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.
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.
Last year, I got involved in Inktober, a month-long, non-competitive art event open to anyone. During Inktober, people use ink to create a sketch from a verbal prompt consisting of a single word. Each day in October we get a new prompt, and we have to complete a sketch that day. My favorite drawing that came out of Inktober 2018 is a portrait of baby Bow.
Unfortunately, I got sick that year and was not able to complete Inktober. This year I was finally able to do one drawing each day in October, and many of my drawings have been of Bow.
While I drew on my own, I also encouraged Bow to draw, too. He didn't always want to, and when he did he would not tell me what he was drawing. By looking at older art from other family members, including myself as a child and Sword in her preschool years, I have noticed a distinct difference between the sorts of art that Bow makes and the art of children I have known. Human children do not strive for realism early on, but they do make representational art that is largely symbolic. Body parts are given symbolic representation and part/whole relations are very important. When Bow draws, he may be representing things, but not so much by symbolism, and quite possibly by a direct attempt at realism.The video linked below demonstrates more fully what I mean.
Here is a picture of the etching that we discovered on the floor of the inner pen in 2008. It had not been there before.
Do you see a head of an ape when you look at it? Do you think this is an artwork by Bow?
You may have noticed that I have been writing in my blog here less and posting more and more videos on YouTube. There's a very simple reason for that: YouTube pays. This blog does not. But there are some things that you can say in a blog post that are harder to say in a video. I am primarily a writer, not a performer. So I will continue to blog, albeit not as often.
After I came home from my brief illness, I kept posting more and more videos on my main YouTube channel, and within a month, as I recovered my strength and stamina, I also regained my YouTube income. Here is the video I posted at the time I learned that monetization had been restored.
In February of 2018, with the advent of the new YouTube rules, I lost my monetization, because I did not have a thousand subscribers. I had many more than the required views and minutes watched, but I had not asked people to subscribe. I had no interest in my viewers, was not counting how many there were, and I was perfectly happy with the extra pocket money I was earning to pay for Bow's bananas. But when they took all that away, I was really put out. I did not understand why I needed subscribers, when subscribers did not pay a subscription fee, and people can see exactly the same videos when they do not subscribe. But if that is what YouTube wanted, I figured I could probably get most of the people who were already watching to subscribe, if I asked them nicely. They would be doing it as a favor to me, because it's not as if they would be cut off from the videos if they didn't subscribe. This is why it felt like a slightly non-commercial transaction between me and my viewers. They were doing me a favor when they subscribed, because this was information they were handing over to Google, when they could just as easily watch incognito. For all I know, some of my most ardent viewers may still be unsubscribed.
After nine months of asking people to subscribe, I gained the required one thousand subscribers and got my monetization back. Now my channel is bringing in about fifteen times what it had brought in before. And right now, as I write this blog post, I have 4,582 subscribers. I got 3,126 of them in the last 28 days. Most of these subscribers like to watch "grooming videos". Most of them will never read a novel by me, much less a scientific article about ape language studies. For them, it is all just stimulus and response, grooming and ASMR. But luckily for me, I believe in the free market, and I feel no compunction about exploiting their interests, so that I can be free to pursue mine.
Thanks to my new subscribers, I was able to get Bow a new hammock and a new sleeping bag for Christmas, not to speak of a number of other items for Leo, Summer and the cockatiels.
Things are looking up. Julia Hanna and I have expanded our interview show to include important researchers, scientists and academics. We had a whole series with Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh.
Last night, we interviewed a linguist and author in Iran.
I feel very lucky to have as much freedom as I do to live as I want, despite the fact that many liberties have already disappeared from the American way of life. Though I do not understand YouTube or the reasons for its rules, I am happy right now with the deal they have offered me. In the coming year, I plan to continue working with Bow, while posting more and more interviews with leading thinkers, writers, scientists and academics.
As for Bow, he is always happy as long as there is someone there to read him a story.
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."
I haven't been blogging as much lately. Sometimes it seems as if everything that could possibly be said has already been said. I don't want to repeat myself. But then something happens that opens up a whole new reserve of the as-yet-unsaid. This morning I got a comment on one of my videos that did just that. "If only Bow could talk, I wonder what he would say." It was an innocent comment made on one of my more popular grooming videos. Ten thousand three hundred and twenty-four views. But none of them know Bow can talk.
Project Bow was an ape language research project that I began in 2002. In 2007, when Bow was five years old, we had our big breakthrough. Bow began to spell out words to express what he wanted and what he was thinking. The Project Bow DVD playlist chronicles all of that. It takes about two hours to sit through it, but if you want to know about Bow's history and his language ability, then it is well worth your while. Although those of us working directly with Bow knew that he was spelling and expressing himself -- in both Hebrew and English -- we could not prove it to the satisfaction of the scientific community. If you would like to understand why, here is an article you can read.
