there’s been some bad p.r. for the non-homosapien primates among us of late. the tawdry tales and resulting litigation surrounding koko the gorilla and her nipple fetish as well as allegations printed in the daily news a few days ago concerning a certain mr. jackson and his pet chimp bubbles; quote: “He was changing Bubbles’ diapers and just got carried away.” well, lest people’s vision get clouded by this negative press, i thought i’d offer a few profiles of some noteworthy primates. think of it as some emergency image control. if you can see through this farcical excuse to post on primates then i’ll just admit here and now, i love me some great apes! (not in any diaper changing sense i assure you) and need very little reason to fill this space with their fascinating and heartbreaking mugs.
since i used koko’s recent tabloidization as excuse we may as well start with her. yes she likes nipples, she uses the hand sign “nipples” as a phonetic substitute for “people” in conversation evidently, and if she watches any amount of t.v. that’s no surprise really, but she’s not just a cross-species sexual deviant. she’s a smart cookie. koko has learned more than 1,000 words in american sign language. with the death of her friend michael (more on him later) she is now the only gorilla in the world capable of communicating with us via sign language.
her story received a lot of attention and is well known. as one writer put it: “koko was more than a media curiosity. she was a living challenge to the conventional stereotype that gorillas were slow, stupid apes ambling through the forests. In her kind, soulful eyes, millions of people saw wisdom and intelligence. for the first time, they considered just how similar they were to this surprisingly charismatic creature, one of humankind’s closest relatives on earth.” some people are skeptical about koko’s abilities but as with aliens all i can say is “i want to believe.”
don’t miss koko’s scrapbook or her making mr. rogers her bitch.
this is michael, koko’s friend, who died in november of 2000 of heart disease. though michael seemed to get less attention for his signing than koko he had talents of his own. evidently michael was quite a prolific artist in his time. both koko and michael painted often but michael is described as being much more passionate about his paintings. i am particularly fond of the portrait of his dog apple, titled apple chase.
some stats about mike- vocabulary: used over 600 signs. favorite color: yellow. favorite foods: nuts, apples, peanut butter sandwiches. favorite t.v. shows: sesame street and mister rogers. favorite music: opera by luciano pavarotti. though michael was brought to the gorilla foundation as a potential mate for koko that relationship never materialized. be that as it may koko and their other pal Ndume are still mourning his loss.
next up is chantek. truth be told i came upon an article about chantek this morning which launched me into hours of googling and ultimately lead to this post. chantek is an orangutan who for all intents and purposes was brought up as a human child. quote: “Lyn raised him as a signing infant from the age of nine months, rearing him as much as possible as a human child. Lyn toilet-trained Chantek and gave him chores, like cleaning his room, and an allowance. his favorite thing to spend it on is fast food from McDonald’s, and his weight threatens to be a lifelong problem. He has ballooned to twice the weight of a normal male orangutan. If he’s granted legal rights, as Lyn would like him to be, he could join a fast-food class-action lawsuit and become not just the most verbal but the richest orang in the world.”
the article by susan antonetta in orion titled language garden (though abridged) was interesting. it poses the question does language bring us, or an orangutan, freedom? one of the most interesting tidbits of chantek’s story, to me, is the way he views himself as opposed to the non-signing orangs he lives with. quote: “chantek calls himself an orangutan person. presumably this term would refer to any orang who’d been enculturated and given language. untaught orangutans, like his cagemate sibu, he’s given the rather snide name of orange dog. He sees himself somehow as the ape in the web photo, stiff, solemn, buttoned-up as a character in planet of the apes. His title sounds exalted as well as lonely: the only one of his kind in the universe, as far as he knows.”
for a little more on chantek try science news, and the chantek foundation.
this is kusasi. his story is something right out of shakespeare or at very least dickens. i saw a documentary on this fella a few weeks back on pbs called from orphan to king a title which drives home my comparison nicely. it was a pretty great tale. a baby orangutan named kusasi was stolen by hunters who shot his mother. he was rescued by police, and brought to camp leaky an orangutan sanctuary. the head doctor noted: “usually traumatized infants are squealing, trying to cling to the… person who most resembles mother. ... kusasi didn’t behave in this way. ... what he did was, he escaped.” he was presumed dead but to everyone’s astonishment he returned 18 months later in good health and now 5 years old…
essentially kusasi the orphan goes on the become the dominant male, or “king” in shakespearean terms, of the whole area. at the time of filming kusasi was holding a tenuous grasp of his domain and had for the first time been seriously injured by a young challenger. drama! but there’s also comic relief, like when julia roberts decided she wanted to meet kusasi. only problem was kusasi is huge and ambivalent toward humans at best. “she is a celebrity though…” well as you might expect he proceeded to paw her like piece of orangutan jerky. haha! wonderful.
for more images of kusasi and his whole kingdom you can check out this camp leaky related site.
