Project Nim (2011) Movie Script
A chimpanzee infant
left with his mother is a thing, a lump.
Taken away, he acquires
human psychological test performances
which are well-nigh unbelievable.
Nim was born
at the primate centre in Oklahoma
and I went out there to get him.
I had never been near
that many chimpanzees.
It was frightening, intimidating,
and I knew Dr Lemmon and his wife
were watching me
to see what kind of a mother would I be.
Carolyn, Nim's mother,
was sitting right there holding Nim,
and she knew what was going
to happen better than I did.
She had had six of her previous babies
removed, apparently, in the same way.
When the time came
to take Nim from his mother,
she instantly took on this drama,
this feeling of
something about to happen.
And Dr Lemmon shot her
with a tranquilising gun
And then said,
"Quick, we have to get him
before she falls over and falls on him. "
She was trying to protect him
and cradle him.
So, he raced in and got Nim
and handed Nim to me
and said, "Go back. "
You know, go back in the other space.
He was very dense.
Unlike a human baby that has fat,
he was dense and hard.
He didn't struggle.
He didn't try to get away.
He just screamed.
As much as he may be screaming
and protesting, he's also clinging.
He was attaching for dear life.
Wouldn't it be exciting
to communicate with a chimp
and find out what it was thinking?
If they could be taught to articulate
what they were thinking about,
this would be an incredible expansion
of human communication,
and possibly give us some insight
into how language, in fact, did evolve.
And that's essentially
why I started Project Nim.
I don't know what
was in his mind, but he just called.
He was asking me to bring
an infant chimpanzee into my home,
raise this infant as if he were a child,
and see if he acquired language
as a function of being part of a family.
Stephanie was
a former student of mine.
She had a large family of her own
children and her husband's children,
was exceedingly empathic and warm.
A chimp could not have a better mother.
I know nothing
about chimpanzees,
and I never actually
sat down to study them
as one could have.
As I should have, perhaps.
But my appetite and my drive
to have that intimate a relationship
with an animal was...
Nothing would have stopped that.
The fact that we could share language
with an animal
seemed like a very radical possibility
at that time.
It had been known for some time
that chimps aren't able to make
the sounds of human language.
Do this, Viki.
So why not teach them sign language?
The real breakthrough would be
if, like human children, a chimpanzee
could create grammatical sentences.
So, without much preparation
and without really asking permission
of my children, my husband,
I said, "Fine, I can do it.
"I even have the funds to do it with.
We don't need to worry about money. "
And so it was launched.
The experiment was launched.
When Nim came to New York,
he was barely two weeks old.
The idea was that he would be treated,
in every way, like a human infant.
I had recently moved to
a brownstone on the Upper West Side
with my three children
and with my husband,
who had four children, Wer Lafarge.
Wer was a poet and a writer.
He redefined himself, became what,
at that time, was called a rich hippie.
A new husband, new family, new house,
and I brought Nim into
that rather turbulent situation.
It just happened.
There was no family discussion about,
"Should we? Shouldn't we?"
It was just, "Oh, we're having a chimp. "
We're going to teach it sign language.
And then the reality of it is sort of
hitting you that it's really...
You know, it's alive,
it's not a doll, it's not a toy,
it's not a human, it's a chimp
and it's an amazing, sweet little
newborn baby, needy creature, so...
I think I fell in love instantly.
Nim didn't like Wer.
And Wer didn't like him.
Almost instantly I saw how complicated
this was going to be.
I think Wer went along with it.
It was clearly Stephanie sort of saying,
"Let's have a chimp. "
It was the '70s!
I breast-fed him
for a couple of months.
It seemed completely natural.
Everything was about treating him
like a human being.
By the time I had Nim, of course,
I felt very comfortable with babies.
I wasn't prepared at all
for the wild animal in him
and the drive.
By the time he was
three months old, I think,
and starting to be ambulatory,
he was just right there,
nothing passive, nothing passive, ever.
I think he figured that he could just
get in between Wer and Stephanie
on some level.
And Wer put his arm around her,
and Nim just, you know,
half asleep, having a bottle,
turned and bit Wer on the arm
quite hard.
He didn't want Wer in the picture.
He wanted Stephanie all for himself.
Wer definitely
felt excluded.
Nim had just become part of my being.
That was incompatible
with the role that I played as wife.
"Herb's coming,
Herb's coming, Herb's coming. "
"Herb's coming" was a big deal.
I would just go over and visit,
just to see what his state was
and how he was getting along.
Herb was
infinitely exciting.
I admired his intellect and his goals
and his arrogance, all those things.
There was something that didn't
sit right with me about him.
The people that I am
the closest to, throughout my life,
are people that I have had
some period of sexual contact with.
I don't think
that the previous sexual relationship
between Herb and myself
made a difference to the project at all,
other than it was part of the glue
that allowed it to happen.
Herb didn't come very much.
He wasn't part of
the caretaking package at all.
Young newborn chimps
are always raised by their mothers,
not by their fathers.
And I didn't see any way
of trying to change...
Or any point in trying to change that.
For better or worse,
I never regarded him as a child.
I regarded him
as an intelligent, personable centre
of a scientific project.
I had an implicit faith
that Nim would learn signs.
We had to wait and see.
How do they start
teaching the child to sign?
Does the child just watch and...
Whatever. I don't know.
It was a problem. We were trying
to teach this chimp sign language
and nobody in the house
really was fluent in sign language.
We would mould his hand into
the sign for "drink", which is this,
and then give him the bottle to drink.
It just happened.
It was just amazing.
And I thought, "Piece of cake. "
I was absolutely delighted.
He picked up quite a few signs
after that rather quickly.
"Eat", "me", "Nim"
were part of his first signs.
"Hug" was another one.
And it was as if, then,
"Okay, we're off.
"Now we just got to
build up the vocabulary. "
As much as we were moulding him,
we were moulding these damn hands
and all this stuff,
he was starting to mould us.
He knew every dynamic
that was in the room, instantly.
He knew when you were upset.
Whatever had happened in,
you know, a 13-, 14-year-old's life.
And he would come over and he would
just come and sit with you and hug you,
and then just kiss the tears away.
You know, it was amazing.
Just unconditional.
He was my life line,
he was my buddy,
and he was bringing something out in me,
a freedom to defy expectation
and authority.
His greatest focus
of defiance was against Wer.
He would kind of
pull books off the shelves,
and Wer liked his books a certain way.
When he saw Wer coming,
he would really do it.
It was very focused. It was intentional.
"Fuck you, I'm touching these. "
It was a problem.
Wer was so impotent.
I mean, what could he do? He'd chase
him around. "Drop that! Blah, blah. "
I mean, he won every time.
Nim saw Herb
as his next adult male challenge.
I mean, that is the life
that he's hard-wired for.
To take on increasingly powerful
male figures until he's the top.
When Herb would come over,
expecting to step in
and have control of Nim,
and he couldn't and didn't,
we loved it. We loved it.
I cornered Nim
and just went to pull him out of some
hiding place, and he bit me.
Frankly, everybody in
the family got a kick out of Nim
doing just what Herb hated.
No one ever put him in his place,
and he just grew
more and more and more powerful,
and that was exciting to me.
We didn't have to try
to control him in any way. In fact,
we enjoyed just letting him
hang out and see how it went.
Stephanie being
the kind of mother she was,
was not very concerned about discipline.
It was sort of the hippie mentality,
and I think what I would tell her
would go in one ear and out the other.
Herb would have wanted
a schedule and a structure
and charted progress
and notes and all of that.
I didn't supply that,
I couldn't create that,
and I don't think Nim
would have thrived in that.
I was taking classes
at Columbia University
and there was a small sign that said,
"Research assistant needed,
course credit granted. "
A man opened the door
and he was completely breathless.
Also, he's one of those men
who was balding on the top.
So he had his hair pasted down,
but he was so upset and dishevelled
that his hair was standing
straight up on one side.
He explained it was a language project
and I immediately understood
the scientific relevance.
Nim was going to test
the nature-versus-nurture hypotheses
that were prevailing at the time.
It really was at the cusp of science.
You know, some things are just
immediately obvious about someone
from the beginning.
You know what kind of person you have.
I think she was 18, if I'm not mistaken.
At the time,
Nim was in Stephanie Lafarge's house,
and my first job
was to basically baby-sit.
To go to the house and ostensibly
teach him sign language.
She came out of nowhere as a
cute little thing from Ramapo.
When I got there,
I was actually really surprised.
There was utter chaos.
There was nothing.
This was a scientific project.
There were no journals.
There were no log books.
They didn't know who was covering Nim,
when they were going to be covering Nim,
who would be teaching Nim,
when they would be teaching Nim.
They didn't know what
they were going to teach Nim.
She quickly felt her power.
It was completely visible.
Everybody had to adapt to it.
She wanted that mother role.
This animal
climbed the walls all day.
He ripped apart Stephanie's house
all day.
The kinds of things she was
exposing Nim to were atypical.
He loved driving fast
in cars. He loved motorcycles.
He loved, you know,
virtually anything thrilling.
He liked alcohol.
You'd give him a sip and he'd want more.
We gave him puffs on a joint.
We didn't have to
treat him like a child.
We could expose him to
the sensations that we enjoyed.
I had an instinctive sense
that something was very amiss here,
that this is not the way
you teach a child language
or you interact with a child
or you teach anything language.
When Nim began to
discover my body, my nakedness,
he'd be curious.
Like a child, he was uninterested
and then one day he was interested.
I never felt sexually engaged with him.
There was a sensuality,
but Nim was, you know, a pre-teen.
Stephanie was a graduate
student in psychoanalysis.
Her questions had to do with
the oedipal complex.
And she was interested
in Nim's masturbation
and how he masturbated.
I couldn't believe it.
I realised that I could not do
what I call good science
in Stephanie's home.
It just wasn't conducive to that.
So I set up a classroom at Columbia.
He's gonna
take Nim to school
and I realise I'm starting to
lose my role
as the person who knows the best
what he needs.
We had to get him
in a context that was
neutral, calming, soothing.
I just mapped out
a teaching plan for Nim
and I did it.
She was so enthusiastic
about this
that I made her, in a sense,
the director of education,
the curriculum.
I was feeling good about myself.
Also, I was succeeding with Nim.
I could see I was succeeding with Nim.
I can see it, I can see that no one
could hold a candle to me.
The only thing that mattered to him...
It became more and more tense.
Words, words, words, words, words,
word order, word order, word order.
He couldn't see anything else.
Herb started seeing the signs
grow on that little graph.
Every day, every other day,
every three days.
Laura taught him another sign.
Laura taught him another sign.
And I just went hell for leather.
Nim's signing was just
almost exponentially increasing.
I was very happy.
Words are a fucking nightmare
when it comes to closeness, often.
And here I was, married to a poet,
working for a linguist...
You know, words became the enemy.
She started restricting the times
we can come in the house.
She started throwing us out.
She, apparently, was
encouraged to believe
that she was now the mother.
Stephanie began to threaten
to take Nim away from Herb.
And Herb started panicking.
I definitely initiated
the move out of Stephanie's house.
I think she was initially
quite resistant to it,
especially since she didn't know
exactly how Nim was going to end up.
God had spoken.
That's what had happened.
That's what was going on.
And we didn't have control.
