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Mar
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Posted by Christopher Waldrop
March 13, 2008 |
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Reading a review in the Christian Science Monitor of Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human, I was tempted to do what author Elizabeth Hess apparently avoided doing: demonize the humans in his life and criticize them for their behavior, for coddling Nim when he was young, teaching him sign language and treating him as though he were special then abandoning him. Nim, who had been taken from his mother when he was only ten days old and raised with a family that fed him ice cream and pizza, suffered a series of abandonments, and at one point ended up in a medical lab as a test subject for vaccines. In fact it’s still hard for me to imagine people behaving so callously. I understand it wasn’t malicious. As reviewer Marjorie Kehe says, scientists “grossly underestimated the difficulties of working with a chimp and, tragically, entirely failed to grasp the depth of his emotional needs.”
Many of us live with animals but many, unfortunately, ignore or are oblivious to the fact that, 
even though they aren’t human, many animals do have emotions. They have emotional needs just as we do. Chimps, like dogs, and like humans, are social animals. All can suffer from neglect. Hess’s previous book is Lost and Found: Dogs, Cats, and Everyday Hereos at a Country Animal Shelter. She’s more than an animal lover; she understands that, when we choose to make animals a part of our lives we make a committment to treat them fairly and decently; we give them no choice but to put their trust in us. What does it say about us when we abandon them, when we neglect them, when we abuse them? What does it say about us when we mistreat an animal because it’s “just an animal”? It’s been said that the way a person treats animals is also an indication of how they treat other human beings. It’s hard to be sympathetic toward the people who cared for then abandoned Nim. While they claim to have loved him, they cut him off when it was convenient. He was, for the researchers, just a subject in an experiment. Would they treat a person the same way?
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