Lucy

Summary

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Radiolab Episode Summary: "Lucy"

Podcast: Radiolab (WNYC Studios)
Air Date: February 19, 2010
Hosts: Jad Abumrad, Robert Krulwich

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Overview

This episode of Radiolab explores the profound—and often heartbreaking—questions that arise when the boundary between humans and our closest animal relatives blurs. Centering on the true story of Lucy, a chimpanzee raised as a human in a science experiment, the episode investigates what happens when animals and people try to share not just space, but culture, language, and even identity. Through interviews, memoirs, and firsthand accounts, the hosts unravel issues of ethics, biology, empathy, and the surprising consequences of crossing the species divide.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Breaking the Animal-Human Barrier (00:00–06:39)

• The show opens with field researcher Barbara Smuts recounting her experiences with a young male chimp, Goblin, in Tanzania and the breakdown of researcher/animal “borders.”
• Memorable Quote (05:54):
  Jad Abumrad: "She slips. And for just that moment, she's not really a human, he's not really a chimp. The raincoat is the only important thing."
• Sets the thematic stage for the episode: What happens when the wall between human and animal collapses?

2. The Experiment: Raising Lucy as Human (07:02–21:43)

• Background:
  In the 1960s, psychologists Maurice and Jane Temerlin adopt Lucy, a newborn chimpanzee, for an extended experiment to see how “human” she can become.
• Key Insights:
  • Lucy eats with utensils, dresses herself, and mimics human behaviors.
  • Language lessons with Roger Fouts reveal she learns over 250 signs, demonstrates spontaneous word creation (“candy drink” for watermelon), and even lies.
  • Lucy’s assimilation is both impressive and unsettling.
    Notable Moment (13:29):
    Roger Fouts: “She would also lie to me…And lying, we should also say, is another one of those things that people used to think only we do.”
• Sexual Identity Crisis:
  • Lucy develops sexual attraction toward humans, and when introduced to another chimp, she is terrified, underscoring how completely social boundaries have been redrawn.
    Memorable Quote (18:20):
    Sue Savage-Rumbaugh: “She was stranded right in between this great divide… There is no category in our language except a mythical one for something that’s not human and not animal.”

3. The Fallout: When Nature Reasserts Itself (21:43–25:57)

• As Lucy grows, her strength and willfulness become dangerous—posing a threat to her human parents.
• The Temerlins search for a solution, eventually deciding to “return” Lucy to the wild rather than placing her in a restrictive zoo or lab.
• Memorable Quote (21:43):
  Maurice Temerlin (via David Garland): “If they don’t have happy endings, they should have tragic endings. I hate books which have no ending like this one.”

4. Janice Carter and the Attempt to Rewild Lucy (25:24–35:29)

• Janice Carter, Lucy’s caretaker, accompanies her to a Gambian nature reserve, eventually relocating her and other ex-captive chimps to a forested island.
• Challenges:
  • Lucy clings to Janice, unable to adapt to wild life, refusing to forage, and suffering emotionally.
  • Janice constructs a cage for herself to force distance, prompting most chimps (but not Lucy) to begin learning wild behaviors.
  • An extraordinary standoff (30:17):
    Janice Carter: “Lucy go.”
    Jad Abumrad: “No, Janice come.”
    This sign language battle continues as Lucy resists assimilation into chimp society.
• Turning Point (32:14):
  • After Janice and Lucy fall asleep together, Lucy offers Janice a leaf, then eats it—a symbolic breakthrough.
  • From this moment, Lucy slowly adjusts and joins the other chimps.

5. Loss, Legacy, and Tragic Ending (35:29–37:45)

• After a long absence, Janice returns to the island to find Lucy gone. She discovers Lucy’s remains—likely killed by poachers after approaching them with her typical human-trusting manner.
• Memorable Quote (36:52):
  Charles Siebert: “They think that Lucy, always the first to approach humans, just sort of guilelessly approached poachers…that was Lucy’s end.”

6. Reflections on Lucy’s Story and Human-Animal Boundaries (39:00–40:32)

• The hosts and Charles Siebert reflect on the meaning of Lucy’s story, emphasizing the risks and ethical quandaries of crossing such deep-rooted boundaries.
• Insightful Takeaway (40:03):
  Charles Siebert: “The only option now and the best way to dignify and honor like what they are, who they are…is to fence them, ourselves off from them in little pockets of their home that we leave alone. That would be coexistence.”

7. A New Approach: Bonobo-Human Experiments (40:32–55:10)

• Producer Soren Wheeler visits the Great Ape Trust in Iowa, meeting bonobo Kanzi, who was raised with both human and bonobo influences by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh.
• Here, rather than a one-way “humanization,” a genuine cross-species culture emerges.
  • Kanzi learns over 600 words by using a symbolic keyboard.
  • Kanzi and the researchers engage in complex, emotionally rich social relationships.
  • The blurred boundary brings confusion, sometimes danger (e.g., Kanzi bites a staff member over a perceived violation of bonobo social rules).
  • Memorable Exchange (54:05):
    Robert Krulwich: “You’re telling us a story which reads more and more and more like a soap opera between a community of beings… it's just primates.”

8. The Emotional Heart: What Do We Lose & Learn? (55:10–56:14)

• Sue Savage-Rumbaugh expresses what she’s gained—and lost—traversing the animal-human divide:
  • Notable Quote (55:10):
    Sue Savage-Rumbaugh: “When I am with bonobos, I feel like I have something that I shared with them long ago, but I forgot…if I could have their abilities and keep mine, I would be whole.”

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• "She was stranded right in between this great divide… There is no category in our language except a mythical one for something that’s not human and not animal."
  Sue Savage-Rumbaugh (18:20)
• "We have begun to be able to decode his speech… When he speaks to me and I understand it, it's in English."
  Bill Fields on bonobo Kanzi (47:22)
• "You’re telling us a story which reads more and more and more like a soap opera between a community of beings."
  Robert Krulwich (54:05)
• "We are all the same, really. Just primates."
  Jad Abumrad & Bill Fields (54:27)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Goblin and Barbara Smuts (Animals & Human Borders): 00:00–06:39
• Lucy's Adoption & “Humanization” (Temerlins & Roger Fouts): 07:02–21:43
• Lucy's Crisis and Wild Relocation (Janice Carter): 25:24–37:45
• Reflections & New Approaches (Great Ape Trust & Kanzi): 40:32–55:10
• Emotional Conclusion (Sue Savage-Rumbaugh): 55:10–56:14

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Conclusion

"Lucy" tells an extraordinary story: of a chimpanzee made human and the tragic cost of her hybrid identity. The episode challenges listeners to ponder the limits of empathy, the meaning(s) of species, and the consequences—good and bad—of our deep desire to connect with animals. In the Lucy experiment, compassion, curiosity, and overreach converge. Later, at the Great Ape Trust, a new, more collaborative paradigm emerges, but it too is fraught with uncertainty. Ultimately, Radiolab offers no neat answers—only the haunting complexity and heartbreak of trying to bridge the gap between human and animal worlds.

Transcript

[Jad Abumrad]

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right.

[Soren Wheeler]

You're listening to Radiolab Radio Lab from WNYC.

[Jad Abumrad]

And npr.