So... my separation from him
was just as abrupt, in a way,
at that moment,
as his was from Carolyn's.
I was ostensibly conscious
but I was no less...
I was as unaware
and, you know, un-in charge
and helpless as she was.
It...
It was heart-breaking,
saying goodbye.
Part of me did not
want him to learn language.
He was less with language
than he was as his unique self.
At that time,
a very lucky thing happened.
I was aware that there was an estate
that Columbia owned in Riverdale,
a very large estate, that used to
be the home of the President.
And I went to him with a proposition
that if he allowed me to raise the chimp
there, I would pay for the heat.
And he said "Sure. "
This was amazing!
This was a fairly tale.
It was a 28-acre estate
surrounded by lovely gardens.
And that allowed me
to put up Nim's teachers
in magnificent surroundings
and not pay any rent.
Life was good.
Nim got out of the car,
ran up to the front door,
rolled down the hill, and he was gone.
He was free.
So, there was no reaction
at having taken him
out of Stephanie's house.
He was fine. And it was like
he had been there his whole life.
He certainly was a different
chimpanzee in this mansion
than he was with Stephanie.
So, I sort of got into more,
you know, interacting with him.
Herb's power as a professor,
his age,
completely impacted me.
He was my model.
We really clicked together.
I wanted so much
to be a part of his world.
I wanted to be
in that world of academia.
I had strong personal
feelings about Laura,
but I don't think that in any way
got in the way of our science.
Some of the daily bodily
requirements that Nim had
had to be addressed, and very quickly.
I eventually couldn't handle
the diapers any more.
He was getting bigger
and he was eating more of our food,
so pragmatically I had to
get him off those diapers.
I watched his facial expressions
when he needed the potty
and I began to see it and grab him
and bring him to the potty.
He did actually use
the toilet correctly,
but it was certainly not as reliable
as what you'd see in a child.
The idea was
that I would live with Nim
and I would train him for
a certain period of time in the house,
but then I would bring him in
every day to Columbia University.
This was an experiment
to teach or see
if a chimpanzee can learn sign language.
I just thought it was really
intellectually interesting.
Interesting to understand
how much chimpanzees are like us
and how much they're not.
At that time he was terribly cute
and getting little photos
in New York magazine.
There was a daily lesson plan,
if you will.
We were supposed to teach
these particular signs to Nim
and they were supposed to
also teach him everyday activities.
Dress yourself, undress yourself,
this sort of thing.
Like children
after they learn a few words,
Nim has spontaneously
put signs together.
In many instances we allow Nim
to use his own signs,
that he almost invents,
so long as they're consistent.
For example, this is the sign for "play"
that he invented.
He's learning signs rapidly.
They're going up, up, up, up, up.
The project was
literally humming.
You know, everything was
going very smoothly.
I have a chimpanzee
who was making history.
We did get a grant
somewhere in that time.
The project had
begun to enter the media,
so there was all this excitement
and hype about the project.
We were thrilled.
We've probably all seen
performing chimpanzees
on television or in circuses,
but Nim is no ordinary chimp.
Since he was a few weeks old,
Nim has lived in a close association
with a group of scientists
under the direction of
Dr Herbert Terrace
of Columbia University.
They're performing a unique experiment
to try to determine whether apes can be
taught to communicate with humans
using language.
How big will he be when he's full-grown?
Oh, he's going to be big.
He's going to be about 5 feet tall,
perhaps 150 pounds,
and supposedly five to six times
the strength of a man.
How are you going to be able
to handle him then?
He had grown.
I guess he was probably
something like that.
If you had to hold him,
you really had to hold him.
And he'd gone from being
this meek little huggable toy
to quite a robust young chimpanzee.
His eye teeth were never taken out,
which means that he's got fangs,
essentially, sitting here.
Extremely strong jaw.
If you didn't assert dominance
in some fashion,
you were going to be
in trouble eventually.
He could size somebody up
in two seconds.
Whether they were confident
or secretly unconfident.
If I stood up too quickly,
if I accidentally showed him
my back too quickly,
if I had food and I didn't think
to share it with him,
he'd cross that threshold
and go into attack.
You could tell
that he was getting an attitude.
The hair would go up on his arms
and he'd sort of get this look
in his face.
When he would bark,
I'd feel it inside,
the danger.
He had to lunge.
The contact, the rip,
the tear and the release.
And he had to draw blood.
She did not tell me that
in an alarming manner.
She was just reporting it.
Maybe I was just too
looking ahead with blinkers
and not wanting to hear that.
This is 37 stitches.
I had four here,
nine here. This one
sent me into the hospital.
This one actually was the most dangerous
one because he hit a tendon.
It's a lot of work
to take care of an animal
that's not your species
who has that kind of energy level.
I probably didn't know the difference
between chimpanzees and monkeys.
So, I was as blind and as ignorant
and as nave as probably they came.
I was on a quick learning curve.
I have high energy
and enthusiasm for a goal.
And he was my goal, apparently.
joyce was a great teacher.
She signed, she was completely
dedicated and motivated.
She wanted to do this.
This was fantastic!
He bit me really hard, and I
bit him on the ear right then and there,
and I said, "That's over. You will
never bite me again. "And he never did.
He did like a lot of human body contact.
Typically, when we would
leave the property,
he would be really attached to you.
The world would scare him,
so he would always come close.
Bill and I hung tight with Nim.
We sort of hit it off
on a lot of our different thinking.
She and I got together as a couple.
It helped
that we liked each other.
And I think that that helped Nim's life
because we enjoyed each other's company,
so we would do things together
and we would hang out as kind of a unit.
Oh, he loved the cats.
He was really, really tender
with the cat, and he'd hold it,
and he sort of liked the feel,
the touch. Something about it.
He would hold her and be like...
And you could see him, like, shaking
because he'd be so excited
that he had her.
He actually kind of
pushed her down on the ground
and then curled around her,
and just laid there, like,
"I'm in heaven. "
I would say
that it was fairly clear
that there was something more
going on than the project,
at least from his side.
And I think we all felt it
and we kind of had...
I don't want to say resentment,
but it was like,
"Oh, jeez, would he stop
this Laura thing?"
If someone showed me some attention,
I thought it meant
that they cared for me.
He had power.
I'm sure that, you know,
unconsciously I took advantage of that.
Somebody admires you,
um, why not...
So, yeah, we very briefly got involved
and he very, very briefly and abruptly
got out of it.
The entanglement completely
affected my decision to leave.
It's the humans I wanted to leave,
not the chimp.
Herb didn't want it to happen.
He went into a very enthusiastic mode
of trying to convince me not to go.
I wasn't panicked.
I wasn't panicked
that the project was just going to
grind to a halt because Laura left.
As I recall, joyce and Bill
pretty much took care of that.
So... I didn't lose any crucial aspect
of the project.
I started to go
to get the boxes to leave,
and Nim pulled loose
from the person's hand,
he climbs to the second floor
of the house.
Then he must have lunged 25 feet.
He landed on me.
He took my head and he started
pounding it into the pavement.
It took four males to get him off me.
He wasn't my child.
He wasn't my baby.
You can't give human nurturing
to an animal that could kill you.
One of the easy
parts of the project
was to advertise for teachers.
It was like, "Uh, this is nice. "
I didn't set out to have women
on the project predominantly,
but it certainly turned out that way.
And if that's the way it turned out,
that's the way it turned out.
I was a trained
interpreter for the deaf.
When I set my mind to something,
I get what I want.
I kept saying, "I want to live here. "
"When I am moving in?
When do I get to move in?"
And I would annoy Herb.
And finally he let me move in.
Probably, as time went on,
it may have become more difficult
for women to work with him.
He was going to take advantage of them
and he was big enough
and strong enough that he could.
I mean, it hurt! His bites hurt.
When he bit your hand, he got the nerve.
And you'd get a running shock
up your arm.
We had epic battles, but we made up.
He'd make that face and sign "sorry".
So, "Well, if I sign this,
she'll forgive me. "
I had a relationship with a chimpanzee,
and I had conversations
with another species.
It's not just him signing
that was important to me.
It was what he was thinking
and experiencing,
because we would talk
when we would hang out.
We would talk about
the things we would see,
the things we would hear.
As far as I'm concerned,
our classroom was the house and the yard
and the field trips that we would take.
Science is
a very objective enterprise.
You can't have personal anecdotes
of how I worked with Nim
up at Delafield
as opposed to the classroom.
That's just
of no interest to a scientist.
Joyce did not see anything
special about the classroom.
Hated it. Hated it, hated it.
He hated it. We hated it.
That's not surprising, because she
didn't get the results in the classroom
that I was hoping for.
- Do you know what time it is?
- Yeah.
Going into a dungeon
of a classroom, which it really was.
I mean, the thing was 15 feet square,
including the observation booth
and everything else.
No windows,
no place really to have any activity.
Trying to get Nim's attention
was a bit of a struggle,
and he would rather have been
been doing something else.
Pay attention to me.
Shh!
So, this is the sign for "dirty",
so we used it for "toilet" for him
because it's a contact sign.
He would jump through the signs
that I asked him to jump through
and then he would have had enough.
And he would say,
"I need to go to the bathroom. "
And that's when I knew,
you little bugger.
You used that sign
because you knew
it would make us leave there
and get us out of there.
He was growing
smarter and smarter.
And smarter in the sense
of recognising situations
that he could take advantage of,
of when he could get what he wanted.
He was starting
to discover himself.
There was a big rock in the front yard
and he used to like to hump it.
And we'd say, "You're gonna
hurt yourself. That's a rock. "
Like, look at himself and go,
"What's that?"
As this whole thing with the physicality
became an issue,
we were much more cautious, I think,
about letting the cats around him,
and letting him play with the cats.
He would even try to,
not engage directly in sexual
relationships with the animals,
but definitely to bring them to him
and to his penis area.
And I just said, "No,
that's not what they're there for. "
We realised, I think
all of us, that it was becoming
increasingly difficult
to pursue the experiment.
Nim was scratching hard,
he was biting harder,
biting more often, biting more people.
We had mentioned
the growing concern that we had
about how to deal with Nim.
Dr Terrace was pretty much
an absentee landlord.
Herb was never alone with Nim,
and Herb never had to spend
any kind of time with him.
Once in a while, you know, photo shoots.
For him to either take photos
or for him to have photos taken of him.
Yes, there were occasional bites.
I imagine they increased in frequency
just because Nim was getting older.
In that sense,
he was becoming more chimp-like.
But it didn't seem to be
a cause for alarm at that point.
It was the end of july,
it was july 28th,
and Bill had him,
and we did the body-to-body transfer.
I mean, you're holding Nim
and the other person comes up
and you just kind of hand
the chimp to the other person.
And I said, "Come on. "
And I got the tether.
You know, you've got the loop first
and I then tied it to my belt.
"Come here. " And he came over
and he put his arms around me.
He just crunched my face.
It just happened.
And I grabbed Nim
and just dragged him into the house.
And he was like,
"Sorry, sorry, sorry!"
"No, no, no. " And I passed
that armoire with that mirror
and saw all this blood.
He had bit through my cheek
almost to the inside of my mouth.
It was folded over,
so you could see inside my face.
I don't recall if she went
to the emergency room,
but I think something
like that happened.
It was just bad.