As my funding was cut, I remained with Bow twelve hours a day, but I could not afford interns and caretakers. In some ways, the past ten years have been very difficult. It's not because of Bow. Bow is a sweetheart. But just not having the help I needed meant that I often had to miss some of my daughter's functions at school and reduce my social interactions with other people. Bow and I became increasingly isolated.
I did have a chimp sitter named Lawrence for most of those years. Bow spelled in English to tell Lawrence what he wanted. He spelled in Hebrew to communicate with me. During those first years, Bow would tell me a lot of things. He gossiped about the neighbors. He made up tall tales. But then gradually, as he went through puberty, he became less talkative. He was more silent and subdued. He still told me what he wanted to eat and when he wanted his blanket and made an occasional sardonic comment about the mutability of things ("everyone dies"), but mostly he kept his thoughts to himself.
Part of it was just our extreme isolation. Nothing new ever seemed to happen, and with nothing to talk about, there was a lot more silence. Then one day, about a year ago, Lawrence had to move. His wife had died, and he was starting a new family, and he let me know he could no longer sit with Bow. So that made things even harder. For a whole year, I went without a sitter, only going out at night when Bow was asleep. I missed my daughter's move-in day to college, and recently I missed one of her choir concerts, because it was held during the day. Thankfully for technology, Bow and I were able to attend the concert via a livestream on my iPhone.
And then this summer my mother, who lives in a different state, said she was feeling weak and asked me to come visit her. At first I did not know what to do. In this current age of Animal Rights activists, and with Jane Goodall getting US Fish &Wildlife to declare domesticated chimpanzees an endangered species, thereby activating the Endangered Species Act to allow strangers to bring lawsuits against chimp owners, I knew I could not just advertise for a chimp sitter and take a complete stranger into my home. A friend of mine who had had a stranger volunteer to help her has gotten into all sorts of trouble with PETA, because the volunteer was a mole. I would rather stay put than risk putting myself and Bow in that position.
And so I spoke on the phone several times about taking a risk on a new caretaker, and I guess that Bow must have overheard me, and he must have been concerned about that risk.
Finally, I dared to ask a friend of Bow's who has been visiting with him once a week through the grid if she would be willing to train to sit for Bow. Bow liked her, and she liked Bow, and she does not believe in Animal Rights, only Animal Welfare, so she was a very good fit. Still, it was a risk I was taking. I must have reiterated that on the phone talking to my friends in English. Bow overheard.
The thing about Bow is he files everything away in his mind, and he never forgets. He may not say much, but he knows what he hears.
The new chimp sitter is named Jessica. Bow loves her. I trained her for a week. At first she went in for only an hour. Then two hours. Then three. Until we worked up to a whole day. Bow was well behaved with her, but at first he was reluctant to speak to her. She had to coax him to spell to her. But eventually, he told her what he wanted to eat, and when he wanted to go outside, and other very mundane things. And also, he spelled "she". "What do you mean Bow?" Jessica asked him. Bow did not answer. But later when I asked him what he had meant by repeatedly spelling "she", he answered in Hebrew that he had meant אמא -- "Mommy."
So the day came when I had to leave for my mother's house. Bow knew I'd be gone for a week, and he seemed okay with it. Jessica kept in text and telephone contact with me, and Bow and I Facetimed a couple of times during the visit. Bow was doing well. He was asking for what he wanted. But every once in a while, for no particular reason, he spelled "risk." "What do you mean by risk, Bow?" Jessica would ask. But Bow never explained. He would just go back to his usual routine, only to spell "risk" again the next day.
A text exchange between me and Jessica
Bow liked Jessica a lot. He wanted to be on good terms with her. He used the potty regularly. and he even took the trouble to inform her when he had peed when she was out of the room. (He never bothers to tell me!) But he was also concerned about "risk". He understood that he and I were taking a risk by trusting Jessica. But he did not really know how to explain it to her. So he just kept spelling risk.
And that problem he had spelling "peed" correctly? That's a perfectly normal language phenomenon for someone who is bilingual. When he refers to that in Hebrew, he says פיפי. In English, that would transliterate to /pipi/. So naturally, he thought "I pid" would be a good way to spell "I peed." This is not proof that Bow can't spell, so much as that he has language, and he uses it dynamically.
If Bow could talk, what would he say? Well, he would talk about "risk" and "peeing". Like anyone, Bow has a wide range of things to talk about. Some subjects are mundane and others are very abstract.
Bow and Jessica
My mother turned out to be fine, and we had a nice visit. And now that I am back, Bow is a little more talkative. It helps to mix things up sometimes. You don't want to get stuck in a rut!
Bow is an avid reader of the Missouri Conservationist.
He enjoys leafing through the entire magazine, but this time, he indicated clearly that his favorite part was a photo of a little girl who looked a little like Ping in Ping & the Snirkelly People and of a Monarch butterfly right in front of her face.
In the little yellow rectangle, an entire conservation strategy is outlined to help preserve the Monarch butterfly.
Why such an "aggressive goal"? And what do Monarchs have to do with pollination?
