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.
My mother often asks me: "Has Bow said anything clever lately?" She is used to the frequent anecdotes from an earlier era, when Bow had just had his breakthrough, and there were daily stories of something new and unexpected that he had said.
As Bow arrived in his late teens, stories like that became few and far between, and now that Bow is in his twenties, he has become quite laconic. But today was an exception.
At lunch, a Jordan Peterson conversation with Frans de Waal popped up on my feed. I guess YouTube knew I would be interested. They were discussing the nature/nurture contribution to gender differences as well as what it takes to socialize males to show deference to females.
Bow, sated from his main course, made occasional grumbling agreement sounds to concur with what Peterson and de Waal were saying. From his own experience, he knew girls are less into rough and tumble play than boys are. After all, he'd had to go easy on his older sister, Sword, to get her to play with him at all.
The discussion between Peterson and de Waal, which centered on the statistical backdrop to gender stereotypes, reminded me of the playful interactions between Sword and Bow depicted in the video clip embedded above. Bow, too, enjoyed the nostalgic view of days gone by. He watched the clip twice. Then he took my hand and spelled:
"חרב יפה. זה טוב. רק קשת חזק."
"Sword is beautiful. That is good. Only Bow is strong."
So now I have another anecdote to share with my mother when we talk on the phone tomorrow.
The latest development on my YouTube channel is Memberships. In order to support my research, you can join the channel as a Donor, a Patron or a Benefactor. Here is a link:
Among the perks available to members are previews of videos about Bow's writing, literacy and other intellectual pursuits at a time when these are not yet available to the general public. Since revenue from viral videos comes primarily from people who are not subscribed to my channel and could not care less about ape language research, this seems like a fair allocation of our resources. The general public gets to view grooming videos right away, but more recent advances in ape language studies are shared first and foremost with our Donors, Patrons and Benefactors.
Since the inception of Project Bow, I have found that low tech methods work better and are more cost effective when working with a strong but intellectual chimpanzee such as Bow. A talking machine was quickly replaced by laminated menus, self-flushing toilet by a plastic potty chair and a touch screen computer by an old fashioned notebook and pen.
The problem that the touch screen computer was meant to solve was Bow's reliance on caretakers' hands to point at letters on the glass. This is a problem of proof, not of communication. It looks to outsiders as if Bow is being manipulated by his interlocutors to point at the letters. But it certainly does not look to us that way, and it does not explain why Bow can tell us things we did not know and share information available only to him. So it was suggested that the intercession of a non-manipulable computer could solve this PR problem for us.
In order to motivate Bow to use a computer to communicate, certain ape language researchers suggested pairing the touch screen computer with a food dispenser, so that Bow would essentially be typing for a food reward. "Machines can't be manipulated, so he would have to say what the machine wanted him to say," I was told.
I don't want Bow to have to say anything. I want him to be able to say what he wants to say. Here is an example of something ordinary, but totally unexpected, that Bow recently said to his caretaker while I was away: "Go sit outside." She was confused, "You want me to sit outside? How do you mean, like on the porch?" He answered: "Yes."
There is nothing extraordinary about this exchange, but it could not have happened with a touch screen computer tied to a food dispenser. Bow could not tell the dispenser anything. He would be totally subject to its mechanical limitations.
Recently, Bow and I watched a video of an Israeli young man who lost his voice while serving in the army. Bow identified with the voiceless man. He watched as the young man talked to a reporter by writing in an ordinary old fashioned notebook by putting pen to paper. "You could do that, too," I told Bow. "You could talk to people by writing in a notebook."
Bow was moved to try. His attempt looks like letters, though hard to tell what he wanted to say. You can contrast his attempt to write letters with his drawing on this other page in the same notebook, in which a month earlier he had tried to draw a face. (The face Bow drew is only in black ink. The other bigger face in blue was one I tried to draw.)
If you want to see the videos of Bow writing and drawing, you can join as a member of my channel. Eventually, these videos will all be released to the public, but you will see them in advance, and you can know that you helped finance my research.
Twenty twenty was the year of social isolation. I skipped that year in posting to this blog. But Bow and I continued our life in social isolation as if nothing remarkable had happened. Social isolation by now had become our way of life. We were resigned to it. We did not really understand why so many people found it unbearable.