I was probably worried
that she would sue me,
or this would become public,
this would become public
knowledge about how
life-threatening the project might be.
They couldn't sew it
because of the infection
and the risk of infection,
so I had an open gaping wound
on my face for three months.
And when I got out the hospital, I said,
"You know what? I want to see Nim. "
He went...
And he went to reach for my face again.
I went, "Whoa!
"That's it. I don't need closure now.
I'm out of here. "
I was scared.
I'm tenacious
and I didn't want to let go.
Sort of like breaking up
with a bad boyfriend.
I was sorry that it came to that,
but you just don't know how
Nim is going to change
and you just can't count on
having outstanding teachers
all the time.
I felt I was spreading myself too thinly
and experiencing too much stress
and not enough, you know, good results.
Nobody keeps a chimp
for more than five years,
because at five years,
they don't know their own strength
and they can do
a lot of damage to people.
He called us together and dropped
the bomb and said, "It's over. "
I was one very angry young woman.
You don't say,
"We're not doing this any more. "
And because Herb had that card to play,
he played it,
'cause he was in the power seat.
I think I said,
"There's no point of
this going on scientifically. "
I felt that Nim had progressed a lot,
and we hadn't had the chance
to really analyse our data.
I just knew that we had reams of data.
This whole mass of data
that needed to be organised,
and that was going to be
a long and tedious process.
The fundamental question was,
"Can a chimpanzee create a sentence?"
I don't think I had
any definitive conclusions to that.
We had to wait and see.
It's kind of like
you're almost there
and you feel like
there's going to be a conclusion,
and it's like, "Okay,
"it's over. "
I thought that the surroundings
in which he was born
would provide
the most psychological support for Nim.
I felt the basic needs would be
taken care of.
So, once I got Bill Lemmon to agree
to take him back,
that was it.
I hope he'll be okay.
That's why I want to go with him.
I hope that I'll be able to
introduce him to his new life
but still have an old part of his life
with him, namely me.
And he can get used to it
and I can fade out and he'll be fine.
It won't just be an abrupt break
between old and new.
And we get Nim up early
one morning,
he gets a shot and he's out.
I chartered a plane
and hired a pilot.
Nim was given tranquillisers
to reduce the possibility of
his getting out of hand.
If he was tranquillised,
he'd be easier to control
and not do any damage to the plane,
which could be quite dangerous.
So that's how we get him
to Oklahoma.
It was just a nasty thing to do.
Very deceitful, I think.
The question is,
what was going to happen in Oklahoma?
And I didn't have any sense of that,
so, that was my concern.
"Holy shit"
was my first thought.
And I think his reaction was
"holy shit" too.
Like he knew we were...
He knew it was bad.
He'd never seen a chimp before,
and he was holding on tight.
You look around, you see cages
and you hear the sounds
of a lot of chimpanzees.
Would I have envisioned this,
when I started on this project,
that he ever would end up there? No.
It turned out to be
a surprisingly more primitive facility
than I remembered.
Because our cages were cages.
They weren't just a room
with a locked door,
they were cages.
I mean, it looked like a prison.
A really stark, ugly, dark, dank prison.
They had a chain
around their neck with a lock.
Should you get into a bad fight,
you could grab the chain
and keep them off of you.
It was like prison behaviour.
We had to put up an electric fence
around the island
because we had had several murders
and two suicides.
They'd just push them out
into the water,
and chimps can't swim.
Dr Lemmon ran the place.
I had an immediate horrible reaction.
He walked around with a cattle prod.
I remember trying to push Nim away,
because I knew what he was gonna do.
And Nim is screaming
and holding on to me very tightly,
and the only reason he let go
was because he got zapped
with the electric prod.
Come here a minute. Mac, come here.
Mac, come here.
Come here, come here.
The reasoning behind
the whole Mac-Nim interaction
was that Mac was not dangerous.
He was small, so he was
not an aggressive, dominant chimp,
so he was the perfect one
for Nim to start with.
Hey, Mac, uh-uh! Buh!
How did you expect
Nim to react
to his first meeting with another chimp?
I think what happened was that
Nim was very apprehensive about Mac
and he took his time
and then when he was ready,
he and Mac got it off.
I feel very good about this,
because I can leave now
knowing that Nim has a friend
and he's going to worry less about
his human companions
and have at least one other chimp
to turn to.
It was time to leave,
and that's when I took Nim
and put him in the cage.
Sure, I didn't want joyce doing it,
so I just said,
"Well, I better go do it. "
I didn't want Terrace doing it.
So, I just decided I was gonna do it.
You know, we coaxed him
down there and then,
because he trusted us...
I just led him in there
and took the lead
and tied it around
the far end of the cage
and said goodbye and walked out
and shut the door.
He was sort of hooting
and trying to come after me,
'cause he didn't really know
where he was.
But I just walked away.
And then when he wasn't looking,
he ran out,
out the door.
I did feel badly.
I felt in a certain basic sense
that was not the right thing to do
to somebody, you know, who had
been part of my life for so many years,
and that I was definitely doing
something that he somehow
would feel was unjust or wrong.
He had a little doll or something
that I think I left.
I strongly believe that
we made a commitment to him
and we failed.
We did a huge disservice to that soul,
and shame on us.
Assumed, I guess wrongly,
that Nim was going to come back
and he was going to be celebrated
in the sense that he was going to be
the great signing chimp.
No, exactly the opposite.
Exactly the opposite.
Nim, in the cage,
no special treatment, no yogurt,
no granola,
no... None of that.
It was pretty traumatic for the chimp.
They curl up
and lay down.
They lose interest in food. They just...
It was a bad start with Nim and I.
The chimp is very upset.
And he just looks at me
and he jumps and lunges at me
and bites through an artery
right in here.
I did use a small shock stick.
He had to grow up
and not be a single, spoiled child
any more.
So, you got to socialise,
work on his "chimpanzee"
and manners.
Everybody needs a job.
Meaning and purpose.
I had them out,
they would help me in the big kitchen
where we prepped our food
and did stuff, they'd sweep...
Nim was a compulsive hand washer,
he'd do dishes.
Vanessa liked to dust,
little Mac liked to clean cages
and wear my boots.
This was a special group of chimps.
They weren't ordinary chimps.
You know, they had the capacity
for higher consciousness.
Terrace came back a year later.
Herb arrived with
still photographers and cameras
and that sort of thing.
It was a shoot
and it was arranged as such.
There was no question
that he was very happy
that he could see me again.
There was no anger that,
"Why did you leave me here?"
It was just, "Hey, that's great.
I wanna see him again. "
You could see that he was like,
"Holy shit, I'm going back to New York!"
It was like that.
Like he was going to be rescued.
It was kind of sad.
I played with him,
we got into games of signing.
I remember I got him to sign "hug".
I got him to sign "Herb".
In fact, I could get almost any sign
out of him.
I didn't have to go through a drill.
So, it was a very entertaining,
comfortable afternoon.
No bad behaviour of any kind.
At the end of the day,
looks at his watch,
gives me Nim back,
and flies off.
And is gone.
Next morning he barely ate.
He just started to crater.
Herb never came back.
I thought,
"I'm going to become Nim's friend,
"and I'm going to hang with Nim
and we'll see what happens. "
I mean, there wasn't much I could do
for him in terms of the cage,
but get him out.
Oh, you saw that, huh?
See you later, Nim!
We just liked each other right off,
and sometimes it's like that.
Chimps aren't humans.
You have to kind of understand chimps
to be able to understand
how to work with them and be with them.
I took him out on walks.
I didn't bring food.
I didn't do the kind of things
that would interrupt the relationship
or the building of the relationship.
He grows on you quick.
He was so charming.
It didn't occur to me that animals
had that kind of personality like ours.
And you had to be true of heart.
You had to be true of heart.
If you had dark places in you, they'd
know it and they wouldn't like you.
Good morning. With us this morning
is Dr Herbert Terrace,
a professor of psychology
at Columbia University.
For several years, Dr Terrace
was in charge of an experiment
where he and several other human beings
tried to teach a chimpanzee named Nim
the sign language of the deaf.
But now in a book just published,
which is called Nim,
you're saying, Dr Terrace,
that these experiments don't prove
as much as you had
originally thought they did?
I changed my mind about the data.
I suddenly saw what the key to this was.
Nim was a brilliant beggar.
He learned how to beg
and he could work his teachers
and always get what he wanted
by moving his hands in different ways.
And most of the time he moved his hands
in the ways that the teachers suggested.
And the motive for signing
was not to say,
"What a nice cat you have over there,"
but, "I want it. "
When the experiments
were over,
you returned Nim to the primate colony
where he was born.
A year after that you went back for a
visit, and we came along with a camera.
You and he are talking
in sign language here.
Here we have it in slow motion.
What's Nim saying?
He's saying, "Give Nim banana. "
Why is it that you're saying
that he can't speak like a human being?
Well, a string of signs is not
necessarily a sentence.
You can learn a list of words by rote,
and that says nothing about
your ability to use a grammar.
Aren't you very disappointed that you
spent all this time and all this money?
Well, it would have been
very electrifying news,
almost like communicating
with a creature from outer space,
if I could show that another organism
could use language the way humans have.
- But it didn't work.
- It didn't work.
Thank you very much, Dr Terrace.
I hope somebody
can still talk to Nim, in any event.
I didn't care about
the language argument after a while,
it didn't matter to me.
He might not have had
sentences or grammar,
but there's no question that there
was communication going on,
and I saw it clearly.
He talked about the trees,
the berries that he found.
He liked to play.
Favourite sign, "play".
Holy shit, he doesn't know
which one to grab.
He knew what pot was,
or hash, or whatever.
And he wanted
to smoke a joint.
Stone.
Smoke.
Now.
When we went out on walks with him,
Nim was one of us,
and if we smoked a joint,
he smoked it with us.
In the circle, we handed it to him.
Chimps are like us, they're hedonistic,
they like to do pleasurable things,
they like to...
You know, they like to have fun,
and hell, who doesn't?
And there was something
in marijuana...
They weren't aggressive.
You talk less, you do different things,
you enjoy each other.
Lily and Nim lived together
in the pig barn.
Both of them didn't have
many chimp friends,
and then they became friends.
They were seen copulating,
and we think Nim might have been
the father of Lily's baby.
Had the best time in my life,
I still say that.
I've never had such a good time.
Except maybe at a Grateful Dead show.
Pretty close.
I don't even know which one I'd...
Actually, being with Nim...
I'd rather be with Nim than jerry,
and, for me, that's saying something.
That's real.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a banana?
Wanna eat the shoe?
That's a shoe, this is a berry.
And that's when Mahoney
started showing up.
He was standing around,
looking at chimps and writing on his pad
and whatever.
When someone...
When I found out who he was,
and I'm sure it didn't take long
for me to figure it out, I was...
Obviously he was checking out
the chimps for the lab.
LEMSIP is best known by its acronym,
L- E-M-S-I-P,
which is Laboratory for Experimental
Medicine and Surgery in Primates.
He represented the devil to me.
Most of the work that we did
with the chimpanzees, for example,
was
testing various
candidate vaccines
for, like, hepatitis B, hepatitis C,
HIV, AIDS.
I think it's very difficult
to fund the kinds of research
that I happen to be
very much interested in.
