It was the early 1970s, an era of experimentation. Minds were open and grants were plentiful at the moment that scientists latched onto the idea of raising baby chimpanzees as humans and teaching them sign language.
After all, if they succeeded, they might penetrate the mysteries of the animal mind. And if not, what was the harm?
Plenty, as journalist Elizabeth Hess demonstrates in Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human, her non-fiction account of the most famous of several monkeys raised by human families for scientific purposes.
Nim did learn to use 150 characters of American Sign Language (ASL), but if scientists hoped to deepen interspecies understanding, then most of what they learnt from Nim was how much they didn’t know.
As a result, they grossly underestimated the difficulties of working with a chimp and, tragically, entirely failed to grasp the depth of his emotional needs.
Nim Chimpsky is about as poignant an animal story as you can get. The neglect Nim suffered (most of which was inadvertent) is heartbreaking. And yet, in many ways, reading about him remains a joyous experience. People who knew Nim could never stop loving him.
His “mother”, Stephanie, recalled years later that if she cried in his presence he would bring her a tissue.
But Nim had work to do. His sponsor was a Columbia University professor to whose laboratory he commuted daily. There, he was expected to sit at a desk and memorise ASL signs.
But Nim was not always successful or cooperative. Unfortunately, while busy bonding Nim to humans, no one had stopped to think of how hard it might be to someday undo those attachments.
Nim was not the only chimp to experience such loss. Hess tells the stories of other chimps placed with human families at the same time Nim was. Many sickened, and one even died, when separated from their human “parents”.
In Nim Chimpsky, Hess does a good job of rolling a number of stories into one. She vividly recreates the key animals and people in Nim’s life. While readers interested only in Nim may occasionally get impatient, these narrative detours, for the most part, are fascinating and together bring to life a world that kept shifting around Nim.
Divorce, academic disgrace, and infighting had nothing to do with him, yet all these contributed to the erosion of his quality of life.
Hess has written about animals and their advocates even before. Yet she resists the temptation to demonise the humans in Nim’s life.
It is only too easy to imagine how deeply all the humans touched by him must have missed him.
And readers, too, will find that Nim haunts them long after they close the pages of this book.