Man is a social animal. Chimpanzees are social animals. Everybody craves companionship and interaction. The regular people flocked to Zoom, making it impossible for Julia and me to livestream there, so we had to turn to a new service: StreamYard.
The Bow fans on my successful YouTube channel berated me for forcing them to watch painting videos, because all they wanted to do was watch Bow groom me. Since the algorithm also punished me for this by reducing our income, I had to find a way to separate painting from grooming.
So now, if you want to watch a grooming video, you can find it on my main channel.
And if you want to watch a painting video, it can be found on my secondary channel.
But what about language? What about Bow's use of words? Why wasn't I mentioning that, writing about it or even publishing? Had Bow stopped using words to communicate?
No, not exactly, but Bow is a grown chimpanzee man now, and grown men very rarely communicate to their mothers about what it is they are thinking about. So we talked about what we would have for breakfast, lunch and dinner, of course. And we talked about if we were going outside or we needed a blanket. But nothing very memorable was said, and I did not feel the need to record any of that.
And then today Bow suddenly spoke up again. It was a snowy day.
After breakfast, I was watching a Yaron Brook video in which he compared Ayn Rand's take on romantic love with the opinions of Jordan Peterson. Bow is usually not interested in videos with talking heads about abstract topics.
I had not gotten very far into the video. Yaron was talking about how happiness and not reproduction is the real goal of romantic love. Bow summoned me to his side of the pen. He told me the he wanted me to let him look at the guy. I was confused: Which guy? It turned out he wanted me to bring the iPhone in so he could listen to Yaron Brook and watch the video. But he had not listened to much, when he started to get agitated, and he took my hand and spelled out: תני לי דודה לאהוב "Give me a lady to love."
I asked him: "Do you want her to come to you? Or do you want to go to her?"
He said: שתבוא אלי "Come to me."
So here is the problem: If Bow were to go to the lady chimp, he could never return. Why on earth should his need for companionship force him to give up his freedom?
In today's age of social isolation, many people are being told that they are allowed to mingle with people from the same household, but they should not meet with strangers. Maybe now the public will understand what it is like to trapped in a holding cell "for your own kind."
Of course, Bow should be allowed to meet with other chimps and to form relationships. But nobody wants to be trapped in a concentration camp, a reservation or an institution "for their own kind." Children want to meet other children, but they also want to be able to go home to their parents, who are not their own age. Elders may enjoy the companionship of other people their age, but they do not want to be told they cannot meet with their grandchildren. People in one neighborhood want to visit friends in another neighborhood and return home at the end of the day.
If the price for companionship were never being able to leave a community, would you not prefer social isolation, too? Stone walls do not a prison make. Not being able to control movements into your own space is what makes it a prison.
Yesterday was Halloween. Bow and I celebrated in our own way. You can watch our Halloween special right here.
Watching this video, you might be asking yourself: is this really a chimpanzee who can spell out words? Is he really sixteen going on seventeen? Is he really an intelligent being? There are those who when they see too much playfulness or behavior that in a human we might associate with a lower IQ become even more skeptical about my claims about Bow's literacy.
However, language ability does not necessarily imply overall high IQ in humans. Literacy can also exist in the form of hyperlexia, implying excellence in decoding letters into sounds and patterns into words, without a high level of comprehension. Many humans I know who are perfectly normal use their language skills just to express their feelings or interact socially with others, without ever having to encode new information. They keep talking and talking, but all they are really communicating with all that hot air is how they feel at the moment or how they want to relate to another person. They can go their whole lives without expressing an original thought or comprehending an original thought expressed by someone else. That is all normal behavior for humans, and chimpanzees like Bow are not all that different.
Recently I was sick and was away from Bow for two days. He was in good hands, and people were taking care of him in my absence. When I got back, he was very gentle with me, grooming. He did not say anything at all about my illness. But one time, totally spontaneously, after a couple of days of my being back, he took my hand and spelled: שתי דודות שמרו עלי "Two ladies watched over me."
I think he just wanted me to know he had been well taken care of in my absence. There is nothing super deep about that, but it did touch my heart.