[Robert Krulwich]

All right, let's start with an Encounter.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yes. Hello?

[Sue Savage-Rumbaugh]

Hello?

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay, can. Can you hear me?

[Barbara Smuts]

Okay, I can barely hear you.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay, so this is, well, our produce, Dr. Lulu Miller, was calling around, trying to find some stories for this hour. Let's see. And she ended up on the phone with a woman named Barbara Smuts. Is that any better?

[Sue Savage-Rumbaugh]

Yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

Barb Smuts is now at the University of Michigan. But years ago, she was a field researcher in Tanzania, working with the great.

[Jad Abumrad]

Jane Goodall, you know, following chimps at a distance and writing down everything they do and that kind of thing.

[Robert Krulwich]

Right.

[Janice Carter]

Okay.

[Robert Krulwich]

And when she was in Tanzania, she ran into, in Gombe National Park, a particularly young male chimp named Goblin.

[Jad Abumrad]

Will you tell me the story of Goblin?

[Barbara Smuts]

Oh, sure.

[Jad Abumrad]

First of all, what does he look like?

[Barbara Smuts]

Well, he's an adolescent male. If he stood up, he would come up to quite a bit above my waist.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Barbara Smuts]

And almost immediately, he started picking on me in the sense that, you know, he would walk past me and just kind of jab me casually as he went by. And sometimes he would punch me with the fist. Sometimes he would just kind of whack me with an open hand or just kind of use his body to just kind of shove at me as he went past. You know, he'd look at me as he approached, and I'd be going, oh, no.

[Jad Abumrad]

And is that something they would often do with humans, or was this.

[Sue Savage-Rumbaugh]

No.

[Jad Abumrad]

Rare.

[Barbara Smuts]

No. He was in a phase of life. When a male. As a male matures, he rises in rank. And before he challenges any other adult male, he rises kind of step by step through the female hierarchy. He basically intimidates female after female until they give in and acknowledge that he's superior, and then he'll pretty much leave them alone. So he was at the point where he dominated all but probably two of the adult females and you and me. So that's part of it is where Goblin wasn't. The other part of it is that I'm really small.

[Jad Abumrad]

So as you're out there doing. What do you think is going on? Did you think he just.

[Barbara Smuts]

Well, I just felt like he was a bully and I was an easy target. And in the evening, I would say to Jane Goodall, you know, I'd tell her what happened, ask her what to do, and she would say, just ignore him. You know, eventually he'll get bored and he'll stop doing it, which was you know, this kind of standard advice, this sort of myth of total scientific objectivity, just ignore it and it'll go away. But instead, he escalated. I remember one time I was sitting at the top of a hill, and he came up behind me and jumped on my back, which forced me to roll down the hill. And he kind of rolled down with me. You know, we were like this ball rolling down a hill again. I would tell Jane and ask her what to do, and she would always say the same thing, just ignore it. But one day, during the rain, it was the rainy season, so we all carried raincoats with us. And when it wasn't raining, we would carry them on our backs so that it wasn't in the way. And Goblin walked up to me one day and yanked on my raincoat. And these raincoats, they were like our most valuable possession, the raincoat. So he grabbed it, and he was going to run away with it. And so we had this tug of war. And so the two of us were standing facing each other, you know, tugging on this raincoat. And then I did something that was not premeditated at all. I just leaned forward and I punched him as hard as I could in the face.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, my God. What did you think, like, right after you'd done it? Were you shocked at yourself that you just.

[Janice Carter]

Yeah.

[Barbara Smuts]

I'd never punched anybody before, you know, much less a chimp who I was supposed to be studying from a distance. So I was shaking.

[Jad Abumrad]

What did he do?

[Barbara Smuts]

He just collapsed. He, like, turned into a little baby, you know, he collapsed on the ground and started whimpering. And then he looked to Figan, who was the alpha male at the time, who was sitting nearby, and he was like Figgin's little sidekick. He always kind of hanging out with Figan and playing up to him. He ran over to Figan screaming like this, being just beat up on me. Come on, let's get her. And fortunately, Figan did not take it seriously. I remember he just reached over with this great big hand, and without even looking at Goblin, he patted him on the head a few times and then went back to whatever he was doing. Because it could have been really bad if he had taken it seriously. I did not go back and tell Jane Goodall I had punched Goblin in the nose. And I just. I didn't tell the story for a long time.

[Jad Abumrad]

Why not?

[Janice Carter]

Well.

[Barbara Smuts]

I think, you know, I would have gotten a lot of disapproval.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah.

[Barbara Smuts]

Anyway, Goblin never bothered me again.

[Jad Abumrad]

So here's the reason we played that story. Because here you've got this moment where you've got a scientist, Barbara Smuts, who's, you know, trained scientist, got scientific rules of objectivity and all that, and she totally loses it.

[Roger Fouts]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

She slips. And for just that moment, she's not really a human, he's not really a chimp. The raincoat is the only important thing.

[Robert Krulwich]

The borders have dropped is really what's happening.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. Now, we're used to thinking of borders, you know, between us and the animals as being fixed. And most people would say, this is good. Keep them there, keep us here, keep us separate.

[Robert Krulwich]

But not in this hour. We're gonna meet people who decided to go the other way. People who are trying to live intimately, and I mean really intimately, really, with big wild animals.

[Jad Abumrad]

Something you could either call incredibly stupid or. Or our last great hope because there.

[Robert Krulwich]

Are so many of us on the planet.

[Jad Abumrad]

So coming up, we've got two stories of radical experiments in sharing. I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab. Okay. Story one. This whole show and way began with a conversation with this fellow, Charles Siebert.

[Charles Siebert]

I am an author and a journalist.

[Jad Abumrad]

And he wrote a book called the Washoula Woods Accord, which is a great book, in which he tells a story, which he told us in the studio as well, about a chimpanzee named Lucy. So let's just start at the beginning. Who is Lucy?

[Charles Siebert]

Lucy is a chimpanzee that actually, this was found out later born to a circus entertainer born in their camp.

[Robert Krulwich]

What country are we in in?

[Charles Siebert]

In the US They. They traveled up and down the East Coast. The May Noel Chimp Ark show, something like that. They were very popular in the 40s and 50s. They were wildly popular, apparently.

[Robert Krulwich]

Oh, so this was a mom and pop entertainment operation that would go from town to town in the middle Atlantic states.

[Charles Siebert]

Exactly.

[Jad Abumrad]

And so Lucy was born to two of the chimps that performed in this thing.

[Charles Siebert]

Yeah. And they used to do things like they used to stage wrestling matches with human beings. The he man of the town would come in and challenge the chimp to a wrestling match.

[Jad Abumrad]

Really? What would happen?

[Charles Siebert]

You know, a chimpanzee, an adult chimpanzee is about five times the strength of a human. And this guy would walk in thinking, you know, I'm gonna give this chimp my money. And, like, one swipe of this chimp's forearm and the guy would be on Queer street and be carried out. It would end so quickly.

[Robert Krulwich]

And then the house band would go.

[Charles Siebert]

He'S out of there.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay, so Getting back to our story about Lucy. This is a story that begins in 1964, and it's one that Charles would have never heard about had he not bumped into this obscure old memoir long out of print. Yeah. What's the name of the book? Do you actually have it with you?

