ANYONE WHO HAS EVER had a young puppy will know the sheer delight of seeing it develop and take on a character all its own. Molly was only four and a half weeks old when we got her to America, much younger than a puppy would normally be when weaned from the mother. Even a healthy puppy, at this young age, requires special care; for Molly, the prospects of her leading a long and uneventful life seemed slender indeed. Molly’s almost continuous health problems—first her eye bursting, then her massive seizure, and always the constant fear of other things going wrong with her—hung over us like a dark cloud.
Despite several months of repeated treatments, Molly still had the bloated belly characteristic of a major parasite infection. Whether this was because of a particularly resistant parasite, or because she had developed a low grade, chronic infection of the intestine as a sequela to the parasites, I could not determine. We soon became able to predict her next crisis. Each time, her tummy would blow up like a balloon. Then we would be in for two days of diarrhea and uncontrollable vomiting, Molly unable to keep down even the smallest amount of food. I visualized the masses of two- to three-inch-long roundworms (like wads of white spaghetti) blocking the narrow parts of her intestinal tract in the duodenum or entrance to the colon. I imagined, too, the swollen walls of her delicate intestine, inflamed from the constant invasion by the bloodsucking worms.
Yet, after each trial, Molly bounced back with tenacity and spirit. She wasn’t going to let anything hold her back. Except for a few photographs that I took of her in her early days, the only other record we have of her growing up is a videotape I had taken at each significant stage of her development. When we look back on it now, it’s hard for us to believe just how tiny she once was, how tottery and weak.
One particular photograph, which I took within a day or two of bringing her home, shows Molly lying fast asleep next to one of my tennis shoes. Her little head, from the angle of her jaw to the crown, was only half the height of the heel of the shoe. The little woolly unicorn that Nathie gave her to play with when she first arrived in the house stood taller than she was.
When I think of this toy unicorn, I remember Finnegan and his little red teddy, the same one he clutched as his pet carrier headed down the airport conveyer belt. Nathie had given it to him when I had first brought him home from the lab, something soft for him to cuddle in his incubator during the night. Finnegan became very attached to his teddy, carrying it around with him as he explored the house. Sometimes we would find Finnegan sitting in some corner, having a soft, whimpering little conversation with Teddy, while he held him by the neck and stared into his eyes. But just as Finnegan had felt duty bound to remind Christopher every evening who was boss, so he would beat the daylights out of Teddy each morning when he first woke up, while he waited in the incubator for us to prepare his breakfast milk and baby cereal. After Finn grew up, he no longer played with Teddy; I have it sitting on the bookshelf in my office now, a constant reminder of those far-off days. It is, surprisingly, as intact as it was the day Nathie first gave it to him.
AS MOLLY GREW, she began slowly to change in appearance, not just in shape, which you would expect, but in color, too. As a puppy of just a few weeks of age, she had well-defined patches of black over her eyes and down one side of the neck, and the one odd-looking little splotch of black on her bottom. The rest of her was pure white, except for the brown trim to her cheeks and the nutmeg spots above her eyes, the only visible traits that she had inherited from her father, Shaba. As the weeks went by, however, the pink skin of her tummy developed irregular black and blue blotches all over, and blue spots began to show on her flanks, then her legs, and finally her back. Molly seemed to be growing up in reverse: she was becoming more pigmented with age, unlike most animals—think of fawns or lion cubs, or even children, for that matter, with their childhood freckles—all of whom tend to lose their spots as they grow. With each passing day, Molly was looking more and more like her mother. We came to realize that, beneath the surface, Molly is more black than she is white; only the tips of most of her hairs are white, a feature that becomes very evident when we give her a bath.
One of our great pleasures was to see Molly take her first steps to explore the world around her. A milestone in any puppy’s growing up is its overcoming the fear of climbing a flight of stairs, and the even more terrifying prospect of having to come down them again. And so it was with Molly: Nathie stayed close by her side, doting mother that she was, ready to grab Molly if she stumbled or fell, as she first climbed up, then down the staircase, one step at a time. Once successful, Molly danced and yapped with unbridled joy, eager to repeat the process.