This morning, I noticed Bow had not yet used the potty. So I asked him if he needed to pee.
?אתה צריך לעשות פיפי
His answer tickled me: רק קצת "Just a little."
This is not a deep interspecies communication moment. But that is how Bow uses language to express his personality. He is not a needy person. He only needs to pee "just a little."
Yesterday was a big and eventful day. Bow discovered rap music.
It started out like any other day. We have been having icy mornings, with everything covered in sheet of transparent frozen water.
This is not Bow's kind of weather, and no amount of cajoling will get him to leave the warmth of the inner pen.
On days like this, Bow remains in the pen, lying on his blanket and I venture forth to see what is going on outside.
On my way to the front yard I said hello to the two cockatiels and Summer the Quaker parrot. I noticed that the female cockatiel, Queen, was trying to nest, but I did not think much of it. In our backyard, the old mourning dove nest had been covered in ice, like a nest made of diamonds.
In the front yard, every tree and bush and blade of grass was coated with ice.
By noon, however, all that ice was melting and crashing to the ground.
After lunch, I brought the iPhone into the pen with Bow, so he could see what I had seen outside. But he was having none of that. He swiftly located the YouTube app and started surfing for new videos to watch. In no time at all, he had located a rap song and began to groove to it.
It was nothing I had planned on. I was in shock! I could not stop him, and he would not give me back the iPhone until long after the spirit of the song had left him. Luckily, he had a firm grip on the iPhone the whole time he was dancing and swinging on his rope to the beat of the rap song.
Bow is growing up. He needs his own electronic device, I thought, as I was cleaning out the bird cages last night. And then I noticed something unusual in the cockatiel cage. It was an egg. But it was cracked. She must have laid it while on a high perch.
Somehow when I saw her trying to nest, I did not take Queen quite seriously enough. I thought she was just playing at being a mother. I had seen her and King mating the day before, but thought nothing of it. I mean, I considered filming it, but decided that YouTube would not approve, so I didn't. Now I was really sad that she had not had a good enough nest to protect this egg, which was undoubtedly fertilized.
In the two years that I have been taking care of the cockatiels since I took them over from Sword, I have never found an egg in the cage, even though the birds have been active as a couple. I wondered if this was a fluke, or it means that King and Queen are ready to start a family.
Last night I went to Wal*Mart with two things on my shopping list: a tablet for Bow and a nesting box for Queen.
The logging continues, but Bow and I are finding ways to ignore it and get on with our lives.
Bow leafs through an issue of the Missouri Consevationist
Yesterday, for instance, Bow watched the loggers for a while without getting too upset. and then he led me in an exercise session indoors.
The loggers are here in the morning, but they leave long before noon. So when I go for my afternoon walk, all is calm, and I can enjoy the wildlife.
Yesterday, I got to watch a leaf fall from the sky, a common buckeye butterfly resting on my path, and two different groups of deer.
Some deer bound away at the first sight of me, and others stare at me long and hard.
This morning, Bow was so accustomed to having the loggers around that he let me go to the post office to mail off some bills and to buy new stamps. I chose the stamps featuring Monarch butterflies.
When I got home, Bow had been good. No accidents, no mess. So I showed him the stamps I had bought. Later he asked me to go out, saying he'd heard the loggers had food. (שמעתי שיש להם אוכל). I went out expecting to see the loggers eating sandwiches. But instead I spotted the twin fawns, nearly grown, taking shelter near the house.
This morning, things have not been so peaceful. Ever since breakfast, the neighbors next door have been logging on their section of the woods next to ours. They have every right to do this, but Bow has been very upset about it.
Bow asked me to go outside to see what was going on. I came back with this picture.
Bow would periodically go outside, display at the loggers, then come in and ask me to go out in the front yard to spy on them.
He kept asking me to go check what they were doing out there, even though I assured him it was not on our property. "It's okay, Bow. They have the right to do that."
Bow spelled: "זה רק שזה רע" Meaning: "It's just that it's bad."
I didn't know what to say. Maybe I read him The Lorax once too many times when he was little.