It's been difficult to fund
social research in general.
We heard about Dr Lemmon's
problems, which were financial.
It was finally arranged that, yes,
we would take a very large part
of their colony.
I thought Lemmon was trying
to scare the university.
I thought they would go,
"Oh, gosh, you can't sell them
to a medical lab.
"We've got to do something. "
I thought the community
would rise itself up.
Bob and I tried so hard
with public appeal
for something for the chimps,
and there was no response.
And then, shortly after that,
the chimps were indeed sold.
Of the chimps that are
being sent off to the lab today,
how many of them were subjects
of the signing research?
Only one
was restricted to signing research.
This is Nim.
As a chimp, you've got no way
of knowing what's happening to you.
You're just suddenly cut off
from seeing everything outside.
Suddenly, after a day and a half
of constant driving,
you get out the other end
and you're in another sort of room.
I wouldn't say
they were jumping with joy
to find themselves in a new place.
Come on. Come here. Come on.
One more time. One more time!
It's over. It's all right, it's over.
I took on the role of being
the one who chose
which animals would go into
which types of study.
And I hated it.
Spike, Spike,
come over here, Spike.
Spike, come on over here. Come on.
You want to go away with Spike?
These animals will be used
on hepatitis vaccine safety tests.
It is a federal law that before
a new batch of vaccine can be released
on the American market,
it must be tested in four chimpanzees.
There's no way, in all honesty...
There's no way
you can carry out research on animals
and for it to be humane.
It can't be humane,
because you already put them in a cage.
That was already the first step,
and from there on, it's downhill.
We realised that certain
of the Oklahoma chimps
could use sign language and were trying
to sign with us.
What we did was,
we wrote down on sheets of paper,
which we posted all over the place,
on doors and walls
and everywhere we could find,
certain signs,
and it was hoped that, as time went by,
everyone would pick up at least
a certain amount of sign language.
I didn't see
Nim as special,
above anyone else in the group,
because they were all going through
the same thing.
I made a big, big stink about it
in every way I could.
I called the press.
We bitched as much as we could.
The student Bob Ingersoll,
he used to hound me every chance he got,
and I would start to get really annoyed.
And then it dawned on me
that he was the only one who cared.
Nobody, nobody,
except the press, helped us.
Is there anything
that you would consider doing
to prevent what is going
to happen to him?
Unfortunately, there's nothing I can do
because legally Nim is not mine.
Nim was loaned to me
for the duration of my project.
That project ran out of funds...
Somebody at the Boston Globe
told me to read a front-page story
on that day
and he said,
"I think you'd be interested,
"and I know you take unusual cases. "
As a human being, I thought it was
a kind of esoteric, unique form
of animal cruelty,
all the worse for that.
And as a lawyer
I thought it was just plain illegal.
If the facts are, as I'm being told,
that this young chimp
was brought up from infancy
in a human family, you can't stick him
into a little cage
in some horrible medical lab
and use him for medical experiments.
It's per se animal cruelty.
Early on, I decided this:
If this animal has been deliberately
brought up from infanthood
to think of himself as human,
then, if I'm going to represent him,
I have to treat him like a human client.
Give him his day in court.
Henry and I, Mr Herrmann, were in
communication pretty much every day.
He used a really cool strategy,
actually.
He said,
"Hey, this chimp can speak for himself.
"Let's bring him into court
and let him talk. "
What I had ready as a trial exhibit
was a steel cage
and a couple of strong guys with a pole
ready to carry it into court.
And I was going to get Nim to go into
a frenzy and signal "out, out, out".
And I believe the judge said
something to the effect that,
"I'm not letting a fucking chimpanzee
"come in here and make a mockery
of my courtroom,"
or something to that effect.
And that's when I said
I'm going to bring, in effect,
a habeas corpus petition
on behalf of the chimp.
Bring him to court.
Our opponents were pigheaded,
but they weren't stupid.
They realised that win, lose or draw,
once I got into court, they'd be losing,
because even if the judge
refused to hear him,
the media attention would
have been devastating.
And the dean
of the medical faculty said,
"That's it, get that chimp out of here. "
Before anything could happen,
swooping down,
like in some Wagnerian drama,
comes Cleveland Amory.
I want this to be a place
where those animals
that have been abused,
that have been misused,
will finally and forever
have a place that they never
will have to fear again.
Mr Amory had, up until then,
perhaps a well-deserved reputation
for doing important work
for animal rights.
And he just went and buys the chimp,
takes him to his Black Horse Ranch
or whatever it was called,
and says, "I am saving Nim. "
Cleveland Amory
to the rescue again.
Nim will live here
for the rest of his natural life.
"Here my story ends,
my troubles are over, and I am at home. "
And that's what it says
as you drive into Black Beauty Ranch.
He was the only animal we ever bought.
And we didn't know
a thing about chimpanzees,
but we just thought it was better...
What we could do was better
than where he was.
It was never meant to be
a home for caged animals.
It is really a home for abused
and abandoned equine animals.
That's animals just with hooves.
We were aghast
that he would just pick up this chimp,
transport him to a horse ranch
somewhere in the middle of nowhere,
and there was nobody there
who knew how to take care of a chimp.
We brought him to Black Beauty
and built a house for him.
It was a big, kind of a square place
and it had a porch outside
so that he could go outside,
and he had all sorts of toys
to play with, but it was solitary.
Chimps are social animals.
And you can't just put
one chimp in a box
and expect everything to be cool.
Some of the time he was sitting
like this, in the corner.
And you just thought,
"What is he thinking,
"what is he missing, what can we do?"
Will you please be sure to stop off here
in the nation's capital?
We had a TV down and then he broke that,
and then we put one up in the ceiling,
and he found a way to get up there.
Well, okay,
you don't get a television
if that's gonna be your attitude.
I wrote letters to Cleveland
bitching at him about how
leaving Nim there alone
was virtually torture.
Not only did they not care
what I thought,
they wanted me as far away
from them as possible.
They wanted to make that pretty clear,
and they did make that pretty clear.
"If you come here, you'll be arrested. "
I felt it, you know,
and I just wanted to...
I don't know, I...
He got out a number of times.
What he wanted to do
was go in the ranch house,
be in the ranch house, be with people,
sleep in a bed.
Well, we had a bed for him in his house.
We never slept in the bed in his house.
One time when he came in the house,
there was a little white poodle
that just barked and barked and barked
at this chimpanzee
coming through the door.
He just picked it up
and swung him against the wall.
He meant to shut the dog up,
but, of course, he killed the dog.
There was another time
when he went in the house
and he picked up a chair
and threw it through the window.
This is a very miserable chimpanzee,
you know?
He'd had such a chequered life,
he'd gone from here to here
to here to here to here.
They should not be taken away
from their mothers in the first place.
I knew that Nim was there.
I didn't know anything about
the quality of his life there.
You heard good things and bad things
and so on.
And I thought, why not go?
So we all flew out to Texas,
we go to the ranch,
we meet the people taking care of him.
He was alone.
He was the only chimp there.
I happened to be looking at him
when Stephanie got out of the car,
and he saw her
and he recognised her right away,
and the look on his face was just,
"Oh, now you come.
"Now you come. Now I've been
through all this, and now you come. "
He definitely recognised us.
Whether he was happy to see us,
I don't know.
He wasn't
particularly attractive to me
now that he was an adult chimpanzee.
I didn't have a,
"Oh, isn't he beautiful,"
or anything like that.
He was... I didn't know him.
My mother decides
that she wants to go
into the enclosure with Nim.
Which didn't...
Which happened sort of,
"I'm going to go in with Nim. "
We said to her,
"He doesn't look like
he's going to welcome you,
"so maybe you shouldn't go
into his facility. "
I was curious. "Is he gonna sign?
"What's gonna happen?
What's it gonna be like?"
Stephanie, please don't go in there,
he's not in a good mood.
You know, you can tell
he's not in a good mood.
I opened the gate and walked in.
Nim went up to the, like,
first-and-a-half storey,
something like that,
pretty high up.
And I realised how much danger I was in.
He came down, and then it was a blur.
He grabbed her by the ankle
and he starts dragging her,
running back and forth,
literally like a rag doll,
just pulling her back and forth.
I think he's going to kill her.
He was gonna swing her against the wall
and then swing her
against the wall again.
There was nothing loving about it,
he was furious.
I remember there being discussions about
getting the gun
or not getting the gun, yeah.
So they got a gun.
No, he's not going to kill her,
he's just really pissed off.
Things dissipate
and he sort of wandered off
and I was able to get out a door.
I have no idea how long
the whole thing lasted.
The fact that he didn't kill her
meant a lot,
'cause he could have.
And he would have been dead,
'cause they would have shot him.
I had abandoned him,
and he had managed to grow up,
and I had walked back in
as if I had not abandoned him,
and he said, "No.
"This is my space. "
"I'm going to put you in your place,
but I'm not going to hurt you. "
We had done so much damage,
removing him from
what his life should have been.
We exploited his human-like nature
without regard to his chimpanzee nature.
We were co-opting him
right from the beginning.
It was wrong. It was wrong.
About a year after Nim
was sold to the Fund,
they purchased a female chimpanzee
to be with him.
Around ten years after that,
I heard she was in failing health.
I was worried that Nim
was going to be on his own again.
That same time I was told that
a new guy had taken over the ranch,
and his name was Chris Burn.
So I approached Chris
about visiting Nim.
Once I met Chris
I was really, really reassured
that things were going to be
much better for Nim.
Look, Nim.
Somebody's come to see you.
Oh, he's got his hackles up.
- Hey, it's okay.
- Hi, Nim. What's up, bud? Nim.
Nim! What's up, bud?
Yeah, I know, buddy. Who am I? Who am I?
Hey, who are you?
Play, play.
Play where? Where?
You are having such a good time.
I said to Chris,
"I have a way to help you,
"and I know I can help you
to get other chimps,
"so let's work together. "
Buddy, things are improving.
Things are way improving.
It's taken awhile, though. It's taken
a long time. Hasn't been easy.
On August the 10th, 1995,
the Dean of NYU Medical Center
announced that LEMSIP would be closed,
and I thought, "I'm going to try
and save as many of the chimps as I can,
"but in a very quiet way, secretly. "
Hey, Lulu. What's up, girl?
How you doing?
That's where Bob came in
through the secret network.
What's up, Nim?
Who is this over here?
Who is this over here, Nim? Who is it?
This is gonna be your new roommate!
Isn't that nice?
What do you think, Mitch?
I told you it would be nice, didn't I?
Jim Mahoney moved literally
And we did indeed get
two chimps from LEMSIP,
through Mahoney, to Black Beauty Ranch.
Mitch was a youngish adult male
and Lulu was very gentle.
Lulu immediately went to her defence
and Nim came over.
Very good, Lulu. She's so good.
Yeah, you're a friend, Lulu.
I think Mitch and Lulu
really helped him out enormously.
What? Now you're making noises for it.
What's the name of this?
Nim's. Nim's what? Soda pop, I know.
Things were
as good as could be expected,
based on everything you know
that had gone on previous.
Oh, yeah, that's so good, Nim.
Isn't it good?
It wasn't exactly perfect.
But it was pretty damn good.
Chimps are
truly wonderful animals.
They're very forgiving,
the vast majority of them.