[Charles Siebert]

Yeah, hold on. It's called Lucy Growing Up Human. A Chimpanzee Daughter in a Psychotherapist's Family by Maurice K. Temerlin.

[Jad Abumrad]

Maurice K. Temerlin. He is the psychotherapist.

[Charles Siebert]

He's a psychotherapist and he's also the.

[Jad Abumrad]

Dad in this story. And his wife Jane, who's a social worker, she's the mom. Now, the thing to know was that especially for Maurice Temerlin, this was more than just adopting a baby chimp. This was an experiment.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

He wanted to know, given the right upbringing, how human could Lucy become?

[Charles Siebert]

You know what he says early on in this book? Would she learn to love us and.

[David Garland]

Perhaps have other human emotions as well? Would she be well behaved, rebellious, intelligent or stupid? What about sexual?

[Jad Abumrad]

Maurice Temerlin actually died in 1989, but these are his words, read by radio host David Garland.

[David Garland]

Would she mother her offspring? Could she learn to talk? How intelligent might she be?

[Jad Abumrad]

And so how did they get her?

[Charles Siebert]

He says that he and his wife Jane made all the arrangements, went and got the chimp.

[David Garland]

On the day the infant was born.

[Charles Siebert]

The mother was anesthetized.

[David Garland]

In the early morning of her second day, Jane fed the mother a Coca Cola, which had been spiked with phencyclidine, a drug which puts chimpanzees into a deep, pleasant sleep.

[Charles Siebert]

And the baby was taken away.

[David Garland]

Jane named her Lucy and brought her home on a commercial airline, carried in a bassinet, her face covered with a lacy blanket. We were blissfully unaware of the complexities we were creating on the day Lucy came home.

[Robert Krulwich]

So the baby was a day or two old?

[Charles Siebert]

Just two days old.

[Robert Krulwich]

So it wasn't weaned?

[Charles Siebert]

No. And that was part of the experiment.

[Robert Krulwich]

They bottle feed her?

[Charles Siebert]

Yeah.

[David Garland]

She quickly learned to hold her own bottle. At two months, her eyes would focus. At three months, she was trying to climb out of her crib to go to people. And at six months, she was pretty mobile on all four limbs.

[Jad Abumrad]

Memoir goes on that by the time she was about a year old, she.

[David Garland]

Was eating at the table with us, forks, spoons, knives. She would see us using silverware and immediately do so herself.

[Jad Abumrad]

She began to dress herself in skirts.

[David Garland]

She would often grab my hand, pull me to my feet and beg Me to chase her, always looking back to see that daddy was not too far behind.

[Charles Siebert]

You know, he really went at this with this sort of full bore earnestness, you know, when he calls her his darling daughter.

[David Garland]

I took great pride in my daughter's achievements.

[Charles Siebert]

He does feel like a real parent to Lucy.

[David Garland]

She was so responsive to being looked at, held and stroked.

[Charles Siebert]

But he's also, make no mistake, treating this as a very intense, cutting edge experiment.

[Jad Abumrad]

The next phase of the experiment which occupies a good deal of the book, involves one of those talents that we thought used to only be limited to US Language. Okay, can you introduce yourself please?

[Roger Fouts]

Okay. My name is Roger Fouts. I'm a professor of psychology and have worked with chimpanzees since 1967.

[Jad Abumrad]

Roger Foutz was called in by Maurice Temerlin to address one of the crucial questions of the experiment.

[David Garland]

Could she learn to talk right?

[Jad Abumrad]

And at the time he was the guy. He'd just been part of a team that had proven for the first time that chimps could use sign language to communicate. So his job with Lucy was to teach her how to sign.

[Roger Fouts]

And I think I came into her life when she was, as I remember it was 1970, I think it was four or five. She was four or five years old.

[David Garland]

Roger taught her signs for airplane, baby doll ball, banana barrette.

[Robert Krulwich]

Right, Berry.

[Roger Fouts]

Yeah, yeah. So I was sort of like Blanket the Tudor friend, babysitter that would come over for a few hours, bow tie each day and spend some time just, you know, just playing with Lucy. I would work on signs.

[David Garland]

Can't.

[Roger Fouts]

We'd read books together or we'd go for walks and I would chat with her, basically cry dirty.

[Jad Abumrad]

And he says that Lucy, enough, just sort of picked it up, picked it all up.

[Roger Fouts]

It was like a game.

[Charles Siebert]

She learned some 250 signs. And the big question is, okay, so is it mere mimicry or are they able to spontaneously create words and put them together in a new original way? And there's been a lot of anecdotal evidence that in fact Lucy did spontaneously.

[David Garland]

Create words in a later session when shown a piece of watermelon, Lucy tasted.

[Roger Fouts]

It and she called it candy drink.

[Jad Abumrad]

Huh.

[Roger Fouts]

And a radish had gotten quite old and one day, you know, she was calling it food and food for I think several days of the study. And then she decided to eat this old radish and she took a bite and spit it out. I said, well, what is that? She called it cry hurt food.

[Robert Krulwich]

Wow.

[Roger Fouts]

She would also lie to me.

[Jad Abumrad]

Really?

[Roger Fouts]

Yes, yeah, yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

And lying, we should also say, is another one of those things that people used to think only we do.

[Roger Fouts]

During one of my sessions, I came in and she had a potty accent and that she had been potty trained, but sometimes she didn't always make it. And I was upset because I was now faced with having to clean it up. And so I said, whose is that? And she said, sue.

[Jad Abumrad]

Who's Sue?

[Roger Fouts]

Sue was one of. One of my students that would come in and spend time with Lucy, too. I said, no, Sue's not here. And finally she blamed it on sue, said Lucy. And sorry, and so on.

[Jad Abumrad]

Sue. Yes, this is Sue. Sue Savvy Drumboff, a grad student of yours, who says she didn't actually see that line take place.

[Sue Savage-Rumbaugh]

Yes. Well, I wasn't there, but she told.

[Jad Abumrad]

Us that when she met Lucy, she was blown away by, well, the incongruity of it all. Like, for instance, every time she would walk in the house, Lucy would just.

[Sue Savage-Rumbaugh]

Walk casually into the kitchen and search through the cupboard for the kind of tea she wanted that day and put some water in a kettle and put it on the stove and make us tea.

[Roger Fouts]

Yeah, it became a routine. I'd come in and she would start the tea.

[Sue Savage-Rumbaugh]

It was the casualness with which she did it, the kind of air about it that, yes, I'm making tea and I would like you to have some too, because tea is what we did. And so the thing to do was to sit down and to casually sip the tea with Lucy and casually look through the magazines, listen to the radio.

[Jad Abumrad]

What magazines would she look at?

[Sue Savage-Rumbaugh]

Well, she looked at, I think, House and Garden and some magazines that had pictures of women and children in them. Whatever the Timberlands had out.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow.

[David Garland]

Lucy had developed an awareness of our emotions. If Jane is distressed, Timberland's wife, Lucy, notices it immediately and attempts to comfort her by putting her arm about her, grooming her or her kissing her. If Jane is sick, Lucy would exhibit tender protectiveness toward her, bringing her food, sharing her own food.