I see this behavior with the chimps and monkeys at the lab. The moment comes when an infant first plucks up the courage to leave its mother’s arms to explore the cage around it. Almost invariably, the baby first climbs the bars of the cage wall. The good mother, sensing that the infant is going to panic when it looks down and realizes just how high it has climbed, will sit waiting, arms outstretched, hands open, ready to take hold of the infant at the first sign of fear and guide it gently down to her breast and the security of her embrace.
Equally exciting is catching a puppy’s first high-pitched, yappy little bark, as we had the fortune to do with Molly. Mystified, she looked around to see who had made this noise, only to find, to her surprise, that it was she. Overwhelmed by cockiness and the sense of achievement, she barked and barked with delight at anything that moved, like the fallen leaf that rustled in the breeze, or the seed-laden heads of grass swaying to and fro. These are indeed the moments to savor.
As, bit by bit, Molly overcame her health problems and began to grow, the characteristics of the wild dog in her started to emerge. For instance, when she eats from her bowl, Molly shakes every mouthful with rapid, almost violent flicks of her head, as if the food were alive and she is trying to break its neck. It’s like the behavior of a lion who has felled a gazelle. This makes for quite a mess on the floor, as she splatters gravy from side to side, leaving a dripping trail as she carries each mouthful from her food dish back to her mat—her eating grounds—five or six feet away. What’s so special about the mat? I wonder. Why does she feel obliged to transfer her food to it before she can eat? Sometimes, Molly’s habit is a major annoyance. If Marie-Paule should decide to take the mat away to be washed, Molly will sneak her food downstairs, one mouthful at a time, to eat it on the brand-new carpet we recently installed in the basement.
Another way in which the wild dog in Molly is apparent to us has to do with her dewclaw. In domesticated dogs, the dewclaw has become vestigial, a lifeless digit that hangs limp on the inner side of the foreleg, just above the paw. The claw itself continues to grow, as if it belonged to a functional appendage, and it can become so curled and overgrown that it creates a hazard for the dog, becoming snagged and torn in branches or fences, or growing into the skin to create deep sores. For this reason, owners often have their dogs’ dewclaws amputated. Molly’s dewclaws are anything but vestigial. She has an unusually strong ability to flex and extend her toes and claws, and uses her dewclaws like thumbs. This gives her the ability to wrap her front paws around her feeding dish, which she sometimes even “carries,” dragging it over short distances. It also enables her to secure big, juicy bones with a grasp as powerful as a feline paw or a primate hand. This dexterity is most striking when she reaches up to greet me when I return home from work. She affectionately grasps my wrist or elbow to pull me down to her level, and then places her “hands” on top of my head, her dewclaws clasping each side of my face to pinion me while she slobbers me with welcoming kisses. This, I am convinced, is a wild trait, an ability that might be essential to any hunting dog of the African savanna.
I told Roger Caras about Molly’s dewclaws that night I met him in the New York City restaurant to discuss the origins of dogs. He seemed genuinely intrigued, assuring me he had never heard of a dog who could use its dewclaws.
“Does she expose her anus?” he asked me.
What on earth is he talking about? I thought, as I glanced around at the other diners to see if they might have overheard his lewd inquiry.
Undaunted, Roger went on to say, “The reason I ask is that wolves, unlike dogs, don’t expose their anuses when other wolves come up to sniff them, because their scent glands are on the upper surface of the root of the tail, not around the anus, as they are in domesticated dogs. I’m just wondering whether Molly might show some original wolf traits. When she walks through the snow or mud, does she leave four footprints, like any normal dog, or only two, like the wolf, whose hind feet step into the prints of the forefeet?” Apparently this difference has to do with the different shape of the chest and how the shoulder blades hang down at the side. There was no wolf in Molly, I was sure of that, but she was a bush dog, nonetheless.
With the unexpected appearance of a trespasser on her land, Molly is transformed from the smooth-haired, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth dog she normally is to a ferocious hyena. Her ears spring up, flecks of spit explode from her mouth, forepaws stab the ground as she jumps up and down on her hind legs, and the whole contour of her body changes, due to the coarse mane that, when raised, extends from the back of her head to the base of her tail. It’s all show; if the intruder, which might be a Canada goose just landed by the pond, turns in its tracks, Molly hightails it, yelping, to the safety of the house and the reassurance of Mama. Molly is the only dog I have ever heard of to be chased by a doe, who I could only assume was trying to protect a fawn, hidden somewhere in the woods.
