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.
Today after breakfast Bow took my hand and spelled: "I have time to talk now." I thought that was a little funny, because it seemed to imply that he's so busy the rest of the day that there simply isn't enough time to talk.
"You have time to talk?" I echoed.
"Yes," he spelled. "I have time to talk to Mommy."
"Well, what do you have to say?"
"That Mommy will not die fast."
"You think that I won't die fast?" I asked. It was not clear what he meant.
He rephrased: "Don't die fast."
"Oh, you're telling me not to die fast."
"Yes."
He has mentioned before that he was worried about that. He has been noticing that I am aging, and he is concerned. There is really no particular cause for concern, but it's true that if I were a chimpanzee in the wild, I'd probably be dead by now, just on account of my age. Bow is extremely dependent on me, and he worries about what will happen to him after I am gone.
I asked him what he thought I should do in order not to die fast. He told me not to eat too much. But as soon as that advice was handed out, he lost all interest in the topic and asked to go outside.
Once there, he got agitated by Brownie's barking, displayed a little, and then went back to the quiet contemplation of nature.
Because Teyman cannot be left alone with the new puppy, Leo, we have taken to allowing Brownie and Leo free run of the backyard, while Teyman who is older, stays longer indoors and gets walked on a leash in our front yard. Sword and I take turns walking Teyman, and Bow seems to accept that I get to take an early morning walk with Teyman before I serve breakfast to him in the pens.
This morning, while on my walk with Teyman, I stopped to pick some blackberries by the fence to the pasture, and I served them to Bow along with his usual bunch of grapes. Bow asked for the grapes first, but I got distracted, and started to give him the blackberries, instead. He stared at me and did not budge, making no move to take the blackberries from me. "Oh. Right. You said grapes." So I went back and got the grapes. He finished the grapes, asked for the blackberries, finished the blackberries, and then asked for "just milk."
Normally, at this point he would have asked for cereal. There was a bowl and spoon on his table, all in readiness for that. But since he asked for just milk, I took the spoon away and poured milk into the bowl. He drank a little, then handed me the bowl that was still full of milk. "Thank you," he spelled. "Give me a blanket."
The "thank you" was surprising. He does say it sometimes, but it's only on rare occasions. I'm not one of those parents who insist on "thank you" and "please" all the time. So when he does say "thank you", he must really mean it.
He then asked for a blanket and started playing with it. It's only a small remnant of blanket that is left of the one he got for Christmas, but he's happy with it.
It's nice that he knows when he is full, and it's a good development that he no longer makes a mess with excess food. If he doesn't want to finish, he just gives the remainder back.
We all have choices. Sometimes we take them for granted, and sometimes we feel unduly fenced in by the choices that we have made in the past, so that we don't think we can just choose anything we want today. No, not everything is available to us, but we can choose from what is.
Bow and I interact all the time, every day. Every interaction is a choice. Even not interacting is a choice. Bow asks for food, for a blanket or a shirt, a toy or just to play together. He can also choose to stay indoors or to go out.
With me, Bow does not tend to ask to go out as often as he does with Lawrence. He is content for hours at a time to play indoors. For a while, it almost seemed that he had forgotten that going outside was a choice with me.
But in the past few months, he's asked to go outside a lot more, and he's okay with my going back in, while he suns himself, listens to the birds chirp, watches the dogs at play and even provokes a little mischief. He is not worried that I will run out on him, as I am usually in the inner pen, working on my computer, proofing books, and he can summon me at a moment's notice. This is a small step toward independence for both of us, but it has been a long time in coming, and it's nice and comfortable now.
Last night I went with my daughter and one of her friends to the local picnic. It is in reality a carnival with rides, concession stands, and local music and dancing. But the locals are modest, so they just call it a picnic. It's a picnic that lasts three days and comes alive at night.
When my daughter was little -- and she was two when we moved here -- she clung to my hand and needed me to accompany her on all the rides. But now she is twelve going on thirteen, and she has friends to go on all the rides with, and so I let the girls go their own way, and I sat in the stands and listened to the country music, and watched the couples dance. Many of them were elderly, but it did not keep them from dancing and showing affection in public. There were also threesomes on the dance floor sometimes, two women with a man, usually. And there were grandmothers dancing with grandchildren and fathers holding their small children in their arms while they danced.
It was nice watching the humans celebrate their lives and their community and their connectedness. Most of it was not in the words. It was in the smiles and the gestures.
We stayed quite late, and as usual I got up early and had breakfast with Bow, while Sword slept. I was listening to Lea Salonga sing "I Dreamed a Dream" on Youtube after breakfast, and I invited Bow to dance with me. But he took my hand and spelled: "That is not a good song." Then he asked to go outside.