[Jad Abumrad]

And as we get to this next part, this is sort of the midpoint of the memoir. It's useful to sort of remember a basic fact of biology. Speciation happens when you've got one group of creatures that gets divided into two, and then these two groups evolve away from one another and eventually they get so far away from each other that they can't have babies.

[Robert Krulwich]

And nature makes sure that they can have babies by making one species basically undesirable to the other. You look across, you're a baboon you look across at a chimp and you go, eh, yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

You're only sexually attracted to your own kind. That is essentially what a species is. Now, this isn't something you're supposed to be able to learn or unlearn.

[Robert Krulwich]

This is just the way it is.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. Which brings us to some troubling passages in the book, beginning really on page 105. Can you read it?

[Roger Fouts]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

And we should warn that this next minute and a half contains a sexual reference.

[Charles Siebert]

One afternoon around five o', clock, Jane and I were sitting in the living room when we observed this sequence of behavior.

[David Garland]

Lucy left the living room and went to the kitchen, opened a cabinet and took from it a glass, opened a different cabinet and brought out a bottle.

[Charles Siebert]

Bottle of gin.

[Jad Abumrad]

Gin.

[Charles Siebert]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Charles Siebert]

She loved gin and tonics.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's actually not the important part. It's what happens next. She takes her gin, goes back to the living room, sits on the couch, and there's really no other way to say this. She starts to masturbate. But even that's not the important part. It's actually in the very next moment that a boundary that took approximately 6 million years to establish dissolves. Mr. Temerlin sees Lucy doing this and he thinks this. This is a perfect experimental moment. So he runs off to the mall.

[Charles Siebert]

Buys a copy of Playgirl magazine and brings it back to her.

[Robert Krulwich]

This is full of naked guys.

[Charles Siebert]

Yeah. And Lucy would masturbate to these centerfolds.

[Sue Savage-Rumbaugh]

I was not a part of that. I was never there when Lucy looked at the porno.

[Jad Abumrad]

But sue says that she was there for what happened next.

[Sue Savage-Rumbaugh]

Yes. I was there when she was introduced to her first adult male chimpanzee.

[Jad Abumrad]

Had Lucy ever seen another chimpanzee before?

[Sue Savage-Rumbaugh]

Never seen another chimpanzee from the moment of birth.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow. She says they brought this male chimp.

[Sue Savage-Rumbaugh]

In to see if Lucy was attracted to chimpanzee males.

[Jad Abumrad]

And was she?

[Sue Savage-Rumbaugh]

I. Well, the male chimpanzee would sit there with his hand held out toward her and she was very frightened and she tried to move away.

[Jad Abumrad]

It was then, says sue, that she realized that in every way that mattered, Lucy was no longer a chimp.

[Sue Savage-Rumbaugh]

She was stranded right in between this great divide that I knew was there between humans and non humans. And I did not know how to negotiate this. There is no category in our language except a mythical one for something that's not human and not animal.

[Barbara Smuts]

Message 8.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hi, this is Charles Sebert calling a little too late on Friday, I'm afraid, to read the show credits. Here goes Radiolab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation and the National Science Foundation. Radiolab is produced by WNYC and distributed by npr. Npr. Hey, I'm Jan Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

And I'm Robert Kwilowich.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab. Today we're listening to a story about Lucy.

[Robert Krulwich]

The confused chimp. Confused chimp is the chimp that's raised.

[Jad Abumrad]

As a human, dressed like a human, talks like a human, even, well, a little bit anyway, sexually attracted to humans.

[Robert Krulwich]

So the thing to understand before we go on in this story, says Charles Sebert, is you can do this and you can do it heartily, and you can get one confused chimp. But at some point, nature reasserts itself, at least in this way. As a chimpanzee grows, it becomes very strong, very strong.

[Jad Abumrad]

And that, says Charles, is usually the point where the human owner throws in the towel.

[Charles Siebert]

And, you know, there are people who really. Who can't have children, who have chimps as their substitute children. And they all have to go through that moment where the chimp gets too big, too strong, too willful, too sexually mature, and they invariably relinquish the chimp.

[Jad Abumrad]

But in Lucy's case, what happened?

[Charles Siebert]

So in Lucy's case, the Temerlins really hung on way longer than Most. Lucy was 10 going on 11. They had by this time rigged up an entire portion of the house for this very strong, willful animal, you know, behind bars. Padded rooms.

[Robert Krulwich]

So you can bounce behind bars. Bars. They built a cage inside the house.

[Jad Abumrad]

In their house, which defeats the entire purpose of the whole thing.

[Charles Siebert]

That's right.

[Robert Krulwich]

Was she destroying things?

[Charles Siebert]

Oh, God, she was tearing the house to shreds.

[David Garland]

Lucy was into everything. She could take a normal living room and turn it into pure chaos in less than five minutes.

[Charles Siebert]

Just. And with company, she would just jump on a guest and start bouncing up and down.

[David Garland]

Our friends and relatives began to visit us less frequently. Now that she's grown and is five to seven times stronger than I am, she could tear us apart, literally.

[Charles Siebert]

It was more and more challenging and time consuming and upsetting to the extent that he and his wife finally said, all right, we can't do this anymore. This is too much.

[Jad Abumrad]

Experiment over. The memoir ends with a big, fat what will happen to Lucy? On the final page, Maurice Temerlin says, well, we know we can't keep her, but we don't. We don't know what to do. The end.

[David Garland]

I was raised in the romantic tradition, and I like books to have happy endings. If they don't have happy endings, they should have tragic endings. I hate books which have no ending like this one.

[Janice Carter]

Hi.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hi. Is this Janice?

[Janice Carter]

Yes, it is.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Janice Carter. Not only does she know the ending of the story, she's actually the key player in it.

[Janice Carter]

Well, I hope we have a decent conversation because the lines are really terrible.

[Jad Abumrad]

Took us a really long time to find Janice Carter. She lives in a remote part of Gambia in Western Africa. And that'll become relevant in a second.

[Robert Krulwich]

How did you meet Lucy?

[Janice Carter]

I met her. One of my part time jobs that I had to put myself through grad school was to clean Lucy's cage. That's how I met her. I cleaned up after her.

[Jad Abumrad]

In fact, Janice says she was one of the few people who could actually handle Lucy when she was out of her cage.

[Janice Carter]

Which surprised the Timberlands because she had been quite difficult with previous caretakers.

[Robert Krulwich]

Was that because you were stronger than the predecessor caretakers or you were cleverer?

[Janice Carter]

Well, I think it was probably more timing. I think that the time that I entered Lucy's respect, she was looking for something, something outside of that sphere of mom and dad and I was a friend.

[Jad Abumrad]

In any case, Janice ended up being in Lucy's life at the exact moment when the Temerlins finally decided what they were going to do with Lucy.

[Janice Carter]

They visited a number of it's 1977.

[Jad Abumrad]

They had just spent a year traveling around the world looking at different options. Zoos, research labs, chimp retirement homes, which were these facilities that were springing up to house chimps like Lucy, you know, who'd been raised by humans or, or in the circus. But every place they visited, she says was just too depressing for them too cage like for this being that they essentially considered their daughter. And so the decision they came to was that the best way to honor Lucy, the best way to really make her happy was to simply let her go in the wild. And they asked Janice to help them do it. Did you have any idea or any experience of what you were getting yourself into?