It's been a strange weekend. On Saturday night, as I was driving to Licking to check my mail and get groceries, a deer bounded out in front of me on the road. It happened so fast that there was no time to hit the brake or swerve. It was almost as if the deer were on a suicide mission. Luckily, I had not yet speeded up to the full fifty-five miles per hour allowed on that road, and so the damage to my car was minimal. I was able to get to Licking, pick up my mail and drive to the grocery store. It was only when I was putting my groceries away that I noticed I had lost a lot of fluid under the engine, and the car was very overheated, so much so that at first it would not start. I managed to drive it to the mechanic's shop, and I got a ride home with my groceries and mail. So what could have been a big disaster was really minor.
I spent Sunday feeling a little more contemplative than usual.
In addition to the usual pictures of flowers, I started to take a series of selfies. I wondered what would have happened if I had not made it safely home the previous night, and who would have taken care of my animals. I guess you might say I was really grateful to be alive.
I was also thinking about what I needed to say about my proposal to change Libertarian Bylaws, and about the odd ways in which my motives for doing so had been questioned. So as I was thinking about how to reply, I also thought that series of self-portraits might be a good way to help represent who I am to those who clearly misunderstand my motives.
And even though I have taken plenty of selfies with my glasses on, I decided to leave my glasses off this time.
I put the glasses down on one of the support beams of the outer pen and proceeded to shoot some pictures of me on the swing. The fact that I had just discovered the timer on my iPhone camera also helped. Bow watched the proceedings sardonically from the sidelines. He knew he was not the star of this photo shoot, and he did not seem to mind.
I went back inside to work on the computer, and it took me a while to realize that I had left my glasses in the outer pen. But when I went out there to get them, they were not on the support beam, where I had left them.
"Where are my glasses?" I said out loud, to no one in particular. Then I looked at Bow. Silently, he handed them to me.
They were perfectly intact. Whatever he did with them while I was not there, it did not damage the glasses in any way. That's something else to be grateful for.
Then, again, maybe there is such a thing as an acquired taste, after all. No sooner had I come to the conclusion that Bow knows instantly exactly what he likes, I was presented with a counterexample.
Now that it's fall, there is a variety of fruit available at the store, including pomegranates, avocados, and guava. I am not really that big a fan of guava, but this time the fruit looked so small that it seemed unusually attractive.
The guava fruits are so small this season, they look like lemons next to the apples and the bananas. Yesterday, I offered Bow a guava. He took a sniff of it, and then he gestured with it toward my mouth. He wanted me to eat it. So I did, pausing every so often and offering some to him. He kept sniffing in my mouth, but he refused to eat the guava. "Well, that's that," I thought. "He doesn't like guava."
But then later in the afternoon Bow's friend who brings the bananas came by, and I offered her a guava, too. When Bow saw that his friend was enjoying the guava, he suddenly became very interested. '
"Bow do you want some guava, too?" I asked him. This time, when I offered him the fruit, he started eating it. In fact, he took it with him to sit on the other side of the door from his friend. They each ate their guava while looking at one another through the grid. I guess that's what you might call social eating.
When Bow was little, we arranged his words on menus. So Bow was used to picking out food items from the menu. And for those things that were not on the menu, he used "Something Else". Now Bow can spell any word he knows, but occasionally, when faced with an unidentified food, he says that he wants "Something Else". That's what happened yesterday when I offered him leftover takeout. He called it "Something Else" when requesting it.
Bow gets very excited about the possibility of eating restaurant food. He remembers when he used to go out to eat with us, and he knows where those styrofoam containers originate. The entire dining out experience is evoked by the appearance of those little takeout boxes.
But then at other times, Bow can be very coy about what he wants. When he knows that it's not quite time for dinner and no food is being displayed to him, he will ask me over and over again for other things which are readily available, like his blanket, before he ever admits that what he actually wants is food.
Yesterday, frustrated by his asking for things he clearly did not want, I asked him pointedly: "Bow, what do you want?!"
He paused for a moment as if to think about it, and then answered back with a typical question:
"?נו מה יש" -- "Well, what is there?" -- Meaning -- What is available? What's on the menu?
Unless something is being offered, sometimes Bow does not even bother to ask. Forced choice is sadly a part of all our lives. When we ask people what they want, they will rarely tell us. Instead, they ask what is on the menu. That's why it's so important to list Libertarian candidates by name in the polls.