They'll forgive you.
left with his mother is a thing, a lump.
Taken away, he acquires
human psychological test performances
which are well-nigh unbelievable.
Nim was born
at the primate centre in Oklahoma
and I went out there to get him.
I had never been near
that many chimpanzees.
It was frightening, intimidating,
and I knew Dr Lemmon and his wife
were watching me
to see what kind of a mother would I be.
Carolyn, Nim's mother,
was sitting right there holding Nim,
and she knew what was going
to happen better than I did.
She had had six of her previous babies
removed, apparently, in the same way.
When the time came
to take Nim from his mother,
she instantly took on this drama,
this feeling of
something about to happen.
And Dr Lemmon shot her
with a tranquilising gun
And then said,
"Quick, we have to get him
before she falls over and falls on him. "
She was trying to protect him
and cradle him.
So, he raced in and got Nim
and handed Nim to me
and said, "Go back. "
You know, go back in the other space.
He was very dense.
Unlike a human baby that has fat,
he was dense and hard.
He didn't struggle.
He didn't try to get away.
He just screamed.
As much as he may be screaming
and protesting, he's also clinging.
He was attaching for dear life.
Wouldn't it be exciting
to communicate with a chimp
and find out what it was thinking?
If they could be taught to articulate
what they were thinking about,
this would be an incredible expansion
of human communication,
and possibly give us some insight
into how language, in fact, did evolve.
And that's essentially
why I started Project Nim.
I don't know what
was in his mind, but he just called.
He was asking me to bring
an infant chimpanzee into my home,
raise this infant as if he were a child,
and see if he acquired language
as a function of being part of a family.
Stephanie was
a former student of mine.
She had a large family of her own
children and her husband's children,
was exceedingly empathic and warm.
A chimp could not have a better mother.
I know nothing
about chimpanzees,
and I never actually
sat down to study them
as one could have.
As I should have, perhaps.
But my appetite and my drive
to have that intimate a relationship
with an animal was...
Nothing would have stopped that.
The fact that we could share language
with an animal
seemed like a very radical possibility
at that time.
It had been known for some time
that chimps aren't able to make
the sounds of human language.
Do this, Viki.
So why not teach them sign language?
The real breakthrough would be
if, like human children, a chimpanzee
could create grammatical sentences.
So, without much preparation
and without really asking permission
of my children, my husband,
I said, "Fine, I can do it.
"I even have the funds to do it with.
We don't need to worry about money. "
And so it was launched.
The experiment was launched.
When Nim came to New York,
he was barely two weeks old.
The idea was that he would be treated,
in every way, like a human infant.
I had recently moved to
a brownstone on the Upper West Side
with my three children
and with my husband,
who had four children, Wer Lafarge.
Wer was a poet and a writer.
He redefined himself, became what,
at that time, was called a rich hippie.
A new husband, new family, new house,
and I brought Nim into
that rather turbulent situation.
It just happened.
There was no family discussion about,
"Should we? Shouldn't we?"
It was just, "Oh, we're having a chimp. "
We're going to teach it sign language.
And then the reality of it is sort of
hitting you that it's really...
You know, it's alive,
it's not a doll, it's not a toy,
it's not a human, it's a chimp
and it's an amazing, sweet little
newborn baby, needy creature, so...
I think I fell in love instantly.
Nim didn't like Wer.
And Wer didn't like him.
Almost instantly I saw how complicated
this was going to be.
I think Wer went along with it.
It was clearly Stephanie sort of saying,
"Let's have a chimp. "
It was the '70s!
I breast-fed him
for a couple of months.
It seemed completely natural.
Everything was about treating him
like a human being.
By the time I had Nim, of course,
I felt very comfortable with babies.
I wasn't prepared at all
for the wild animal in him
and the drive.
By the time he was
three months old, I think,
and starting to be ambulatory,
he was just right there,
nothing passive, nothing passive, ever.
I think he figured that he could just
get in between Wer and Stephanie
on some level.
And Wer put his arm around her,
and Nim just, you know,
half asleep, having a bottle,
turned and bit Wer on the arm
quite hard.
He didn't want Wer in the picture.
He wanted Stephanie all for himself.
Wer definitely
felt excluded.
Nim had just become part of my being.
That was incompatible
with the role that I played as wife.
"Herb's coming,
Herb's coming, Herb's coming. "
"Herb's coming" was a big deal.
I would just go over and visit,
just to see what his state was
and how he was getting along.
Herb was
infinitely exciting.
I admired his intellect and his goals
and his arrogance, all those things.
There was something that didn't
sit right with me about him.
The people that I am
the closest to, throughout my life,
are people that I have had
some period of sexual contact with.
I don't think
that the previous sexual relationship
between Herb and myself
made a difference to the project at all,
other than it was part of the glue
that allowed it to happen.
Herb didn't come very much.
He wasn't part of
the caretaking package at all.
Young newborn chimps
are always raised by their mothers,
not by their fathers.
And I didn't see any way
of trying to change...
Or any point in trying to change that.
For better or worse,
I never regarded him as a child.
I regarded him
as an intelligent, personable centre
of a scientific project.
I had an implicit faith
that Nim would learn signs.
We had to wait and see.
How do they start
teaching the child to sign?
Does the child just watch and...
Whatever. I don't know.
It was a problem. We were trying
to teach this chimp sign language
and nobody in the house
really was fluent in sign language.
We would mould his hand into
the sign for "drink", which is this,
and then give him the bottle to drink.
It just happened.
It was just amazing.
And I thought, "Piece of cake. "
I was absolutely delighted.
He picked up quite a few signs
after that rather quickly.
"Eat", "me", "Nim"
were part of his first signs.
"Hug" was another one.
And it was as if, then,
"Okay, we're off.
"Now we just got to
build up the vocabulary. "
As much as we were moulding him,
we were moulding these damn hands
and all this stuff,
he was starting to mould us.
He knew every dynamic
that was in the room, instantly.
He knew when you were upset.
Whatever had happened in,
you know, a 13-, 14-year-old's life.
And he would come over and he would
just come and sit with you and hug you,
and then just kiss the tears away.
You know, it was amazing.
Just unconditional.
He was my life line,
he was my buddy,
and he was bringing something out in me,
a freedom to defy expectation
and authority.
His greatest focus
of defiance was against Wer.
He would kind of
pull books off the shelves,
and Wer liked his books a certain way.
When he saw Wer coming,
he would really do it.
It was very focused. It was intentional.
"Fuck you, I'm touching these. "
It was a problem.
Wer was so impotent.
I mean, what could he do? He'd chase
him around. "Drop that! Blah, blah. "
I mean, he won every time.
Nim saw Herb
as his next adult male challenge.
I mean, that is the life
that he's hard-wired for.
To take on increasingly powerful
male figures until he's the top.
When Herb would come over,
expecting to step in
and have control of Nim,
and he couldn't and didn't,
we loved it. We loved it.
I cornered Nim
and just went to pull him out of some
hiding place, and he bit me.
Frankly, everybody in
the family got a kick out of Nim
doing just what Herb hated.
No one ever put him in his place,
and he just grew
more and more and more powerful,
and that was exciting to me.
We didn't have to try
to control him in any way. In fact,
we enjoyed just letting him
hang out and see how it went.
Stephanie being
the kind of mother she was,
was not very concerned about discipline.
It was sort of the hippie mentality,
and I think what I would tell her
would go in one ear and out the other.
Herb would have wanted
a schedule and a structure
and charted progress
and notes and all of that.
I didn't supply that,
I couldn't create that,
and I don't think Nim
would have thrived in that.
I was taking classes
at Columbia University
and there was a small sign that said,
"Research assistant needed,
course credit granted. "
A man opened the door
and he was completely breathless.
Also, he's one of those men
who was balding on the top.
So he had his hair pasted down,
but he was so upset and dishevelled
that his hair was standing
straight up on one side.
He explained it was a language project
and I immediately understood
the scientific relevance.
Nim was going to test
the nature-versus-nurture hypotheses
that were prevailing at the time.
It really was at the cusp of science.
You know, some things are just
immediately obvious about someone
from the beginning.
You know what kind of person you have.
I think she was 18, if I'm not mistaken.
At the time,
Nim was in Stephanie Lafarge's house,
and my first job
was to basically baby-sit.
To go to the house and ostensibly
teach him sign language.
She came out of nowhere as a
cute little thing from Ramapo.
When I got there,
I was actually really surprised.
There was utter chaos.
There was nothing.
This was a scientific project.
There were no journals.
There were no log books.
They didn't know who was covering Nim,
when they were going to be covering Nim,
who would be teaching Nim,
when they would be teaching Nim.
They didn't know what
they were going to teach Nim.
She quickly felt her power.
It was completely visible.
Everybody had to adapt to it.
She wanted that mother role.
This animal
climbed the walls all day.
He ripped apart Stephanie's house
all day.
The kinds of things she was
exposing Nim to were atypical.
He loved driving fast
in cars. He loved motorcycles.
He loved, you know,
virtually anything thrilling.
He liked alcohol.
You'd give him a sip and he'd want more.
We gave him puffs on a joint.
We didn't have to
treat him like a child.
We could expose him to
the sensations that we enjoyed.
I had an instinctive sense
that something was very amiss here,
that this is not the way
you teach a child language
or you interact with a child
or you teach anything language.
When Nim began to
discover my body, my nakedness,
he'd be curious.
Like a child, he was uninterested
and then one day he was interested.
I never felt sexually engaged with him.
There was a sensuality,
but Nim was, you know, a pre-teen.
Stephanie was a graduate
student in psychoanalysis.
Her questions had to do with
the oedipal complex.
And she was interested
in Nim's masturbation
and how he masturbated.
I couldn't believe it.
I realised that I could not do
what I call good science
in Stephanie's home.
It just wasn't conducive to that.
So I set up a classroom at Columbia.
He's gonna
take Nim to school
and I realise I'm starting to
lose my role
as the person who knows the best
what he needs.
We had to get him
in a context that was
neutral, calming, soothing.
I just mapped out
a teaching plan for Nim
and I did it.
She was so enthusiastic
about this
that I made her, in a sense,
the director of education,
the curriculum.
I was feeling good about myself.
Also, I was succeeding with Nim.
I could see I was succeeding with Nim.
I can see it, I can see that no one
could hold a candle to me.
The only thing that mattered to him...
It became more and more tense.
Words, words, words, words, words,
word order, word order, word order.
He couldn't see anything else.
Herb started seeing the signs
grow on that little graph.
Every day, every other day,
every three days.
Laura taught him another sign.
Laura taught him another sign.
And I just went hell for leather.
Nim's signing was just
almost exponentially increasing.
I was very happy.
Words are a fucking nightmare
when it comes to closeness, often.
And here I was, married to a poet,
working for a linguist...
You know, words became the enemy.
She started restricting the times
we can come in the house.
She started throwing us out.
She, apparently, was
encouraged to believe
that she was now the mother.
Stephanie began to threaten
to take Nim away from Herb.
And Herb started panicking.
I definitely initiated
the move out of Stephanie's house.
I think she was initially
quite resistant to it,
especially since she didn't know
exactly how Nim was going to end up.
God had spoken.
That's what had happened.
That's what was going on.
And we didn't have control.