here we have a pretty lady by the name of washoe. she’s one of the most famous chimpanzees in the world. she was captured in africa as part of an air force initiative. in fact she came from the same colony that yielded ham, the first primate in space. famously washoe was the first chimpanzee to announce to the world that chimpanzees have a sense of self. While looking at her reflection in a mirror she was asked by her human companion, “Who’s that?” Without hesitation she replied, “Me, Washoe.” much like some of our other friends above washoe was taught sign language but washoe has the distinction of being the very first.
what’s most fascinating about this particular program is that since washoe chimpanzee mothers in captivity have begun to teach their own children sign language without any prompting, creating chimpanzee family groups that can speak to one another in american sign language… so crazy.
washoe’s story is recounted in the book next of kin by her teacher robert fouts. some of which is adapted at friends of washoe.
this is kanzi. he’s a bonobo and might well be called the bonobo ambassador to humanity. kanzi was essentially kidnapped from his birth mother by a dominant female. this dominant female, named matata, was brought to the language research center at georgia state to be studied. kanzi came with her. matata was put through lexigram training tasks. quote: ‘kanzi, who was always with his mother during these training sessions, either ignored them completely or interfered with them in any manner that he could invent on the spur of the moment. he did not appear interested in learning lexigrams, though he liked the lights on the keyboard and often tried to chase the symbols as they appeared on the projectors above the keyboard. the experimenters found matata’s nearly imperceptible progress as well as Kanzi’s clear disinterest quite discouraging. at this time, it appeared that bonobos were far less linguistically competent than their common chimpanzee relatives.” and this is where it gets interesting.
kanzi was intentionally weaned off of matatas milk so they could be separated at which point- quote: kanzi much to the experimenters’ surprise, began to correctly employ nearly all of the 10 lexigrams that were on his mother’s keyboard at that time. He didn’t need to be taught these lexigrams, as he already knew them. prior to the separation, however, kanzi had given no evidence that he had even been attending to them, much less that he understood any sort of semantic connection between lexigrams and objects in his world. even more striking than the fact that kanzi knew the lexigrams was the fact that he also knew the spoken english words which the lexigrams represented. he could not speak the words, but when he heard them he could locate the lexigram, or printed symbol, that corresponded with the word.” so essentially kanzi was the first nonhuman primate to learn language the way children do - by being immersed in a language-rich environment.
as recently as 2003 kanzi was still making headlines by being the first great ape to create his own words.
many of you may recognize this guy from one of the nonist header images. his name is enos and what you might not know is that on november 29, 1961, he was launched in a nasa mercury capsule, atop an Atlas 5 rocket, to become the first primate to orbit our very own planet earth. a little factoid about this endeavor via stopsmiling magazine: the psychomotor device that powered the equipment malfunctioned in such a way that every time enos performed per the correct protocol, he was instead rewarded with the electric shocks. The ground crew resigned itself to the fact that enos wouldn’t put up with the torture he was undergoing for long and would soon re-calibrate his actions to receive the banana pellets, thus dooming the mission. However, they didn’t reckon with the bravery and the fortitude of their little guy. enos continued to pull the correct levers, even though doing so meant receiving shock after painful shock. champion!
lastly, i think this guy is worth a mention, though he wasn’t an ape-o-naut or a primate linguist. “In 1967, local villagers in Africa’s Equatorial Guinea captured a remarkable baby gorilla. This young male was unlike any gorilla the villagers had seen before; instead of the thick brown fur of most gorillas, this baby had a coat of pure white. Through a series of fortunate circumstances, the rare white gorilla ended up at the Barcelona Zoo, where he became an international star. He was given the Spanish name Copito de Nieve and the English name Snowflake.” in the fall of 2003, at over 40 years of age, snowflake passed away.
pbs has a nice little feature on him. he was often described as “grouchy” with i think is hilarious, but from everything i’ve seen he was quite a character. until i saw a blurb about him on television last week i didn’t even realize who my comments avatar was! haha.
anyhow, hope you enjoyed these fine, by and large non-sex-scandal embroiled, folk. for more scholarly information on related subjects see the links below:
machiavellian monkeys & shakespearean apes: the question of primate language.
language and the orang-utan: the old ‘person’ of the forest.
linguistic superabundance via onemonkey.org
primate language ability, a nice overview featuring many of the folks mentioned above and this specific tidbit-
Vervet Monkey DNA 92% identical DNA to humans
Gorilla DNA 96% identical DNA to humans
Chimpanzee DNA 98.5% identical to Humans
Bonobo DNA 98.7% identical to humans
the case for the personhood of gorillas.
talking with chimps featuring washoe and nim chimpsky.
apenet. a consortium dedicated to providing new living and communication solutions for enculturated great apes. i.e. letting koko and chantek have video chats.
humans, nonhumans, and personhood.
the great ape trust.
and famous monkeys through history, linked here previously but what the hell.
oh, and if you are wondering who that grizzled and wizened looking old coot in the first thumbnail is his name is marty.