The other day, Bow received a gift of two peaches from a friend. The peaches were not quite ripe, but they had been picked off the friend's tree to keep other animals from eating them first. After the friend left, Bow asked for a peach. I decided to try an experiment, and I put the peach on a support bar in the outer pen and told Bow that he would have to get it himself. The floor of the pen was still a little damp from rain. I wanted to see if I could induce Bow to step on the wet floor by doing this. Bow found another way around.
Bow did not have to walk on the wet floor. He had other options, and given his preferences, he used them. You can see how easily he did this in the video below.
I am not much of a manipulator. Instead, I favor respecting the other person's mind when it comes to things he has a choice about, and using direct force or threat of force about the things that he does not have a choice about. This was the way I was raised, and this is my idea of what it means to be an upright person. It's people who cloak a direct order in the words of a request that have always earned my disdain.
I remember once, when away from home as a child, I was asked whether I wanted to wash my hands before dinner. I said that I did not, and you should have seen the chaos that ensued! It took about three hours before they were able to get across to me that this had been their way of telling me to wash my hands, rather than asking about my wishes. At which point, I washed my hands, because I had no objection to following orders -- I just misunderstood. Back home, when I was required to do something, my parents just used the imperative to order me to do it. I always was very obedient. It's just reading between the lines that has been difficult. On the other hand, at home when I did have a choice, I was asked, and I felt free to express my true wishes, and not what I thought somebody else expected me to say. To me, making it clear when something is a choice and when it isn't is the respect we all owe to every person we interact with. But to other people, avoiding even the verbal mention of force is the height of politeness.
There are people who studiously avoid giving orders, but use social consensus and manipulation in order to get others to do what they want. They are the sort of people who like to tell the anecdote about the tribe somewhere in the jungle where, if a person commits a crime, rather than punishing him, the whole tribe gets together, they stand in a circle, and they hug the wrongdoer, and they take turns talking about all the good things he may have done in his life, and then after a constant repetition of all this, the culprit just bows his head and becomes ashamed of having done wrong and vows to do better in the future, and then they all go back to living a merry collective life and the consensus about how everybody should behave is re-established, without any violence being done to anyone -- except. of course, the victim of the crime.
I bristle at this story for two reasons. The first is there does not seem to be any consideration of the rights of the victim. I believe that there are no victimless crimes. So how is this going to help the victim, if we rehabilitate the wrongdoer? Punitive measures are supposed to assuage the suffering of victims. Revenge is not wrong. It's part of the tit for tat that is built into nature. But secondly, let's imagine this was actually a victimless crime -- then I feel bad for the culprit! Because maybe he was following his heart. Maybe he was doing what he thought was right. And to have him brainwashed in an act of social manipulation to change his mind in order to please all the other members of his tribe is very close to mind-rape. And supposing it doesn't work? Supposing he still insists that what he did was right? What do they do then? Do they banish him? Do they try to break his spirit by giving him the cold shoulder until he capitulates and adopts the values of the collective?
There are people who believe that solitary confinement -- or a solitary life -- are the worst possible punishment. Those people think that separating an individual from peers is the height of cruelty, and they try to harness this particular brand of cruelty to enforce social order. "But everyone else is doing it," for them is a good argument for a parent to use against a child. "Everybody knows that..." is an argument that seeks to enforce a scientific consensus about something like global warming. If you don't agree with their views. they will socially shame you into submission, while pretending to deeply care about you.
There are other people who just as firmly believe that being confined in a cell with peers who are about to rape you is the worst possible punishment -- and solitary confinement is a safe haven. They enforce rules by direct threats of force. They realize that being able to walk away from a conflict is the surest way to maintain personal freedom. They are the kind of parents who, when the child says: "But everybody else is doing it," answer back "You are not everybody else." And when a child says "But everybody else says this is true" are not afraid to answer "Everybody else is wrong."
How do social people react when they are banished from the tribe? Is it harder for them than it is for people who have lived solitary lives since infancy? Have you ever read Island of the Blue Dolphins?
Yesterday, on my walk, I was hoping to film some more butterflies, but came across a robin's nest instead. When I got home, I almost forgot that I had picked some blackberries on my walk, but Bow reminded me, and I hurried to give them to him, still in the plastic bag that I used to gather them.