[Janice Carter]

0. I didn't have a clue.

[Jad Abumrad]

So after a 22 hour flight, Janice, the Temerlins and Lucy arrive in Dakar, Senegal.

[Janice Carter]

I remember arriving really early in the morning. How hot it was even early in.

[Jad Abumrad]

The morning compared to Oklahoma. This was just different.

[Janice Carter]

Lots of insects, mosquitoes and high, high, high humidity. It was the rainy season.

[Jad Abumrad]

After they landed, she says they piled.

[Janice Carter]

Into a car and crossed the Gambia.

[Jad Abumrad]

River and made their way to a nature reserve. Nature reserve, which was basically just a.

[Janice Carter]

Bunch of big cages, really large enclosure.

[Jad Abumrad]

There, sitting right outside in the jungle. So they get there, coax Lucy into one of these cages, say their goodbyes for the night, and they leave her to spend her very first night alone outdoors. After a few weeks, Maurice and Jane Temerlin decided to leave. And the plan was that Janice, for just a little while, would stay behind, you know, to help Lucy with the transition.

[Janice Carter]

She started to lose her hair and get skin infections and. No, I wasn't happy being there either. I hated it.

[Jad Abumrad]

How long did you think you would be staying there?

[Janice Carter]

Three weeks.

[Jad Abumrad]

Three weeks, wow. It's worth saying that Janice Carter has actually never left.

[Janice Carter]

At the end of those three weeks, there was just no way that I could leave Lucy.

[Jad Abumrad]

The weeks turn into months and then into a year, and still Lucy's stressed out. She's not eating, her hair is falling out. By this point, a whole other group of chimps shows up at this nature reserve. These are former captives like Lucy, and they start to deteriorate as well. So Janice decides what she needs to do is change locations. So she takes Lucy and all these other chimps to this abandoned island that she'd found.

[Janice Carter]

Long, narrow island.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is in the Gambia River, a.

[Janice Carter]

Mile wide at its widest point. Very thick, green forest.

[Robert Krulwich]

And the idea here was that you would release them and they would be able to do whatever in the island and learn how to climb trees and learn how to forage and learn how to establish relationships with each other. Was that the notion?

[Janice Carter]

Yeah, in a nutshell. And you would think that if you gave them freedom, they would just jump for joy. And that's. That's the last chapter of the book.

[Jad Abumrad]

But it's not what happened. She says that when Lucy and the other chimps got to the island and she let them loose, they clung to her during the day. She'd walk them around the island and point out to them, here are the fruits you should be eating. These are the leaves you should be eating. But they weren't interested in any of that stuff. Oh, no, they were actually more interested in her stuff, which is what they were used to.

[Janice Carter]

I had human objects and tools that I needed for my own survival and they wanted to use them. Like when I would cook or brush my teeth or take a bath or anything that I wanted to do, they wanted to be doing it with me.

[Jad Abumrad]

Janice figured the only way this was going to work is if she could somehow keep the chimps away from her and her tools. And so here's where she does something really radical. She had run into a couple of British army officers who were passing through the Gambia, on some kind of wilderness training thing. And she somehow convinced them to build her a cage, a giant metal industrial cage. Then to fly it over to her.

[Janice Carter]

Island and drop it. Thunk.

[Jad Abumrad]

Right in the center. The thing about this cage is that it wasn't for the chimps, it was for her.

[Janice Carter]

Yes.

[Robert Krulwich]

You lived in a cage?

[Janice Carter]

I lived in a cage, yes.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow. And in the beginning, she says her cage didn't even have a roof.

[Janice Carter]

No. In the rainy season, it rained on me.

[Jad Abumrad]

The only thing above her head was this fine wire mesh to keep the chimps out.

[Janice Carter]

And the chimps all wanted to be inside with me when I said no. Then they climb on top of the cage and sleep out in the open on the wire on top, right above me. Every time there was any sound in the night of a hyena or anything, they would immediately squeal and defecate and urinate right on top of me.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, God.

[Janice Carter]

Then I put corrugates on the roof, but then they started dancing on the corrugates. They really liked the sound that it made. So they were all day long busy dancing. It sounds funny and. And it was at times, but it distracted them from being chimps.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. After about a year, says Janice, most of the chimps lost interest in her, you know, because they couldn't get her tools. She was stuck in a cage. They gave up. They stopped hanging around her and they just wander off into the forest and forage for themselves.

[Janice Carter]

But Lucy would stay behind. She, for obvious reasons, thought that she was different than all the rest of the chimps.

[Jad Abumrad]

And so Janice and Lucy entered into a kind of sign language battle of wills.

[Janice Carter]

If I came out of the tent to look to see if they were all gone, there she was, right there, looking nearly forlorn at me and using sign language to take. Tell me to come out, to be with her.

[Jad Abumrad]

But Janice would sign to Lucy, no, Lucy go. Lucy would then sign back, no, Janice, come.

[Janice Carter]

No, Lucy go.

[Jad Abumrad]

No, Janice come.

[Janice Carter]

Lucy go.

[Jad Abumrad]

And this went on and on.

[Janice Carter]

I tried and I tried and I tried and I tried, but Lucy wouldn't move.

[Jad Abumrad]

She would just stand there, waiting for Janice to help her.

[Janice Carter]

Sometimes I would stay inside the kids all day long and I would try to ignore her, ignore that she was there thinking that if I ignored her, then she'd go off with the others. But that didn't work. And if I did look at her, then she would sign that she was hurt. She would use a sign for hurt.

[Jad Abumrad]

Meanwhile, she wasn't foraging for herself, she.

[Janice Carter]

Was getting thinner and I tried everything and really, really knocked myself out trying to do things for her. And I just started to think maybe she never was gonna do it. And we would argue about it. I would. I ate everything. I was eating ants. I was eating the sticky latex from figs. I was doing everything that I was finding really nauseating to do just so that she would watch me do it and think, wow, if she's doing it, then I'm gonna do it too. And she wouldn't do it. She just turned her head away. And I honestly thought at one point that she would rather starve to death than have to work for her food. I was losing hope.

[Jad Abumrad]

But incredibly, Janice kept at this for years. She'd have to toss Lucy some food, some of hers, just to keep Lucy from starving, but she kept at it. And then one evening, after a really, really long day.

[Janice Carter]

Oh, what a drag of a day.

[Jad Abumrad]

Janice and Lucy are walking through the forest, and they both stop because they're so beat and crash.

[Janice Carter]

And we just. We fell asleep on the ground together. When I woke up, Lucy was actually holding my hand. And she had a leaf.

[Robert Krulwich]

She's holding out a leaf?

[Janice Carter]

Yes. She reached out and she offered it to me, and then I offered it to her. And she ate. Was a miracle. It was an absolute miracle.

[Jad Abumrad]

And after that, says Janice, things turned.

[Charles Siebert]

And actually, from that moment on, Lucy did start to make the effort and.

[Jad Abumrad]

Go off and be a chimp.

[Charles Siebert]

And be a chimp.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's Charles Siebert again.

[Charles Siebert]

And it was not too long after that that Janice went away and left the island.

[Robert Krulwich]

Mm.

