immediate results from this, but at least they didn't say "No." Which is a lot better than what I get when I suggest this idea to primatologists with institutional employers or zoo people.
Perhaps I myself have been guilty of the same sort of prejudice against other chimp owners that some institutional primatologists have against me. After all, I am doing research with Bow into his linguistic abilities. I am not "playing Tarzan." In a way, up until now, even though I knew there were other chimpanzee owners, I tried to distance myself from them. I was more "legitimate" in my own eyes. But that is a bunch of nonsense, isn't it? There is no such thing as legitimacy. It's all a matter of attitude. I and the other chimpanzee owners are leading a lonely existence with strong forces fighting us and trying to drive us into giving up. If we don't help each other, who will help us?
Of course, it would be dangerous to try to introduce adult and adolescent chimpanzees to each other in person. They could unwittingly transmit diseases to each other, and any new chimpanzee in an institution has to be quarantined and tested and very slowly and carefully introduced to each of the others alone, before being introduced to the group. All this has to be done in order to avoid real physical danger. But I'm not suggesting that we do that. I'm suggesting that we let them talk to each other via Skype. Skype is free. It costs nothing to talk on Skype. And yet certain zoos have told me they could not do this, because they don't have a budget for it! I wonder, do they have a budget for email?
Anyway, a chimp is a chimp. I don't need the cooperation of zoo people or institutional primatologists to get access to another chimp online. Privately owned chimps may actually be more fluent in English than their zoo-jailed counterparts. So letting Bow try to talk vocally to private chimps seems like a better experiment. I don't know why I've waited this long.
"Give me a wife," Bow said this morning at breakfast. "A pretty one."
"What if there isn't a pretty one?" I asked. "Would you settle for an ugly one?"
"Get the prettiest there is," he replied.
I smiled. They say that among chimpanzees, there are no old maids. No chimpanzee female goes to her death a virgin. The old maids of our Western culture are a symptom of monogamy. No female is too ugly if you don't have to settle for her as your only mate! I read that in a primatology book, so it must be true!
The important thing to remember is: if one door is closed, another may open. I'm keeping an open mind about communicating with other chimpanzees on-line.
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