Bow found retrieving the blackberries from the bag to be more challenging than eating them from a bowl with a spoon.
This reminded me of the "enrichment" that is recommended for animals in confinement. I saw an article about elephants yesterday that said that it was not the amount of space they were given in zoos that was important to their happiness, but rather the complexity of the social relationships that they had and the lack of ease with which food could be gathered. The upshot was that challenges in food gathering were good for elephants, as were complex social groups in which they had to find themselves a niche.
I am not sure that any of these studies on enrichment and sociability take into account the built-in tension between the right to be free of the group and the desire to belong to a group. I cannot tell you how many people have spoken to me about what Bow is missing in not living with other chimpanzees, but I seem to be the only one who is worried that he might not be able to escape from other chimpanzees and their collective will if he were confined in a concentration camp for chimps that is self-governing and is run by the inmates.
Bow has had to put up with a lot of flower pictures lately. When I show them to him, he is singularly unimpressed.
But he will just have to bear with me, because, after all, it is spring, and that is the season for flowers.
Cherry Blossoms
In the morning, we wake up to beautiful birdsong. I let Brownie into the yard at sunrise, and I wish I could follow him, too, because the songs of the birds are beckoning me.
I have seen quite a few butterflies on my walks in the field, but they won't stop for a portrait.
In the afternoons, when it is no longer chilly, Bow goes outside.
The dogwood is already putting out its showy blossom, although the parts that pass for petals are still green.
Green dogwood flowers
The dogwood blossoms are really set up to produce drupes, so it's those little green balls in the center that are the buds which will one day soon bloom into flowers, which in turn will seem like fruit. But the things that look like flower petals now are merely bracts.
But Bow does not care about all that, and he sees no need to rehash it every time the dogwood blooms.
However, Bow does like to eat peaches and cherries and pears and apples, so he does see the usefulness in allowing me to go out and inspect the blossoms in our orchard.
And after Bow has gone to bed, I make another pass, and I get to see the apple blossoms on our brand new apple tree up close.
Beauty can be functional. April flowers can bring us edible fruit later on in the summer and fall.
Everything is in bloom now, but it has been very cold out lately, especially in the mornings. Yesterday morning, Bow asked to go out, then immediately changed his mind.
Although the mornings are chilly, many of the afternoons are nice and warm. Both Bow and the dogs seem to enjoy those times out of doors.
Sometimes I am in with Bow, looking out at the dogs, and sometimes I am out with the dogs, looking in on Bow.
We did not have an Easter egg hunt this year. Bow is fourteen and too mature for that. But he did get some Easter treats, in moderation.
He tore the little box of Easter dots open with his mouth, then ate them one by one, a dreamy look on his face.
Sometimes Bow asks to be left alone. But he never words it that way. Yesterday after lunch, he kept motioning for me to go out to the front yard, taking my key and pointing at the door, but when I asked him what he wanted, he spelled out: "תנסי לצלם פרחים" -- "Try to take pictures of flowers." There was something decidedly condescending in the way he worded that. But I complied.
The pear blossoms yesterday
Bow is not interested in pictures of flowers. But he knows that I am. So there's theory of mind for you in practice. And, yes, there are times when a fourteen year old needs to be alone. I do understand.
Today in the mail Bow received an unexpected piece of correspondence.
Inside the envelope addressed to him, but with no return address was a birthday card with a cat on it.
The cat was a ginger kitten that reminded me of Nile. When the card was opened, it played the birthday song, only with cats meowing.
Bow listened, chewed on the card a little, shook it along with the beat of the music, then closed it to silence the cats and handed it back to me.
Afterwards he pointed toward the front door frantically several times, before spelling. "הם לא באו" -- "They didn't come!"
It turns out Bow thought it must be his birthday, if he got a birthday card in the mail today, and he was a little upset that nobody had come to his birthday party. I had to reassure him that today is neither his actual birthday nor the day we set for his birthday party to take place this year. Eventually, he calmed down.
It is hard to explain to an intelligent, literate, but impatient chimpanzee that the arrival of a birthday card in the mail does not necessarily mean that today is his birthday.
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