[Jad Abumrad]

Janice says she'd, you know, periodically circle in a boat just to keep an eye on Lucy. But she says she never, not once, set foot on that island. At least not for a year. Then one day, she decided to go back.

[Janice Carter]

This day is the first day that I went actually on the island.

[Jad Abumrad]

She pulled her boat up to the tip of the island where there was this little clearing, and she parked. And as she did, Lucy and the other chimps who'd heard the boat came out of the forest and into the clearing, and Lucy and her walked toward each other.

[Janice Carter]

And I took with me some of the. Lucy's possessions that had been important to her, like her mirror. And she used to like to draw and books just to see how she responded to it.

[Jad Abumrad]

And what did she do?

[Janice Carter]

Well, she was. She looked at the thing, she looked at the book, she looked at herself in the mirror, and she signed to herself in the mirror. Then all of a sudden, she grabbed me. I mean, really Grabbed me, one arm, circled all the way around me and she sort of held me really, really tight. It just really made me breathless and I started crying. She started to give these soft little pants and I. I feel pretty certain what she was saying to me was, it's okay, you know, it's all okay now.

[Jad Abumrad]

At that moment, somebody in Janice's boat snapped a picture of her and Lucy hugging. It's a picture that Charles Siebert printed in his book. And it's one of those images that when you see it, I don't know why, it just haunts you. Lucy has her head against Janice's chest and Janice has her arms around Lucy.

[Charles Siebert]

It's one of the more fraught moments. You have to just look at the picture. I mean, it sort of made me want to write the book. Something about the complexity and the invertedness of that picture.

[Janice Carter]

After that, the other chimps had started to go and she wanted to go with them and she got up, but then she. She didn't turn back to look at me. She just kept walking. She wanted to go with the other chimps and she did.

[Jad Abumrad]

A year later, Janice went back to visit Lucy again. But when she got there this time, Lucy was gone.

[Janice Carter]

And I went to all the different places looking to see if we could find anything. And we did. We found her, the body.

[Jad Abumrad]

She was lying right near the place where Janice's cage had been. Just a skeleton.

[Janice Carter]

The skull and her hands and her feet were separated from the rest of the skeleton.

[Robert Krulwich]

So how did you know that that was her body?

[Janice Carter]

She had a split between her front teeth and she was very long and there was nobody else missing.

[Jad Abumrad]

And maybe the saddest, strangest thing was.

[Janice Carter]

That we didn't find any signs of her skin or hair.

[Jad Abumrad]

It appeared that Lucy had been skinned.

[Charles Siebert]

And no one knows actually what happened. But because the hands were taken, which poachers do. They thought one of the conjectures which makes it really unbelievably tragic is that they think that Lucy, always the first to approach humans, just sort of guilelessly approached poachers, not knowing that they were that and that they just took advantage of their unwitting and overeager prey. But that's. That was Lucy's end.

[Janice Carter]

The scenario that I have developed to cope with her death is that a fisherman or someone who. Some local person that just happened to pull up next to the land and was going to take a break or cut a raffia palm down or do something, and because she always felt confidence around humans, she probably approached the person Perhaps as you surprised the person and just on reflexive defense, she was probably shot. I've got no other explanation.

[Jad Abumrad]

Janice Carter still lives in Gambia where she now works not just with the chimps, but with the local population to protect the habitat for the chimps. And Charles Siebert's latest book, which is a really tremendous book, is the Washula Woods Accord. Our sincere thanks to him for turning us on to the Lucy story. Also, if you go to our website, Radiolab.org you can see pictures of Lucy and Janice and also that particular picture that I describe of the hug. It's just one of those pictures you really just have to see. It'[e-mail] My name is Micah and I'm.

[Janice Carter]

Calling from Lincoln, Massachusetts with my son Jude.

[Barbara Smuts]

Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation and enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.

[Jad Abumrad]

More information about [e-mail]. thanks.

[Robert Krulwich]

3A 2A 1.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

Wow, that was a big head.

[Jad Abumrad]

Sorry, I was just feeling it. I was feeling it. I'm Robert Krulwitz, this is Radiolab. We've been, we shouldn't be laughing because we've been listening to a really, really sad story about a chimp named Lucy.

[Robert Krulwich]

Who, who was born as a chimp, raised as a human and died in well under because she ran into a human that she trusted and probably shouldn't have.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. And so the question that we want to ask now, and we asked this question to Charles Siebert, you know, guy who wrote a lot about chimps, is what's the lesson that we should draw from this?

[Charles Siebert]

It's a good question. I think what it says points back to something I said earlier, that the only option now and the best way to dignify and honor like what they are, who they are, they're more than what is to fence them, ourselves off from them in little pockets of their home that we leave alone. That would be coexistence.

[Robert Krulwich]

Or if you can't do it that way, and there's a very good reason why you couldn't do it that way, because there are what, six now 6.8 billion people in the world, soon to go up to 9 billion.

[Jad Abumrad]

Too many of us.

[Robert Krulwich]

Too many of us.

[Jad Abumrad]

So what do you do?

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, one thing you might try, I mean, it's kind of a far out notion, but you could go back to the Lucy experiment, the one we just.

[Jad Abumrad]

Described, that ended very badly.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah, but this Time you do it. How shall I put this? You do it differently.

[Bill Fields]

Test, test, test.

[Jad Abumrad]

There's a place in Iowa where this is kinda happening. Kinda. We sent our producer, Soren Wheeler, to check it out.

[Soren Wheeler]

Getting ready to go visit Sue Savage. Rumba.

[Jad Abumrad]

So to set things up, what was the name of this place?

[Soren Wheeler]

The Great Ape Trust. Although I think the name is kind of in flux. But anyway, the Great Ape Trust, which is this place in Des Moines, Iowa, where it's kind of like a compound where they keep very special group of bonobos.

[Jad Abumrad]

Is it bonobos or bonobos? How do they say it?

[Soren Wheeler]

I think they say bonobos.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay.

[Bill Fields]

His microphone started working again.

[Soren Wheeler]

So when I got there, Bill Fields.

[Bill Fields]

Who'S the director of the place, director of scientific research.

[Soren Wheeler]

That's him right there.

[Bill Fields]

I am Bonobos studies.

[Soren Wheeler]

Bill took me inside. And then there's this place where they keep the bonobo. But Bill had to kind of go in there ahead of me without his authority. Ask Kanzi if they are ready to see me.

[Bill Fields]

Do you want the visitor to come see you? That's Kanzi. Okay.

[Soren Wheeler]

All right.

[Bill Fields]

We're gonna bring the visitor to see you.

[Soren Wheeler]

And I walk into this room, which is this kind of big concrete room.

[Bill Fields]

Here comes Kanji. He'll be coming right through here.

[Soren Wheeler]

The rules are, when there are visitors, that the bonobos are kind of kept behind this fence.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, there's a fence in the room? Yeah.

[Soren Wheeler]

And just on the other side of the fence is Kanzi.

[Robert Krulwich]

Whoa.

[Jad Abumrad]

What does he look like? Is he big?

[Soren Wheeler]

He's pretty big. Maybe if he stood completely upright, he'd be a little bit shorter than I am. But he's built. And more than that, he's. He's just got this kind of presence. I mean, he looks at you, like, directly in the eye. He was standing there with his arms just kind of swinging. His fingers are amazing.

