TODAY, IN 2012, with the whole of the Internet laid out before me like a Candy Land board (or maybe Chutes and Ladders is the better metaphor—or maybe Sorry!—anyway, one of those games that never ends because you never win), I’ve been trying to find out what happened to other famous cross-fostered chimps. Information about the experiments is easy to come by, not so easy to learn the fates of the subjects. When there is information, it’s often disputed.
One of the earliest chimps, clever, docile little Gua, appears to have died in 1933 from a respiratory infection shortly after the Kellogg family returned her to the Yerkes research lab, where she’d been born. She’d lived in the Kellogg home for about nine months alongside their toddler son, Donald, effortlessly outshining him at using a fork and drinking from a cup. She was two years old at the time of her death.
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VIKI HAYES WAS born in 1947 and died in her home of viral meningitis when she was either six and a half or seven, depending on what website you choose. After her death, her parents divorced; at least one friend said that Viki had been the only thing keeping that marriage together. She was an only child.
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MAYBELLE (BORN IN 1965) and Salome (1971) both died of a severe diarrhea that developed within days of their respective families’ going on vacation and leaving them behind. No underlying physical condition for the diarrhea was found in either case.
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AFTER HIS RETURN to a research facility, Ally (born 1969) also developed a life-threatening diarrhea. He pulled out his own hair and lost the use of one arm, but none of these things killed him. There are rumors, unsubstantiated, that he died in the 1980s in the medical labs, victim of an experimental but fatal dose of insecticide.
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AT TWELVE YEARS OF AGE, Lucy Temerlin (born in 1964) was sent from her home to live with the chimps in Gambia. She’d been raised in Oklahoma by the Temerlin family. Lucy liked Playgirl magazine, tea that she brewed herself, and straight gin. She was a tool-using chimp who took sexual pleasure from the household vacuum. She was a wild girl.
But she knew nothing of life in the wild. She’d been born at the Noell’s Ark Chimp Farm and taken from her mother into a human home two days later. In Gambia, Janis Carter, a psych grad student, took great care over many years trying to gently habituate her. During this time, Lucy suffered a deep depression, lost weight, and pulled out her hair. She was last seen alive, in the company of other chimps and apparently resigned to being so, in 1987.
Some weeks later, her scattered bones were found and collected. The suspicion that she was killed by poachers, into whose arms she eagerly ran, has been widely transmitted. It has also been strongly contradicted.
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NIM CHIMPSKY (1973–2000), star of book and screen, died at the far-too-young age of twenty-six. At the time of his death he was living at the Black Beauty Ranch for horses in Texas, but he’d had many homes and many surrogate families. He learned twenty-five or a hundred twenty-five signs—reports differ—but his linguistic capabilities were a disappointment to Dr. Herb Terrace, the psychologist who’d picked him for study. When Nim was four years old, Terrace announced that the experiment was over. Nim was then sent off to live at the Institute for Primate Studies (IPS) in Oklahoma.
Nim’s perceived failures had consequences for many of the signing chimps. Money for these experiments dried up as a direct result.
He was eventually sold to the medical labs, where he lived in a small cage until one of his former grad students threatened a lawsuit and launched a public fund that finally got him out.
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WASHOE (1965–2007), the most famous of the cross-fostered chimps, also spent time at the IPS in Oklahoma. The first nonhuman ever to learn American Sign Language, she had a vocabulary of 350 ASL words and died of natural causes in 2007, when she was forty-two. Roger Fouts, who’d started working with her as a grad student, eventually devoted his life to her protection and well-being. She died at the sanctuary he created for her on the Central Washington University campus in Ellensburg, surrounded by humans and chimps who knew and loved her.
About Washoe, Roger Fouts has said, she taught him that in the phrase human being, the word being is much more important than the word human.
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THE IMPULSE TO WRITE a book appears to run like a fever through those of us who’ve lived with apes. We all have our reasons. The Ape and the Child is about the Kelloggs. Next of Kin is about Washoe. Viki is The Ape in Our House. The Chimp Who Would Be Human is Nim.
Maurice Temerlin’s Lucy: Growing Up Human ends in 1975, when Lucy was eleven years old. The Temerlins adopted her believing, as did many of the cross-fostering families, as did my parents, that they were making a lifelong commitment. But at the end of his book, Temerlin expresses a longing for a normal life. He and his wife haven’t shared a bed for years, because Lucy won’t have it. They can’t take a vacation or ask friends to dinner. There is no part of their lives that Lucy doesn’t affect.
Lucy had an older brother, human, whose name was Steve. Post-1975, I can find no mention of him. I do find a site that says that Donald Kellogg, the child raised for a year and a half with little Gua—a period of time he would, of course, have had no memory of, though it is well documented in papers, books, and home movies—killed himself around the age of forty-three. Another site claims that Donald had had a distinctly simian gait, but it’s a white supremacist site—there is no reason to give that any credence at all.