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Next
of Kin Reviewed by Audrey E. Nickel In 1967, psychology graduate student Roger Fouts went to the University of Nevada Reno with high hopes of becoming a child psychologist. He ended up working with a child of a very different sort than he had envisioned...a two-year-old chimapanzee named Washoe, who lived with a human family and spoke American Sign Language. The day that Washoe jumped into his arms and claimed him as a member of her family changed Fouts’ life...and his understanding of animals, both human and otherwise, forever. This book tells the moving, and often heartbreaking, story of Fouts’ 30-year relationship with Washoe and with other captive chimps who became a part of the Ape Language Study of the early ‘70s. We follow Fouts and Washoe from a comfortable backyard in Reno to a brutal research lab run by a sadistic megalomaniac in Oklahoma and, finally, to a modern and comfortable chimp habitat in Ellensburg, Washington. Along the way, we meet several fascinating characters: Ally, the gentle young chimp who didn’t know he was a chimp, who was baptized by a Catholic priest and made the sign of the cross, who disappeared forever into the murky hell of an animal research lab; Lucy, the chimp who brewed tea for herself and Fouts before her ASL lessons and loved "Playgirl" magazine, who died at the hands of poachers in Africa; Booie, who descended into the hell of one of the nation’s most notorious biomedical labs and emerged triumphant. All had two things in common: Because they were "animals," they were considered exploitable and expendable. Because of Fouts, they could "talk" about their experiences. This is an excellent resource, both for animal activists and for linguists (especially those who work with children). The book itself is well-written and often entertaining, but it manages to impart a lot of information about chimpanzees, humans and the development of language. We learn that chimps in the wild have a culture and a gestural language that for many years has been trivialized by both "hard" scientists and linguists because it isn’t vocal in nature. We learn that humans and chimps share 98% of their DNA...which makes the chimp more closely related to us than African elephants are related to Asian elephants. We learn a lot (perhaps more than makes us comfortable) about how science abuses these wild cousins of ours, purportedly in the interests of human welfare. Most important, we learn that when we look into the eyes of a chimpanzee we see ourselves...a fact that gradually changed Fouts from a typical psychology student to an ardent animal rights activist. "Next of Kin" is highly recommended reading. I guarantee, you will never look at a chimpanzee, or any other ape, in the same way...even if you are already an animal rights activist. |