[Bill Fields]

Oh, they're so soft and sweet.

[Soren Wheeler]

It's not like going to a zoo. It's a little bit more like there's another person on the other side of that wire.

[Bill Fields]

Kanzi.

[Robert Krulwich]

I have a music.

[Soren Wheeler]

So here's one of the first things that Kanzi does when I come in. Like, there's these two, you know, like a big plastic salad bowl. He would take these two big plastic salad bowls face down on the concrete and put his hands on them and run them. Around the room, round and around, circle. And then he just slams himself up against the wire. Wow.

[Jad Abumrad]

Why? What do you think he was doing?

[Soren Wheeler]

I didn't know what to think.

[Robert Krulwich]

Do you like him?

[Charles Siebert]

You Do I like him too?

[Bill Fields]

I like him.

[Soren Wheeler]

He likes you.

[Bill Fields]

Okay, what's Liz gonna.

[Soren Wheeler]

You see the microphone? So here's. Here's Kanzi's story. Sue, you remember sue from the last story.

[Sue Savage-Rumbaugh]

Sue, savvy drum bop?

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, yeah.

[Soren Wheeler]

After she worked with Lucy, this is about 30 years ago, she got Kanzi and she raised him.

[Jad Abumrad]

I mean, she from a little bitty.

[Soren Wheeler]

Bonobo, she would, you know, carry Kanzi around with her all the time, loving him.

[Sue Savage-Rumbaugh]

And as much as I love my.

[Soren Wheeler]

Son, she becomes like watch movies when.

[Sue Savage-Rumbaugh]

We went to bed at night and.

[Soren Wheeler]

They had a mother to Kanzi. This sounds a little bit like the Lucy thing. But the difference here is that with.

[Sue Savage-Rumbaugh]

Kanzi, we never wanted to take him away from his mother, Matata.

[Soren Wheeler]

Kanzi also has a bonobo mother.

[Sue Savage-Rumbaugh]

Matata was born in the Congo, so she carried the knowledge of the bonobos culture as best she could across the country. I was a member of a different species. I had a different kind of language, a human kind of language.

[Soren Wheeler]

Sue says that the whole idea of the experiment was to create kind of an emotional bond between her and Kanzi that would fill Kanzi with an innate.

[Sue Savage-Rumbaugh]

Desire to understand what I was going to say, to understand how I felt, to want to communicate with me.

[Soren Wheeler]

And so pretty soon Kanzi is using this. They have a kind of a special keyboard with these symbols. And you can touch the symbol and it makes a computer voice. Says a word.

[Roger Fouts]

Egg. Good.

[Janice Carter]

Can you find Milk?

[Jad Abumrad]

Milk, Good.

[Soren Wheeler]

He's using this cymbal keyboard to communicate with Sue.

[Jad Abumrad]

How about Sue? Sue?

[Janice Carter]

Very good.

[Soren Wheeler]

This is the two of them sitting in front of the keyboard practicing.

[Jad Abumrad]

And how many words can he do?

[Janice Carter]

How about Chow?

[Soren Wheeler]

Over 600.

[Jad Abumrad]

Really?

[David Garland]

Yeah.

[Soren Wheeler]

Wow. And then this is where to me, it just gets Kanzi, as he got older, started being able to communicate without the keyboard. She would talk to him and he would talk back. I'll give you an example. When I was there, there was one point where we were outside.

[Bill Fields]

We're here. Kanzi, where are you?

[Soren Wheeler]

Like, Kanzi has this outside space and we're outside too, but he's still fenced in like before. And Bill and Kanz, Kanzi are having this kind of back and forth.

[Bill Fields]

What's out there? Do you see something?

[Soren Wheeler]

Kanzi seems to be saying, there's something I want to show you, or there's something you need to see. It's not quite clear what's going on.

[Bill Fields]

I don't see it yet.

[Soren Wheeler]

And Bill can't quite figure it out either. So Kanzi takes us Then from the tool site over this other place where there's. Out in the yard, there's this big pit that we can't see into because we're behind the fence. But Kanzi is basically pointing down in the pit.

[Sue Savage-Rumbaugh]

There's something down in the hole.

[Janice Carter]

You have to go in to look at that, Bill.

[Soren Wheeler]

And according to Bill and Sue saying there's something there.

[Jad Abumrad]

How is Kanzi saying this? I mean.

[Soren Wheeler]

Well, I mean, to you and me, it would sound like. I mean, like I could tell that Kanzi was gesturing at something.

[Sue Savage-Rumbaugh]

You got it in here. Come in here. But is it dangerous?

[Soren Wheeler]

What is it Bill and Sue are hearing?

[Sue Savage-Rumbaugh]

Does it live under the mud?

[Soren Wheeler]

Words.

[Jad Abumrad]

So has it got teeth?

[Sue Savage-Rumbaugh]

It's got teeth. It's got big teeth.

[Bill Fields]

And you want us to get rid of it? Are you scared of it? Not too much. You can handle it. Well, I can't come in there right now, but I can in a little bit and we'll check it out.

[Jad Abumrad]

We were so interested in this situation. You're hearing right here.

[Bill Fields]

It's too cold out here. I'll come and look.

[Janice Carter]

I'll come and look.

[Jad Abumrad]

Like what it like, Are they really talking? So we decided to call up Bill Fields. Hello?

[Robert Krulwich]

Hello?

[Jad Abumrad]

Hello.

[Bill Fields]

Hello, this is Bill.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hey, Bill. So we heard a bit of tape that Soren recorded where you guys were outside, and Kanzi was pointing in a hole or something. And it just sounded like you guys are having some kind of real bilingual exchange. I mean, is that really what was happening?

[Bill Fields]

Yes, that's what was happening. We have begun to be able to decode his speech. If you say, kanzi, what do you want for breakfast? He'll point on the Lexagram keyboard. He wanted grapes, onions, tofu. Say, okay, I'm gonna go tell everybody we're gonna have grapes, onions, and tofu. And he will just respond with. Right now, like, vocally, yes.

[Jad Abumrad]

What does that sound like?

[Bill Fields]

I'm gonna see if I can do.

[Robert Krulwich]

So it's in English.

[Bill Fields]

Yes.

[Robert Krulwich]

Oh, man.

[Bill Fields]

Yes. When he speaks to me and I understand it, it's in English.

[Jad Abumrad]

The first time it happened, says Bill, he was a grad student, and he and Kanzi were outside.

[Bill Fields]

I was sitting on a stump, and.

[Jad Abumrad]

Kanzi was sort of in a field nearby. But at a certain point, he says, kanzi stopped what he was doing, turned.

[Bill Fields]

Right to Bill, and I'll do my best to reproduce it for you. He said to me, ch ace like that.

[Jad Abumrad]

He said what?

[Bill Fields]

He said Chase, but it was very hard for him to say it.

[Jad Abumrad]

Don't you just ask yourself, like, really? Am I sure? That's what I heard.

[Bill Fields]

Not anymore. I used to. It is such a common occurrence in our lab. And it's not just my experience. It's my staff's experience. It's Sue's experience.

