The chimp who thought he was a boy.

[silverweb]

Biography of a chimp taken from his mother as an infant and raised as a human child -- until the funding ran out.

How else to account for a man who approaches a female chimp nursing its wide-eyed newborn, takes aim amid howling protests from nearby apes and blasts the mother with a tranquilizer dart -- then snatches the sobbing infant and delivers it to an otherwise thoughtful, loving woman, who whisks the creature off to her New York brownstone?

It was science, this was the '70s, and the gauntlet had been thrown down by none other than Noam Chomsky. While nonhumans may communicate with one another, the MIT linguist said, they are fundamentally incapable of language. Columbia University professor Herbert Terrace set out to disprove the assertion with an ambitious and groundbreaking study. The experiment that followed involved a cleverly named chimpanzee and some less-than-clever human choices. The fascinating, ultimately heartbreaking account has finally been told in journalist Elizabeth Hess' primate biography, "Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human."

Fancy Upper West Side address, nice clothes, summer in the Hamptons, fawning media attention, parents mellow enough to pass him their joint now and then -- for a year and a half, Nim had a life many humans would envy. But that was the problem: He himself wasn't human, merely raised to think he was. He bonded intensely with his adoptive family, and indeed learned around 125 words in American Sign Language, but in the end his fate wasn't that of a true son. Funding for the project ran out, Nim proved more difficult to handle as he got older, and eventually he was unceremoniously sent away.

Complete article: http://www.salon.com/books/int/2008/03/31/Nim_Chimpsky/index.html
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[blondie58]

1. I thought that this was about Bush at first

[silverweb]

2. LOL

It would be odd putting it in the Animal Rights forum in that case! :D