So... my separation from him
was just as abrupt, in a way,
at that moment,
as his was from Carolyn's.
I was ostensibly conscious
but I was no less...
I was as unaware
and, you know, un-in charge
and helpless as she was.
It...
It was heart-breaking,
saying goodbye.
Part of me did not
want him to learn language.
He was less with language
than he was as his unique self.
At that time,
a very lucky thing happened.
I was aware that there was an estate
that Columbia owned in Riverdale,
a very large estate, that used to
be the home of the President.
And I went to him with a proposition
that if he allowed me to raise the chimp
there, I would pay for the heat.
And he said "Sure. "
This was amazing!
This was a fairly tale.
It was a 28-acre estate
surrounded by lovely gardens.
And that allowed me
to put up Nim's teachers
in magnificent surroundings
and not pay any rent.
Life was good.
Nim got out of the car,
ran up to the front door,
rolled down the hill, and he was gone.
He was free.
So, there was no reaction
at having taken him
out of Stephanie's house.
He was fine. And it was like
he had been there his whole life.
He certainly was a different
chimpanzee in this mansion
than he was with Stephanie.
So, I sort of got into more,
you know, interacting with him.
Herb's power as a professor,
his age,
completely impacted me.
He was my model.
We really clicked together.
I wanted so much
to be a part of his world.
I wanted to be
in that world of academia.
I had strong personal
feelings about Laura,
but I don't think that in any way
got in the way of our science.
Some of the daily bodily
requirements that Nim had
had to be addressed, and very quickly.
I eventually couldn't handle
the diapers any more.
He was getting bigger
and he was eating more of our food,
so pragmatically I had to
get him off those diapers.
I watched his facial expressions
when he needed the potty
and I began to see it and grab him
and bring him to the potty.
He did actually use
the toilet correctly,
but it was certainly not as reliable
as what you'd see in a child.
The idea was
that I would live with Nim
and I would train him for
a certain period of time in the house,
but then I would bring him in
every day to Columbia University.
This was an experiment
to teach or see
if a chimpanzee can learn sign language.
I just thought it was really
intellectually interesting.
Interesting to understand
how much chimpanzees are like us
and how much they're not.
At that time he was terribly cute
and getting little photos
in New York magazine.
There was a daily lesson plan,
if you will.
We were supposed to teach
these particular signs to Nim
and they were supposed to
also teach him everyday activities.
Dress yourself, undress yourself,
this sort of thing.
Like children
after they learn a few words,
Nim has spontaneously
put signs together.
In many instances we allow Nim
to use his own signs,
that he almost invents,
so long as they're consistent.
For example, this is the sign for "play"
that he invented.
He's learning signs rapidly.
They're going up, up, up, up, up.
The project was
literally humming.
You know, everything was
going very smoothly.
I have a chimpanzee
who was making history.
We did get a grant
somewhere in that time.
The project had
begun to enter the media,
so there was all this excitement
and hype about the project.
We were thrilled.
We've probably all seen
performing chimpanzees
on television or in circuses,
but Nim is no ordinary chimp.
Since he was a few weeks old,
Nim has lived in a close association
with a group of scientists
under the direction of
Dr Herbert Terrace
of Columbia University.
They're performing a unique experiment
to try to determine whether apes can be
taught to communicate with humans
using language.
How big will he be when he's full-grown?
Oh, he's going to be big.
He's going to be about 5 feet tall,
perhaps 150 pounds,
and supposedly five to six times
the strength of a man.
How are you going to be able
to handle him then?
He had grown.
I guess he was probably
something like that.
If you had to hold him,
you really had to hold him.
And he'd gone from being
this meek little huggable toy
to quite a robust young chimpanzee.
His eye teeth were never taken out,
which means that he's got fangs,
essentially, sitting here.
Extremely strong jaw.
If you didn't assert dominance
in some fashion,
you were going to be
in trouble eventually.
He could size somebody up
in two seconds.
Whether they were confident
or secretly unconfident.
If I stood up too quickly,
if I accidentally showed him
my back too quickly,
if I had food and I didn't think
to share it with him,
he'd cross that threshold
and go into attack.
You could tell
that he was getting an attitude.
The hair would go up on his arms
and he'd sort of get this look
in his face.
When he would bark,
I'd feel it inside,
the danger.
He had to lunge.
The contact, the rip,
the tear and the release.
And he had to draw blood.
She did not tell me that
in an alarming manner.
She was just reporting it.
Maybe I was just too
looking ahead with blinkers
and not wanting to hear that.
This is 37 stitches.
I had four here,
nine here. This one
sent me into the hospital.
This one actually was the most dangerous
one because he hit a tendon.
It's a lot of work
to take care of an animal
that's not your species
who has that kind of energy level.
I probably didn't know the difference
between chimpanzees and monkeys.
So, I was as blind and as ignorant
and as nave as probably they came.
I was on a quick learning curve.
I have high energy
and enthusiasm for a goal.
And he was my goal, apparently.
joyce was a great teacher.
She signed, she was completely
dedicated and motivated.
She wanted to do this.
This was fantastic!
He bit me really hard, and I
bit him on the ear right then and there,
and I said, "That's over. You will
never bite me again. "And he never did.
He did like a lot of human body contact.
Typically, when we would
leave the property,
he would be really attached to you.
The world would scare him,
so he would always come close.
Bill and I hung tight with Nim.
We sort of hit it off
on a lot of our different thinking.
She and I got together as a couple.
It helped
that we liked each other.
And I think that that helped Nim's life
because we enjoyed each other's company,
so we would do things together
and we would hang out as kind of a unit.
Oh, he loved the cats.
He was really, really tender
with the cat, and he'd hold it,
and he sort of liked the feel,
the touch. Something about it.
He would hold her and be like...
And you could see him, like, shaking
because he'd be so excited
that he had her.
He actually kind of
pushed her down on the ground
and then curled around her,
and just laid there, like,
"I'm in heaven. "
I would say
that it was fairly clear
that there was something more
going on than the project,
at least from his side.
And I think we all felt it
and we kind of had...
I don't want to say resentment,
but it was like,
"Oh, jeez, would he stop
this Laura thing?"
If someone showed me some attention,
I thought it meant
that they cared for me.
He had power.
I'm sure that, you know,
unconsciously I took advantage of that.
Somebody admires you,
um, why not...
So, yeah, we very briefly got involved
and he very, very briefly and abruptly
got out of it.
The entanglement completely
affected my decision to leave.
It's the humans I wanted to leave,
not the chimp.
Herb didn't want it to happen.
He went into a very enthusiastic mode
of trying to convince me not to go.
I wasn't panicked.
I wasn't panicked
that the project was just going to
grind to a halt because Laura left.
As I recall, joyce and Bill
pretty much took care of that.
So... I didn't lose any crucial aspect
of the project.
I started to go
to get the boxes to leave,
and Nim pulled loose
from the person's hand,
he climbs to the second floor
of the house.
Then he must have lunged 25 feet.
He landed on me.
He took my head and he started
pounding it into the pavement.
It took four males to get him off me.
He wasn't my child.
He wasn't my baby.
You can't give human nurturing
to an animal that could kill you.
One of the easy
parts of the project
was to advertise for teachers.
It was like, "Uh, this is nice. "
I didn't set out to have women
on the project predominantly,
but it certainly turned out that way.
And if that's the way it turned out,
that's the way it turned out.
I was a trained
interpreter for the deaf.
When I set my mind to something,
I get what I want.
I kept saying, "I want to live here. "
"When I am moving in?
When do I get to move in?"
And I would annoy Herb.
And finally he let me move in.
Probably, as time went on,
it may have become more difficult
for women to work with him.
He was going to take advantage of them
and he was big enough
and strong enough that he could.
I mean, it hurt! His bites hurt.
When he bit your hand, he got the nerve.
And you'd get a running shock
up your arm.
We had epic battles, but we made up.
He'd make that face and sign "sorry".
So, "Well, if I sign this,
she'll forgive me. "
I had a relationship with a chimpanzee,
and I had conversations
with another species.
It's not just him signing
that was important to me.
It was what he was thinking
and experiencing,
because we would talk
when we would hang out.
We would talk about
the things we would see,
the things we would hear.
As far as I'm concerned,
our classroom was the house and the yard
and the field trips that we would take.
Science is
a very objective enterprise.
You can't have personal anecdotes
of how I worked with Nim
up at Delafield
as opposed to the classroom.
That's just
of no interest to a scientist.
Joyce did not see anything
special about the classroom.
Hated it. Hated it, hated it.
He hated it. We hated it.
That's not surprising, because she
didn't get the results in the classroom
that I was hoping for.
- Do you know what time it is?
- Yeah.
Going into a dungeon
of a classroom, which it really was.
I mean, the thing was 15 feet square,
including the observation booth
and everything else.
No windows,
no place really to have any activity.
Trying to get Nim's attention
was a bit of a struggle,
and he would rather have been
been doing something else.
Pay attention to me.
Shh!
So, this is the sign for "dirty",
so we used it for "toilet" for him
because it's a contact sign.
He would jump through the signs
that I asked him to jump through
and then he would have had enough.
And he would say,
"I need to go to the bathroom. "
And that's when I knew,
you little bugger.
You used that sign
because you knew
it would make us leave there
and get us out of there.
He was growing
smarter and smarter.
And smarter in the sense
of recognising situations
that he could take advantage of,
of when he could get what he wanted.
He was starting
to discover himself.
There was a big rock in the front yard
and he used to like to hump it.
And we'd say, "You're gonna
hurt yourself. That's a rock. "
Like, look at himself and go,
"What's that?"
As this whole thing with the physicality
became an issue,
we were much more cautious, I think,
about letting the cats around him,
and letting him play with the cats.
He would even try to,
not engage directly in sexual
relationships with the animals,
but definitely to bring them to him
and to his penis area.
And I just said, "No,
that's not what they're there for. "
We realised, I think
all of us, that it was becoming
increasingly difficult
to pursue the experiment.
Nim was scratching hard,
he was biting harder,
biting more often, biting more people.
We had mentioned
the growing concern that we had
about how to deal with Nim.
Dr Terrace was pretty much
an absentee landlord.
Herb was never alone with Nim,
and Herb never had to spend
any kind of time with him.
Once in a while, you know, photo shoots.
For him to either take photos
or for him to have photos taken of him.
Yes, there were occasional bites.
I imagine they increased in frequency
just because Nim was getting older.
In that sense,
he was becoming more chimp-like.
But it didn't seem to be
a cause for alarm at that point.
It was the end of july,
it was july 28th,
and Bill had him,
and we did the body-to-body transfer.
I mean, you're holding Nim
and the other person comes up
and you just kind of hand
the chimp to the other person.
And I said, "Come on. "
And I got the tether.
You know, you've got the loop first
and I then tied it to my belt.
"Come here. " And he came over
and he put his arms around me.
He just crunched my face.
It just happened.
And I grabbed Nim
and just dragged him into the house.
And he was like,
"Sorry, sorry, sorry!"
"No, no, no. " And I passed
that armoire with that mirror
and saw all this blood.
He had bit through my cheek
almost to the inside of my mouth.
It was folded over,
so you could see inside my face.
I don't recall if she went
to the emergency room,
but I think something
like that happened.
It was just bad.
