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:
http://hubpages.com/hub/Project-Bows-FAQ-Why-is-it-called-a-lexigram-when-it-looks-like-a-word
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.
A Young Chimpanzee's Growth and Development
Chimpanzee Development Age Three through Five
Bow and Literacy
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.
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| When Sword Met Bow |
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.
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