A Monarch caterpillar on my transplanted common milkweed
My own experience with the Monarch caterpillars this season have been a little disappointing. I did see several different caterpillars in different stages of their growth. But what I never got to see is any of those caterpillars turning into a chrysalis. And having missed that stage, I never saw a Monarch butterfly emerge.
As the caterpillars proceeded with their work and the purple milkweed flowers died and the leaves were left full of holes, I began to wonder about the great effort to reestablish milkweed so as to help the Monarch butterfly, and the total disregard for the wellbeing of the milkweed plant itself.
Purple milkweed does not seem to produce very many seed pods. Last year mine produced no seed pods at all because somebody -- I don't know who -- ate all the flowers long before anything interesting could happen. This year, a single flower survived long enough to start growing one tiny seed pod.
But the seed pod did not arrive at maturity, because ants attacked it.
Both my milkweed and my Monarchs seem to be productive in the early stages of the procreative process -- flowers, caterpillars -- but not so productive in the later stages -- seed pod, chrysalis. Is this what is happening worldwide? Maybe not.
I have been following the blog of Anurag Agrawal, and he recently a posted an article of his about the decline of the Monarch population that came out in Science. You can look at the article here:
What Agrawal has found is that there is a mismatch between these two ways of counting total butterflies. Sometimes there is a resurgence of Monarchs in Canada and the United States, but by the time they get down to their over-wintering site in Mexico, the population is greatly reduced.
Loss of habitat for a migratory butterfly can happen anywhere along its migration. But Agrawal has stated that it is the migration, not the butterfly, that is currently endangered. Planting more milkweed in the United States and Canada is not going to help, if the forests in Mexico are being cut down. On the other hand, there are Monarchs in warm places like parts of California that have a more local migration, and they are fine. And there are Monarchs in Mexico that seem to be active all year round, without overwintering anywhere. Does the Monarch butterfly need our intervention on its behalf? And if so, why?
Tussock Moth Milkweed Caterpillar
It's not because they are pollinators. They're not. It is not for the sake of fruit orchards. It is not because of any unique contribution that the Monarch makes to our ecology that some other butterfly does not. It's because, for some reason, the Monarch has great PR, and there are people lobbying on its behalf.
Would anybody care about milkweed if not for Monarchs? There are other caterpillars that depend on milkweed, like the tussock moth
caterpillar, but nobody seems to care much about them. So why the Monarch and why are state and Federal governments intervening on its behalf at taxpayer expense?
Ever since I first read Agrawal's book, Monarchs andMilkweed, I have been noticing some of the less popular milkweed eating insects.
Red Milkweed Beetle (Tetraopes Tetropthalmus)
The red milkweed beetle feeding on a defunct purple milkweed seed pod is so cute. Why doesn't it have a lobbyist in Washington?
Or how about the seed eating milkweed bugs? Why aren't there entire conservation movements built around them?
Milkweed Bug on Butterfly Milkweed
If we look at all this from the point of view of the milkweed plants, their survival strategy seems to be something like this:
Make yourself inedible by emitting a poison and a nasty latex.
Some bright insects will breach your defenses and make you their sole source of food in order to thwart predators.
When farmers start to eradicate you, because you are not good for cattle to feed on, get one of the insects that has managed to breach your defenses and can eat only you to be the poster child for pollinators, even though it's actually not a pollinator.
Get civic organizations to plant you profusely and governments to assure you acres and acres of protected growth.
If the poster child butterfly is still being decimated by its cross country migration, just use this to get even more protection for the propagation of yourself.
If, as a result of being artificially boosted, you lose the ability to propagate naturally through the spread of seeds from seed pods, keep yourself procreating artificially as a domesticated plant.
Two identical butterflies on butterfly milkweed
The truth is that in this age of huge human populations, only those beings protected by us get to thrive. Domestication has a bad name, but if you insist that one plant -- rather than another-- has the right to exist, and that one species, rather than another, will be protected in a given environment, then you are in fact domesticating those species that you protect. Once natural selection ceases to be the main factor in their future adaptations, you will have to act as a cultivator to keep them alive. And when you do that, you are not advocating natural balance. You will tend to create, instead, a sharp drop in diversity. Monocultures are what humans are famous for.
I love the many species of milkweed that I find growing wild on my land, and the many and varied butterflies that feed on their nectar delight me. But I would hate to think that these are not wildflowers at all, but part of a widespread plot to keep some species alive at taxpayer expense, while others die out.
Why does this matter to me? Because current efforts are afoot to end all breeding of chimpanzees in the United States. This is being done in the name of conservation. It's being done, because conservationists want to maintain only wild chimpanzees, and to eradicate all chimpanzees which have been domesticated.
But wild chimpanzees in Africa will not remain wild if they are protected. Once their natural predators are eliminated and their existence assured, they will change their ways of being. And domesticated chimpanzees here in the US, which are privately owned, will never have a chance to live free, outside of zoos and sanctuaries. Generations of Americans will grow up without the opportunity to meet a chimpanzee in a safe and mutually respectful environment.
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