I was probably worried
that she would sue me,
or this would become public,
this would become public
knowledge about how
life-threatening the project might be.
They couldn't sew it
because of the infection
and the risk of infection,
so I had an open gaping wound
on my face for three months.
And when I got out the hospital, I said,
"You know what? I want to see Nim. "
He went...
And he went to reach for my face again.
I went, "Whoa!
"That's it. I don't need closure now.
I'm out of here. "
I was scared.
I'm tenacious
and I didn't want to let go.
Sort of like breaking up
with a bad boyfriend.
I was sorry that it came to that,
but you just don't know how
Nim is going to change
and you just can't count on
having outstanding teachers
all the time.
I felt I was spreading myself too thinly
and experiencing too much stress
and not enough, you know, good results.
Nobody keeps a chimp
for more than five years,
because at five years,
they don't know their own strength
and they can do
a lot of damage to people.
He called us together and dropped
the bomb and said, "It's over. "
I was one very angry young woman.
You don't say,
"We're not doing this any more. "
And because Herb had that card to play,
he played it,
'cause he was in the power seat.
I think I said,
"There's no point of
this going on scientifically. "
I felt that Nim had progressed a lot,
and we hadn't had the chance
to really analyse our data.
I just knew that we had reams of data.
This whole mass of data
that needed to be organised,
and that was going to be
a long and tedious process.
The fundamental question was,
"Can a chimpanzee create a sentence?"
I don't think I had
any definitive conclusions to that.
We had to wait and see.
It's kind of like
you're almost there
and you feel like
there's going to be a conclusion,
and it's like, "Okay,
"it's over. "
I thought that the surroundings
in which he was born
would provide
the most psychological support for Nim.
I felt the basic needs would be
taken care of.
So, once I got Bill Lemmon to agree
to take him back,
that was it.
I hope he'll be okay.
That's why I want to go with him.
I hope that I'll be able to
introduce him to his new life
but still have an old part of his life
with him, namely me.
And he can get used to it
and I can fade out and he'll be fine.
It won't just be an abrupt break
between old and new.
And we get Nim up early
one morning,
he gets a shot and he's out.
I chartered a plane
and hired a pilot.
Nim was given tranquillisers
to reduce the possibility of
his getting out of hand.
If he was tranquillised,
he'd be easier to control
and not do any damage to the plane,
which could be quite dangerous.
So that's how we get him
to Oklahoma.
It was just a nasty thing to do.
Very deceitful, I think.
The question is,
what was going to happen in Oklahoma?
And I didn't have any sense of that,
so, that was my concern.
"Holy shit"
was my first thought.
And I think his reaction was
"holy shit" too.
Like he knew we were...
He knew it was bad.
He'd never seen a chimp before,
and he was holding on tight.
You look around, you see cages
and you hear the sounds
of a lot of chimpanzees.
Would I have envisioned this,
when I started on this project,
that he ever would end up there? No.
It turned out to be
a surprisingly more primitive facility
than I remembered.
Because our cages were cages.
They weren't just a room
with a locked door,
they were cages.
I mean, it looked like a prison.
A really stark, ugly, dark, dank prison.
They had a chain
around their neck with a lock.
Should you get into a bad fight,
you could grab the chain
and keep them off of you.
It was like prison behaviour.
We had to put up an electric fence
around the island
because we had had several murders
and two suicides.
They'd just push them out
into the water,
and chimps can't swim.
Dr Lemmon ran the place.
I had an immediate horrible reaction.
He walked around with a cattle prod.
I remember trying to push Nim away,
because I knew what he was gonna do.
And Nim is screaming
and holding on to me very tightly,
and the only reason he let go
was because he got zapped
with the electric prod.
Come here a minute. Mac, come here.
Mac, come here.
Come here, come here.
The reasoning behind
the whole Mac-Nim interaction
was that Mac was not dangerous.
He was small, so he was
not an aggressive, dominant chimp,
so he was the perfect one
for Nim to start with.
Hey, Mac, uh-uh! Buh!
How did you expect
Nim to react
to his first meeting with another chimp?
I think what happened was that
Nim was very apprehensive about Mac
and he took his time
and then when he was ready,
he and Mac got it off.
I feel very good about this,
because I can leave now
knowing that Nim has a friend
and he's going to worry less about
his human companions
and have at least one other chimp
to turn to.
It was time to leave,
and that's when I took Nim
and put him in the cage.
Sure, I didn't want joyce doing it,
so I just said,
"Well, I better go do it. "
I didn't want Terrace doing it.
So, I just decided I was gonna do it.
You know, we coaxed him
down there and then,
because he trusted us...
I just led him in there
and took the lead
and tied it around
the far end of the cage
and said goodbye and walked out
and shut the door.
He was sort of hooting
and trying to come after me,
'cause he didn't really know
where he was.
But I just walked away.
And then when he wasn't looking,
he ran out,
out the door.
I did feel badly.
I felt in a certain basic sense
that was not the right thing to do
to somebody, you know, who had
been part of my life for so many years,
and that I was definitely doing
something that he somehow
would feel was unjust or wrong.
He had a little doll or something
that I think I left.
I strongly believe that
we made a commitment to him
and we failed.
We did a huge disservice to that soul,
and shame on us.
Assumed, I guess wrongly,
that Nim was going to come back
and he was going to be celebrated
in the sense that he was going to be
the great signing chimp.
No, exactly the opposite.
Exactly the opposite.
Nim, in the cage,
no special treatment, no yogurt,
no granola,
no... None of that.
It was pretty traumatic for the chimp.
They curl up
and lay down.
They lose interest in food. They just...
It was a bad start with Nim and I.
The chimp is very upset.
And he just looks at me
and he jumps and lunges at me
and bites through an artery
right in here.
I did use a small shock stick.
He had to grow up
and not be a single, spoiled child
any more.
So, you got to socialise,
work on his "chimpanzee"
and manners.
Everybody needs a job.
Meaning and purpose.
I had them out,
they would help me in the big kitchen
where we prepped our food
and did stuff, they'd sweep...
Nim was a compulsive hand washer,
he'd do dishes.
Vanessa liked to dust,
little Mac liked to clean cages
and wear my boots.
This was a special group of chimps.
They weren't ordinary chimps.
You know, they had the capacity
for higher consciousness.
Terrace came back a year later.
Herb arrived with
still photographers and cameras
and that sort of thing.
It was a shoot
and it was arranged as such.
There was no question
that he was very happy
that he could see me again.
There was no anger that,
"Why did you leave me here?"
It was just, "Hey, that's great.
I wanna see him again. "
You could see that he was like,
"Holy shit, I'm going back to New York!"
It was like that.
Like he was going to be rescued.
It was kind of sad.
I played with him,
we got into games of signing.
I remember I got him to sign "hug".
I got him to sign "Herb".
In fact, I could get almost any sign
out of him.
I didn't have to go through a drill.
So, it was a very entertaining,
comfortable afternoon.
No bad behaviour of any kind.
At the end of the day,
looks at his watch,
gives me Nim back,
and flies off.
And is gone.
Next morning he barely ate.
He just started to crater.
Herb never came back.
I thought,
"I'm going to become Nim's friend,
"and I'm going to hang with Nim
and we'll see what happens. "
I mean, there wasn't much I could do
for him in terms of the cage,
but get him out.
Oh, you saw that, huh?
See you later, Nim!
We just liked each other right off,
and sometimes it's like that.
Chimps aren't humans.
You have to kind of understand chimps
to be able to understand
how to work with them and be with them.
I took him out on walks.
I didn't bring food.
I didn't do the kind of things
that would interrupt the relationship
or the building of the relationship.
He grows on you quick.
He was so charming.
It didn't occur to me that animals
had that kind of personality like ours.
And you had to be true of heart.
You had to be true of heart.
If you had dark places in you, they'd
know it and they wouldn't like you.
Good morning. With us this morning
is Dr Herbert Terrace,
a professor of psychology
at Columbia University.
For several years, Dr Terrace
was in charge of an experiment
where he and several other human beings
tried to teach a chimpanzee named Nim
the sign language of the deaf.
But now in a book just published,
which is called Nim,
you're saying, Dr Terrace,
that these experiments don't prove
as much as you had
originally thought they did?
I changed my mind about the data.
I suddenly saw what the key to this was.
Nim was a brilliant beggar.
He learned how to beg
and he could work his teachers
and always get what he wanted
by moving his hands in different ways.
And most of the time he moved his hands
in the ways that the teachers suggested.
And the motive for signing
was not to say,
"What a nice cat you have over there,"
but, "I want it. "
When the experiments
were over,
you returned Nim to the primate colony
where he was born.
A year after that you went back for a
visit, and we came along with a camera.
You and he are talking
in sign language here.
Here we have it in slow motion.
What's Nim saying?
He's saying, "Give Nim banana. "
Why is it that you're saying
that he can't speak like a human being?
Well, a string of signs is not
necessarily a sentence.
You can learn a list of words by rote,
and that says nothing about
your ability to use a grammar.
Aren't you very disappointed that you
spent all this time and all this money?
Well, it would have been
very electrifying news,
almost like communicating
with a creature from outer space,
if I could show that another organism
could use language the way humans have.
- But it didn't work.
- It didn't work.
Thank you very much, Dr Terrace.
I hope somebody
can still talk to Nim, in any event.
I didn't care about
the language argument after a while,
it didn't matter to me.
He might not have had
sentences or grammar,
but there's no question that there
was communication going on,
and I saw it clearly.
He talked about the trees,
the berries that he found.
He liked to play.
Favourite sign, "play".
Holy shit, he doesn't know
which one to grab.
He knew what pot was,
or hash, or whatever.
And he wanted
to smoke a joint.
Stone.
Smoke.
Now.
When we went out on walks with him,
Nim was one of us,
and if we smoked a joint,
he smoked it with us.
In the circle, we handed it to him.
Chimps are like us, they're hedonistic,
they like to do pleasurable things,
they like to...
You know, they like to have fun,
and hell, who doesn't?
And there was something
in marijuana...
They weren't aggressive.
You talk less, you do different things,
you enjoy each other.
Lily and Nim lived together
in the pig barn.
Both of them didn't have
many chimp friends,
and then they became friends.
They were seen copulating,
and we think Nim might have been
the father of Lily's baby.
Had the best time in my life,
I still say that.
I've never had such a good time.
Except maybe at a Grateful Dead show.
Pretty close.
I don't even know which one I'd...
Actually, being with Nim...
I'd rather be with Nim than jerry,
and, for me, that's saying something.
That's real.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a banana?
Wanna eat the shoe?
That's a shoe, this is a berry.
And that's when Mahoney
started showing up.
He was standing around,
looking at chimps and writing on his pad
and whatever.
When someone...
When I found out who he was,
and I'm sure it didn't take long
for me to figure it out, I was...
Obviously he was checking out
the chimps for the lab.
LEMSIP is best known by its acronym,
L- E-M-S-I-P,
which is Laboratory for Experimental
Medicine and Surgery in Primates.
He represented the devil to me.
Most of the work that we did
with the chimpanzees, for example,
was
testing various
candidate vaccines
for, like, hepatitis B, hepatitis C,
HIV, AIDS.
I think it's very difficult
to fund the kinds of research
that I happen to be
very much interested in.
It's been difficult to fund
social research in general.