One peculiar trait, which I’m not sure has any connection to the wild, is Molly’s ability to walk almost on what seems to be tiptoes. On those rare occasions when I’m the first one in the house to get up in the morning, I try not to wake anyone else as I step quietly down the stairs, careful to avoid the creaking steps in the middle of the flight. I’m just as cautious with the refrigerator when I go to get the milk, bread, butter, and jam that I’ll need for breakfast, for fear that I’ll awaken everyone with the sucking sound on opening the door, or the sloughing sound as it slams closed. I avoid clattering the plate or cutlery as I remove them from the cupboard, and I try as hard as I can not to grate the toaster as I load it up with bread.
Molly stays behind in bed during all of this, lying close by Marie-Paule’s side. She barely wags her tail at me to say good morning when I first get out of bed, and you’d think she was so exhausted from the day before that she just has to have an extra wink or two before she can stir. It’s all show, however, because I know she’s listening intently for the noise of toast popping. This is the signal to her that, not only have I finished my cornflakes—and she had better be careful that Girlie, the cat, doesn’t drink all the milk I have left in the dish for her and Molly to share—but I’ve also prepared the two slices of toast and jam that we share, alternating a piece at a time, just as I used to do with Spike, and then with Finnegan and Erin, all those years ago during our lunchtimes in the woods.
As I sit quietly at the table, still muzzy from the night’s sleep, I catch Molly out the corner of my eye, carefully tiptoeing down the last few steps of the staircase and across the floor of the kitchen to sit by my side. She walks as if her body were partially suspended by invisible ropes, only the tips of her paws coming in contact with the floor. On occasion she can be so deft and quiet that I don’t hear her at all, and I’m surprised to find her sitting beside my chair. This behavior I find interesting in two respects. For one, how is she able, physically, to tiptoe? I try to catch her unawares, to study more intently how she does it, but as soon as she realizes I’m watching her, she reverts to her normal way of walking. Roger Caras didn’t believe me at all when I related Molly’s habit to him. He thinks it’s physically impossible for a dog to tiptoe, and he may well be right. But what puzzles me even more than the question of whether a dog can tiptoe is why Molly walks this way in the first place. Is she, like me, trying not to wake up Mama when she leaves the bed and climbs down the stairs? Or does she think I want peace and quiet and she doesn’t want to disturb my reverie? I don’t think it’s the latter, because if Marie-Paule is the first to get up, Molly doesn’t hesitate to make noise and wake me up as she treads over my body, rushes downstairs like a bullet, and rockets out the front door to urinate and bark at the neighborhood. Either way, it’s a fascinating behavior that begs explanation. Is it a demonstration that she’s capable of empathy, of putting herself in another’s position and not just seeing the world around her from her own perspective? Or is it indeed a wild trait, stemming from some sort of pack behavior, when individual dogs must act in careful concert with one another so as not to undermine the chances of a successful hunt before the final rush to the kill?
SHARING FOOD WITH ANIMALS is an important way of establishing a relationship with them, as all pet owners know. Of course, the act of sharing doesn’t necessarily imply a two-way street. It’s almost always the human who’s going to do the sharing, and the animal who’s going to do the taking. Chimpanzees are the only animals I know of who truly share food, not only amongst themselves, but with human beings as well. I discovered this one evening not long after I had started working at LEMSIP, when I was making my evening rounds. I like to do my rounds at the end of the day, when most of the people at the lab have gone home. I know I’m not going to be bothered by the paging system, or be disturbed by the technicians entering the animal rooms. The chimps are at their quietest then, getting ready to bed down for the night, lying on their chain-suspended, truck-tire perches, which sway with their every movement. Even after long years in captivity, our chimps follow the same rhythm as wild chimps when they go to sleep in the branch-laden nests they construct each night, after sundown, at the tops of tall trees. All is calm during the hour before lights-out—you hear the chimps crunching lazily on their food, or giving out an occasional yawn, or making “raspberry” sounds as they force air through their tightly pursed lips while they groom themselves or one another—all sounds of quiet contentment.