[Jad Abumrad]

And Soren, what about you? I mean, you were there. Do you buy what he's saying?

[Bill Fields]

Kanzi speaks words.

[Soren Wheeler]

Uh, I still don't know. Yeah, I mean, the science isn't there. But what I do buy is that there's. There's real communication going on. And I think it may be like a new kind of communication, like something. This is something I don't think has happened anywhere else. Bill and sue have literally created a third culture, a culture that is neither just bonobo or just human. It's something and something in between. And I think that that culture and those relationships are real.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Soren Wheeler]

Now, the weird thing about that is that with all the. All the great things that come out of that, there are also moments of real confusion.

[Jad Abumrad]

Like what?

[Bill Fields]

Well, one time we had a principal investigator who was visiting the lab at that time, and she was having a very strong disagreement with Dr. Savage Rumbaugh about method. And this really upset Kanzi.

[Jad Abumrad]

Why was the investigator screaming at sue, or what was she doing?

[Robert Krulwich]

Why do you call him an investigator? Is that like. Is this some kind of academic visitor? Is that what we mean?

[Bill Fields]

That's how scientists are referred to. You have the principal investigator, the co investigator.

[Robert Krulwich]

It's not Columbo with a gun, packing a gun. This is like, just some guy from some college somewhere.

[Bill Fields]

It's a scientific investigator.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay, so just to fill out the scene, you've got Sue, Bill, and this investigator in one room, and Kanzi in a different room behind some glass. So Kanzi can actually see what's happening in their room. He can see that this investigator is getting angry with sue, his human mom, getting more and more animated.

[Bill Fields]

It was professionally aggressive and loud.

[Jad Abumrad]

And what was the argument about? Do you remember?

[Bill Fields]

Oh, yes. It was about the format that we were going to use for archive video.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's it.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, you know, wars have been fought over stupider things.

[Jad Abumrad]

And as sue and this lady are arguing, what was Kanzi doing?

[Bill Fields]

He was banging on the window. So I went to speak to him.

[Jad Abumrad]

He walked into Kanzi's room. Kanzi then went to the keyboard and told him, you have to punish that investigator for screaming at Zu.

[Bill Fields]

He wanted me to go in there and. And stop her from doing this. It was my responsibility to take care of things, and that if I didn't do it. He was going to bite me.

[Jad Abumrad]

Really?

[Robert Krulwich]

So were you being told, man up. This woman is being attacked, and you're supposed to pound or bite that investigator. And if you don't bite her, I will bite you? Is that what.

[Bill Fields]

Essentially, yes. And I defaulted to human culture. I said, kanzi, I really can't go argue. I can't interfere. I just default faulted to the way things would happen in the human world. And so later I told sue that Kanzi told me he was going to bite me. And sue said, kanzi's not going to bite you. And 24 hours later, after he threatened.

[Jad Abumrad]

To bite me, he says sue was putting Kanzi back in his enclosure, but Kanzi pushed past her, ran down the hall, found Bill in his office, came.

[Bill Fields]

And found me, and he bit me.

[Jad Abumrad]

He bit you?

[Robert Krulwich]

Where did he bite you?

[Bill Fields]

On the hand. It was really serious. I lost a finger. What happened was the hand was bitten and they had to reattach all of the ligaments so that the rest of my hand would work. I had three surgeries that week. The first one was 14 hours, the next one was about eight hours, and the third one was about three hours. But the problem was I apparently had sensitivities to drugs we didn't know about, and they had given me morphine, and I arrested. It stopped my breathing and my heart.

[Jad Abumrad]

You almost died?

[Bill Fields]

Yes.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow. Zer.

[Robert Krulwich]

But do you think if you'd bit her, then he wouldn't have bitten you?

[Bill Fields]

I'm certain of it, yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

So what did you do then? I mean, did you just come back to the lab and pretend nothing happened or.

[Bill Fields]

I came back to the lab about 14 days after the event. I was not ready to, but I didn't know what else to do. But for eight months, I didn't speak to Kanzi, and he kept trying to make up with me.

[Jad Abumrad]

How would he do that? Would he. Would he type in his keyboard sorry or.

[Bill Fields]

He refused to tell me he was sorry, but he would keep calling me.

[Jad Abumrad]

Bill says he'd use the keyboard to ask the other researchers to get Bill. Get Bill.

[Bill Fields]

And what he wanted me to do is just come down and renew my friendship with him and just act like nothing had happened. And I simply wouldn't go and see him. And sue came to me and tried to talk me into going to see him. And I said, when Kanzi's ready to apologize. But she'd come back and say, no, Kanzi's not going to apologize. He doesn't think he should. And I just stood on My ground, you know, Kanzi's gonna apologize to me.

[Jad Abumrad]

Finally, one afternoon, eight months later, one of his colleagues came up to him.

[Bill Fields]

And told him, kanzi wants to tell you he's sorry. And as soon as I got down there, he threw his body up against the wire pressing up against me. And he just screamed and screamed in my mouth, which was this very submissive scream. It was very clear he was sorry and he was trying to make up with me. And I asked him on the keyboard, are you sorry? And he told me, yes.

[Robert Krulwich]

When you say he threw himself against the wire, that meaning against the separating device between you and him?

[Bill Fields]

Yes, he just pressed his body up against that wire. And so I put my body up against him and we just pressed up against each other.

[Robert Krulwich]

Do you see what's happening here? You're telling us a story which reads more and more and more like a soap opera between a community of beings. The fact that one of them is a little bonobo and the other one is a guy is almost incidental to the story. It's like, I could put this on Channel 5 if I wanted.

[Bill Fields]

It's. It's just primates.

[Jad Abumrad]

We are all the same, really.

[Bill Fields]

Just primates.

[Jad Abumrad]

I am all alone now, plain old human me.

[Soren Wheeler]

Currently, the Great Ape Trust is not just Kanzi. There's about seven different bonobos there and a dozen or so kind of staff and researchers. And while they're certainly not the same, they have created at the very least, some middle ground. And for sue, that's not about a solution to any conservation problem or some scientific breakthrough. It's something deeper and more personal.

[Sue Savage-Rumbaugh]

When I am with bonobos, I feel like I have something that I shared with them long ago, but I forgot. As we've clothed ourselves and separated ourselves, we've gained a wonderful society, but we've lost a kind of soul to soul connection that they maintain. And it sometimes seems to me as though we're both a kind of a disadvantaged species. They have things that I've lost, I have things that they don't have. I feel like if I could have their abilities and keep mine, I would be whole.

[Jad Abumrad]

You can find more information about anything that you heard in this hour at our website, Radiolab.org We've also got Lucy pictures and Janice and Kanzi pictures there. And you can subscribe to our podcast that'[e-mail] I'm Jan Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

Thanks for listening Radio the Video Lab is produced by Jad Abumarad Abum Abumorad Jad Abumarad.

[Janice Carter]

Our staff includes Michael Raphael, Shoren Wheeler.

[Jad Abumrad]

Ellen Horn and Lulu Miller, with help.

[Charles Siebert]

From Adi Narayan and Tim Howard.

[Roger Fouts]

Special thanks to David Garland.

[Janice Carter]

This is Billfield signing off.

[Soren Wheeler]

Bye.

[Janice Carter]

Bye.