We heard about Dr Lemmon's
problems, which were financial.
It was finally arranged that, yes,
we would take a very large part
of their colony.
I thought Lemmon was trying
to scare the university.
I thought they would go,
"Oh, gosh, you can't sell them
to a medical lab.
"We've got to do something. "
I thought the community
would rise itself up.
Bob and I tried so hard
with public appeal
for something for the chimps,
and there was no response.
And then, shortly after that,
the chimps were indeed sold.
Of the chimps that are
being sent off to the lab today,
how many of them were subjects
of the signing research?
Only one
was restricted to signing research.
This is Nim.
As a chimp, you've got no way
of knowing what's happening to you.
You're just suddenly cut off
from seeing everything outside.
Suddenly, after a day and a half
of constant driving,
you get out the other end
and you're in another sort of room.
I wouldn't say
they were jumping with joy
to find themselves in a new place.
Come on. Come here. Come on.
One more time. One more time!
It's over. It's all right, it's over.
I took on the role of being
the one who chose
which animals would go into
which types of study.
And I hated it.
Spike, Spike,
come over here, Spike.
Spike, come on over here. Come on.
You want to go away with Spike?
These animals will be used
on hepatitis vaccine safety tests.
It is a federal law that before
a new batch of vaccine can be released
on the American market,
it must be tested in four chimpanzees.
There's no way, in all honesty...
There's no way
you can carry out research on animals
and for it to be humane.
It can't be humane,
because you already put them in a cage.
That was already the first step,
and from there on, it's downhill.
We realised that certain
of the Oklahoma chimps
could use sign language and were trying
to sign with us.
What we did was,
we wrote down on sheets of paper,
which we posted all over the place,
on doors and walls
and everywhere we could find,
certain signs,
and it was hoped that, as time went by,
everyone would pick up at least
a certain amount of sign language.
I didn't see
Nim as special,
above anyone else in the group,
because they were all going through
the same thing.
I made a big, big stink about it
in every way I could.
I called the press.
We bitched as much as we could.
The student Bob Ingersoll,
he used to hound me every chance he got,
and I would start to get really annoyed.
And then it dawned on me
that he was the only one who cared.
Nobody, nobody,
except the press, helped us.
Is there anything
that you would consider doing
to prevent what is going
to happen to him?
Unfortunately, there's nothing I can do
because legally Nim is not mine.
Nim was loaned to me
for the duration of my project.
That project ran out of funds...
Somebody at the Boston Globe
told me to read a front-page story
on that day
and he said,
"I think you'd be interested,
"and I know you take unusual cases. "
As a human being, I thought it was
a kind of esoteric, unique form
of animal cruelty,
all the worse for that.
And as a lawyer
I thought it was just plain illegal.
If the facts are, as I'm being told,
that this young chimp
was brought up from infancy
in a human family, you can't stick him
into a little cage
in some horrible medical lab
and use him for medical experiments.
It's per se animal cruelty.
Early on, I decided this:
If this animal has been deliberately
brought up from infanthood
to think of himself as human,
then, if I'm going to represent him,
I have to treat him like a human client.
Give him his day in court.
Henry and I, Mr Herrmann, were in
communication pretty much every day.
He used a really cool strategy,
actually.
He said,
"Hey, this chimp can speak for himself.
"Let's bring him into court
and let him talk. "
What I had ready as a trial exhibit
was a steel cage
and a couple of strong guys with a pole
ready to carry it into court.
And I was going to get Nim to go into
a frenzy and signal "out, out, out".
And I believe the judge said
something to the effect that,
"I'm not letting a fucking chimpanzee
"come in here and make a mockery
of my courtroom,"
or something to that effect.
And that's when I said
I'm going to bring, in effect,
a habeas corpus petition
on behalf of the chimp.
Bring him to court.
Our opponents were pigheaded,
but they weren't stupid.
They realised that win, lose or draw,
once I got into court, they'd be losing,
because even if the judge
refused to hear him,
the media attention would
have been devastating.
And the dean
of the medical faculty said,
"That's it, get that chimp out of here. "
Before anything could happen,
swooping down,
like in some Wagnerian drama,
comes Cleveland Amory.
I want this to be a place
where those animals
that have been abused,
that have been misused,
will finally and forever
have a place that they never
will have to fear again.
Mr Amory had, up until then,
perhaps a well-deserved reputation
for doing important work
for animal rights.
And he just went and buys the chimp,
takes him to his Black Horse Ranch
or whatever it was called,
and says, "I am saving Nim. "
Cleveland Amory
to the rescue again.
Nim will live here
for the rest of his natural life.
"Here my story ends,
my troubles are over, and I am at home. "
And that's what it says
as you drive into Black Beauty Ranch.
He was the only animal we ever bought.
And we didn't know
a thing about chimpanzees,
but we just thought it was better...
What we could do was better
than where he was.
It was never meant to be
a home for caged animals.
It is really a home for abused
and abandoned equine animals.
That's animals just with hooves.
We were aghast
that he would just pick up this chimp,
transport him to a horse ranch
somewhere in the middle of nowhere,
and there was nobody there
who knew how to take care of a chimp.
We brought him to Black Beauty
and built a house for him.
It was a big, kind of a square place
and it had a porch outside
so that he could go outside,
and he had all sorts of toys
to play with, but it was solitary.
Chimps are social animals.
And you can't just put
one chimp in a box
and expect everything to be cool.
Some of the time he was sitting
like this, in the corner.
And you just thought,
"What is he thinking,
"what is he missing, what can we do?"
Will you please be sure to stop off here
in the nation's capital?
We had a TV down and then he broke that,
and then we put one up in the ceiling,
and he found a way to get up there.
Well, okay,
you don't get a television
if that's gonna be your attitude.
I wrote letters to Cleveland
bitching at him about how
leaving Nim there alone
was virtually torture.
Not only did they not care
what I thought,
they wanted me as far away
from them as possible.
They wanted to make that pretty clear,
and they did make that pretty clear.
"If you come here, you'll be arrested. "
I felt it, you know,
and I just wanted to...
I don't know, I...
He got out a number of times.
What he wanted to do
was go in the ranch house,
be in the ranch house, be with people,
sleep in a bed.
Well, we had a bed for him in his house.
We never slept in the bed in his house.
One time when he came in the house,
there was a little white poodle
that just barked and barked and barked
at this chimpanzee
coming through the door.
He just picked it up
and swung him against the wall.
He meant to shut the dog up,
but, of course, he killed the dog.
There was another time
when he went in the house
and he picked up a chair
and threw it through the window.
This is a very miserable chimpanzee,
you know?
He'd had such a chequered life,
he'd gone from here to here
to here to here to here.
They should not be taken away
from their mothers in the first place.
I knew that Nim was there.
I didn't know anything about
the quality of his life there.
You heard good things and bad things
and so on.
And I thought, why not go?
So we all flew out to Texas,
we go to the ranch,
we meet the people taking care of him.
He was alone.
He was the only chimp there.
I happened to be looking at him
when Stephanie got out of the car,
and he saw her
and he recognised her right away,
and the look on his face was just,
"Oh, now you come.
"Now you come. Now I've been
through all this, and now you come. "
He definitely recognised us.
Whether he was happy to see us,
I don't know.
He wasn't
particularly attractive to me
now that he was an adult chimpanzee.
I didn't have a,
"Oh, isn't he beautiful,"
or anything like that.
He was... I didn't know him.
My mother decides
that she wants to go
into the enclosure with Nim.
Which didn't...
Which happened sort of,
"I'm going to go in with Nim. "
We said to her,
"He doesn't look like
he's going to welcome you,
"so maybe you shouldn't go
into his facility. "
I was curious. "Is he gonna sign?
"What's gonna happen?
What's it gonna be like?"
Stephanie, please don't go in there,
he's not in a good mood.
You know, you can tell
he's not in a good mood.
I opened the gate and walked in.
Nim went up to the, like,
first-and-a-half storey,
something like that,
pretty high up.
And I realised how much danger I was in.
He came down, and then it was a blur.
He grabbed her by the ankle
and he starts dragging her,
running back and forth,
literally like a rag doll,
just pulling her back and forth.
I think he's going to kill her.
He was gonna swing her against the wall
and then swing her
against the wall again.
There was nothing loving about it,
he was furious.
I remember there being discussions about
getting the gun
or not getting the gun, yeah.
So they got a gun.
No, he's not going to kill her,
he's just really pissed off.
Things dissipate
and he sort of wandered off
and I was able to get out a door.
I have no idea how long
the whole thing lasted.
The fact that he didn't kill her
meant a lot,
'cause he could have.
And he would have been dead,
'cause they would have shot him.
I had abandoned him,
and he had managed to grow up,
and I had walked back in
as if I had not abandoned him,
and he said, "No.
"This is my space. "
"I'm going to put you in your place,
but I'm not going to hurt you. "
We had done so much damage,
removing him from
what his life should have been.
We exploited his human-like nature
without regard to his chimpanzee nature.
We were co-opting him
right from the beginning.
It was wrong. It was wrong.
About a year after Nim
was sold to the Fund,
they purchased a female chimpanzee
to be with him.
Around ten years after that,
I heard she was in failing health.
I was worried that Nim
was going to be on his own again.
That same time I was told that
a new guy had taken over the ranch,
and his name was Chris Burn.
So I approached Chris
about visiting Nim.
Once I met Chris
I was really, really reassured
that things were going to be
much better for Nim.
Look, Nim.
Somebody's come to see you.
Oh, he's got his hackles up.
- Hey, it's okay.
- Hi, Nim. What's up, bud? Nim.
Nim! What's up, bud?
Yeah, I know, buddy. Who am I? Who am I?
Hey, who are you?
Play, play.
Play where? Where?
You are having such a good time.
I said to Chris,
"I have a way to help you,
"and I know I can help you
to get other chimps,
"so let's work together. "
Buddy, things are improving.
Things are way improving.
It's taken awhile, though. It's taken
a long time. Hasn't been easy.
On August the 10th, 1995,
the Dean of NYU Medical Center
announced that LEMSIP would be closed,
and I thought, "I'm going to try
and save as many of the chimps as I can,
"but in a very quiet way, secretly. "
Hey, Lulu. What's up, girl?
How you doing?
That's where Bob came in
through the secret network.
What's up, Nim?
Who is this over here?
Who is this over here, Nim? Who is it?
This is gonna be your new roommate!
Isn't that nice?
What do you think, Mitch?
I told you it would be nice, didn't I?
Jim Mahoney moved literally
And we did indeed get
two chimps from LEMSIP,
through Mahoney, to Black Beauty Ranch.
Mitch was a youngish adult male
and Lulu was very gentle.
Lulu immediately went to her defence
and Nim came over.
Very good, Lulu. She's so good.
Yeah, you're a friend, Lulu.
I think Mitch and Lulu
really helped him out enormously.
What? Now you're making noises for it.
What's the name of this?
Nim's. Nim's what? Soda pop, I know.
Things were
as good as could be expected,
based on everything you know
that had gone on previous.
Oh, yeah, that's so good, Nim.
Isn't it good?
It wasn't exactly perfect.
But it was pretty damn good.
Chimps are
truly wonderful animals.
They're very forgiving,
the vast majority of them.
They'll forgive you.