So we went outside and the birds were chirping, and the sun was shining, and all was right with the world. Contentment and a feeling of community can come in many ways. Bow was happy, and so was I.
Yesterday I signed a lease and rented Orchard House out. It is the end of an era. There will be no more interns staying at our guest house, and Bow and I need the income from the rental to keep going.
Orchard House was originally purchased to give interns a place to stay while they volunteered with Project Bow. At one time, Bow would commute from our current home to Orchard House several days a week, to have floortime sessions in a different learning environment. We had a playroom with a swing, a different set of toys, and there was even a real child's toilet that flushed, very low to the ground, like the ones they sometimes have in preschools, for him to use. We had a little school house set up in an outbuilding, with a real chalkboard and school desks. Hopefully, the children of our tenants will now enjoy those facilities.
Bow's visits to Orchard House ended in the Spring of 2007 when he and I became confined to the pens here. But for several years after that, interns would stay at Orchard House and make the drive over to this house to work with Bow.
Does Bow need floortime sessions anymore to learn language? No. He already has picked up two languages and literacy. He does not seem interested in learning any other subjects in a formal way, and I'm not going to force him to try. He pays attention to day to day events. When I read a book, he looks at it. If I read it out loud, he will listen. When I watch a video, he watches along. He will sometimes make sweeping pronouncements as a comment on something we watched: "I heard. It is not good for a son not to let a father win." At other times, his concerns are entirely practical. "The hour is three," he will tell me. I have no watch on, but when I go to check, sure enough, it is 3:03. This is important, because between three and three-thirty, I go to the kitchen to put dinner in the oven, and Bow gets a snack when I get back, if he's been good. But he doesn't always tell me that he wants the snack or that I should put dinner in the oven. Sometimes he just tells me what time it is.
It would be good to get some sort of independent confirmation that this is happening, so that I can say that I have proved it. But sometimes proof is not the most important thing. Sometimes just letting it be is okay, too.
Yesterday was a Wednesday, and I ran errands, while Bow played with Lawrence. They had a good day, meaning that Bow did not misbehave once, and everything went smoothly. They played outside. They came indoors to talk with guests, and they generally had a good time.
Besides running the usual errands, I had a chance to shoot this video of my pasture:
I have been dreaming for some time of converting this pasture into a spacious island for Bow and a companion or two of his own kind. But lately, this thought was not uppermost in my mind. Two things happened recently that reminded me of the plan.
The first thing that made me think of the island was this news item:
Why would people intentionally separate themselves from the rest of society and place themselves in a desolate little man-made island out at sea, subject to the forces of both nature and man and without any of the benefits of police protection, in case they are attacked by... oh, I don't know -- pirates? Isn't being with your own kind and part of the mainstream what everybody wants?
The problem is that sometimes your own kind attacks and exploits you. Sometimes getting away from it all is the best possible alternative. Haven't we all dreamed, at some point in our lives of the desert island scenario, where we would rise or fall on our own merit and nobody would molest us?
The second thing that made me think of the desert island scenario was that I finally watched the movie Project Nim. I didn't splurge and buy the movie. An anonymous fan of Project Bow had it sent to me through Amazon a while ago, saying that hopefully it was not redundant. No, it was not redundant and thank you, whoever you are!
I took my time finding an opportunity to watch the movie, because I understood that parts of it were disturbing, so I did not want to watch it with either of my kids. Having seen it, I agree that it was worth watching, and though it was by no means a happy story and parts of it were disturbing, there were many parts that were not, and there were things about Nim's story that reminded me of experiences with Bow and not in a bad way.
It was awful that Nim was abandoned by those who had made a commitment to him, but I do not join in the general disapproval of the original aims of the project. Though Nim's separation from his mother was sad and poignant, I do not agree with the person at the end of the movie who comments that it is always wrong to take baby chimpanzees from their mothers. And though I was glad that in the end Nim was given chimpanzee companionship before he died, I don't think that it was chimpanzee companionship that he was longing for when he was returned to the Lemmon Farm. As one of the commentors pointed out, it was awful for him to be lumped in with those other chimpanzees and what he was hoping for was a reunion with his human family and a return to his normal life in New York. Even years later, after the horrific experience at Lemsip, the medical research facility, and after he was placed in a cage in a sanctuary where everybody meant well, he kept breaking out of the cage and into the caretaker's house. He wanted to live in a house! He wanted to be accepted among humans. He did not dream of life in the jungle, and he did not ask to be treated "like a chimp", whatever that means.
