For example, with curious delight, he could hold my dog by one leg and and spin him around into a happy landing less happy for my dog than for Nim. Nim was taken by everyone and knew we were enthralled by his charm and intelligence.
Nim was fun. Nim and I had another thing in common: loss. He had lost his mother—he was taken from her when he was two weeks old—and my mother was very ill at that time, having nearly died shortly before I met Nim.
My interactions with this young chimpanzee were magical, full with the hope and solace that humans can be better and evolve to treat each other and our nonhuman friends with respect, because without them we are entirely lost.
Winter came and I did not see Nim for a long time. I tried to visit him on my own with my larger dog Harvey in tow by sneaking through the grand gates at the Delafield Estate after a snowfall. It was a foolish move. Harvey nearly drowned in an icy pond as he desperately tried to hold on to the sides with his paws. Someone from inside the house came and helped us and sent me and my nearly freezing dog home.
But I was not deterred from wondering what had happened to Nim. As time went on, I was told Nim was too old to play with me safely. Terrace was writing up his findings for the journal Science when one day, as he watched a well-worn tape of Nim signing with his teacher, he began to notice that something was off.
But Nim was. It had to do with our understanding of ourselves as individuals. While his message was clear, Petitto said, Nim could never take himself out of the picture. It was physical. And the ability to take ourselves out of the situations we describe through language is one of the things that make humans unique as communicators. Terrace eventually concluded that chimpanzees lacked the "social intelligence" that made humans able to talk to each other, and Project Nim was closed.
Nim, now a full-grown hulk of a chimp, was shipped off to a center in Norman, Okla. His Oklahoma caretakers covertly sold him to a cancer research facility, but the sale was exposed by the media.
A legal challenge resulted in Nim's return to the sanctuary in Norman, an adventure that "Project Nim" describes in detail. Though scientists concluded that Nim did not use language to communicate independently, they also saw that this was no dumb animal.
Communication studies on chimp behavior now look at the many and varied ways in which chimps and other primates interact naturally. The Nim project was pivotal in giving scientists an early glimpse of those rich possibilities. De Waal is particularly interested in chimp communication through body language and gestures.
In the end, he was abandoned at a sanctuary among chimpanzee brethren he had never known. Based on the book "Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human" by Elizabeth Hess, the film paints a poignant picture of an animal capable of human emotion: love, jealousy and even the capacity for forgiveness. The film, directed by James Marsh ["Man on a Wire"], won a top prize at the Sundance Film festival in , and was the darling of animal rights activists in limited theatrical release last year.
But Marsh said he was less interested in advocacy than telling a unique story about an animal and how the treatment by his human caretakers reflects man's potential for good and evil. Chimps play a large role in human research. Support for chimp research has been on the decline since Nim's death in , and the National Institutes of Health has now found most invasive experimentation to be unnecessary, according to a recent report in Scientific American.
NIH stopped funding at several research centers in September and has relocated only a small number of them to sanctuaries, according to the Washington Post.
Nearly 1, other research chimps are still languishing in government custody, according to advocacy groups such as the Great Ape Protection Project. The chimp bonds with his human mother, but is jealous of her husband and ransacks his library, becoming increasingly unmanageable. Along the way, viewers watch Nim learn to dress himself, do household chores such as wash the dishes and endear himself to all the humans who work with him.
Because Nim's life was one big science project, Marsh was able to obtain vintage footage from the s, which he uses with present-day interviews. The breast-feeding was kind of weird, but her whole mission was to treat him just as a child.
The bell bottoms, VW buses and pot-smoking caretakers of Nim paint a colorful picture of that flower-power era. Nim himself partakes in the occasional cigarette, beer and even a puff of weed. The media took an interest in Nim. In , an infant chimpanzee was taken from his mother's arms and sent to live with a human family as part of a Columbia University psychology experiment.
The goal of the project was to see if the animal, named Nim Chimpsky, could be conditioned to communicate with humans if he was raised like a human child in a human household. He learned some very basic words in American Sign Language, but Nim continued to act like a chimp — he bit the children in the house and didn't understand how to behave like a human child.
It was decided that the family could no longer care for Nim, and he was shuffled from caretaker to caretaker for several years.
In , Nim attacked one of the people taking care of him, and the experiment ended. At that point, researchers said he knew more than ASL signs — but no one knew quite what to do with Nim.
He was sent to a medical research facility, where he lived in a cage with other chimps for the first time in his life, before being rescued and sent to an animal sanctuary. He died in Nim and the many people who raised him over the years are the subjects of James Marsh's new documentary Project Nim.
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