Even at the Black Beauty Ranch, where everybody wanted to be kind to Nim, they could not let him roam free. The equines on the ranch could be free. Nim could not. This is true of every chimp sanctuary that I know of, even the ones in Africa. Because chimpanzees do not respect borders and agreements and compacts, it is not possible to come to terms with them about territorial boundaries. And yet the younger chimpanzees can be taken for long walks outside the confines of the sanctuary -- to the extent that they still feel dependent on adult caretakers.
It was the same with Bow. When he was little, he clung to me and would not leave me alone. He rode on my back, and when we stopped for a while in the woods and he went to explore, he kept within a small radius of me, not because of any obedience to my authority, but because he felt the need to keep me close.
Was it a terrible thing to take Nim away from his mother Carolyn? For Carolyn, definitely. But for Nim, not so much. Remember that Nim was born in a cage. If he had stayed with his mother, he would have stayed in that cage all his life. Being adopted into a human home allowed him to run free and play and learn and live as the Lord of Delafield Mansion. While this freedom could not possibly last, I think it was pretty nice for him to have had it at all.
At the Lemmon Farm, there was an island where chimpanzees could roam free. The water kept them from escaping the confines of the farm, but within the island, had they felt so inclined, they could have created a chimpanzee utopia. Instead, stronger individuals often threw weaker ones into the water, where they would drown.
Sometimes the appeal of a desert island is not escaping foreign oppressors. Sometimes it is our own kind that we have to fear the most. The same is true for the people who are trying to build an offshore startup outside the territorial waters of any nation. They are Americans trying to get away from other Americans.
The future of chimpanzees here on earth is looking very grim. Expansion by humans is likely to cut off all possibility of peaceful coexistence in their place of origin. The best possible future for chimpanzees has got to be the creation of environments where they can co-exist with humans, and where they will not be prevented from reproducing.
What do I hope for Bow? I hope that he will know more freedom someday soon in the future. I hope that he can have companions of his own kind who will not dictate terms to him. I hope he doesn't have to give up his current family in order start a new one. And someday I hope that his descendants will find a way to respect other people's boundaries, so that other people will be more inclined to respect theirs.
Humans are not always nice to other humans. Chimps are not always nice to other chimps. But in time, that can change. It might even be possible that with the application of natural selection over generations of chimpanzees living among humans, there might actually one day be chimpanzees whose word is as good as their bond. Chimpanzees who don't lie and cheat. Chimpanzees you can trust with your life. When that happens, they will be able to walk freely among us.
For the time being, though, Bow and I will have to stay in our cage.
Not a lot has happened lately for me and Bow. I published Vacuum County, and it's gotten some excellent reviews. Leo and Brownie have become good friends, but we still have to keep Leo separated from Teyman, so the dogs go out into the back yard in shifts. Sometimes Brownie and Leo are out back together, sometimes Teyman and Brownie, but never, never Leo and Teyman. We are afraid that Teyman would kill Leo if left alone with him.
Teyman is the first dog we had here, and she is very aggressive. She thinks she owns the place. She just barely tolerates Brownie, even though he towers over her. But Brownie is a gentle soul, and he somehow manages to keep the peace.
Not every two dogs are compatible. The same goes for humans or chimpanzees. And sometimes two people who do just fine with each other alone cannot behave well together when a third person is introduced into the room. I've seen this with humans, with dogs, and with chimps. Social dynamics are a complicated thing.
One of the things we learned early on at Project Bow when we started having interns is that Bow could do just fine with a new volunteer when it was one-on-one, but then he might be violent with that same person, once another person with a more dominant rank was introduced into the room. For this reason, one of our rules is that Bow gets to choose who to invite, and we go in one at a time, never in groups.
Now that Brownie and the frisky little puppy are out together a good part of the day, Bow is more interested in observing what is going on in the back yard, and he often asks to go out. Before, every time Bow went out, I had to go out, too. So if it was not convenient for me, because I wanted to work on my laptop and I needed to set it down on a table, or the sunlight was too harsh to work outside, Bow had to stay in, too, or I had to give up on working. We had to negotiate about that.
But the biggest recent development with Bow is this: he's suddenly started asking me to go outside into the outer pens alone, and he lets me go back into the inner pen by myself, while he stays out by himself to watch the puppy and the older dog play. When he needs to use the potty, he uses the one outside. He doesn't leave a mess for me to clean up.
Today, he asked to go out by himself again. I went out with him. We watched the interaction between Leo and Brownie for a while together, and then Bow kind of tickled me in a reassuring way and indicated that he was not mad at me, but I was free to go. He's becoming more independent!
Posts