On one particular evening, I came upon Jojo-M, an adult male chimp with an especially friendly disposition. He was sitting at the front of his cage, holding the bars with both hands while he munched on a hard biscuit (these biscuits, along with fruits and vegetables, constitute the basic diet we feed the chimps). Without putting too much thought into it, I said, “That looks like a very nice biscuit, Jojo. May I have one?” To my surprise, Jojo took the biscuit from his mouth and handed it me, insisting with a repeated nodding of his head that I try it. I pretended to eat off the corner of the biscuit, making great chomping sounds while doing so. Handing it back to him some moments later, I said in enthusiastic tones, “Thank you, Jojo. That was a very nice biscuit.” He became quite excited by my response, bobbing his head up and down and bouncing on his bottom. Suddenly he made the most awful retching motion from the back of his throat, as though he were about to vomit from the very depths of his stomach. He brought forth into the palm of his hand a wad of finely chewed biscuit that he had carefully prepared by mixing small mouthfuls of biscuit with mouthfuls of water. Chimps love to do this with their biscuits, especially with their evening meal. Unlike their early morning meal, which they tend to scarf down in frenzied hunger, it can take them an hour or more in the evening to blend the biscuits into the perfect consistency. Some of them will actually prepare their entire biscuit meal in this way before swallowing even a crumb, storing each mouthful they have disgorged on ledges inside the cage, or on the crossbars of the walls, careful not to allow any to fall through the floor out of their reach.
As Jojo handed me this disgusting-looking sludge—it was the color and consistency of a semidried glob of diarrhea—he bounced up and down with a big panting grin, as if to say, “If you thought that biscuit was good, just wait till you taste this!” Again, so as not to offend him, I pretended to eat Jojo’s gooey mess as it oozed between my fingers.
One of the most consistent food sharers among chimps I ever knew was Rufe, a venerable old gentleman who used to pass food over his shoulder to his females as they waited patiently behind him. The oddest example I ever saw of food-sharing was with Nancy and Stella, two grumpy old chimps who lived together with Rufe during the birth and rearing of two consecutive sets of babies. The first time round, Nancy and Stella had become pregnant, and then given birth, more or less at the same time, to female infants named Katherine and Pammy. Like most infant chimps, Katherine and Pammy began to experiment with eating solid food only once they reached about nine months of age. Even then, they used the biscuits more as playthings than as serious nourishment. Stella came up with a novel approach to encourage the infants to begin eating solid food. She would chew all her biscuits into the consistency of soft meatballs, just like Jojo-M, while she lay stretched out on her abdomen on the floor of the cage. Once her chewing had brought the food to its final consistency, Katherine and Pammy would approach, one at a time, squat in front of Stella’s face, and, reaching forward with both hands, grasp her ears, touching their lips to hers as she extruded the stodgy mass into their mouths, like toothpaste being squeezed from a tube. This became Stella’s standard way of feeding the two infants: Nancy seemed not the least bit disturbed by Stella’s meddling with her infant. In fact, Nancy seemed quite content to have someone else assume her responsibilities. The second time around, with the birth of their next babies four years later, Nancy and Stella reversed roles, Nancy taking sole responsibility for feeding the infants the biscuit mash.
For all our closeness, Spike never shared food with me, except when it came to peaches. Peaches were, without doubt, his most favorite food. Just to see one would make him turn into a quivering jelly of excitement and expectation. His love for peaches began when he was a little fellow, living at home with us. I would take him in my arms to explore the two small peach trees behind the house, and he would reach up to pluck the fruits himself. Spike would always insist I take the first bite, and then would continue to offer me alternate bites until there was nothing left but the pit.
I have never known a dog to share food, except a mother with her puppies, and most dogs would snap if you attempted to take food from their mouths. Angus was certainly like that, snarling viciously if we pretended to go for a bone he was gnawing. Whether he would have actually bitten us if we had persisted, I don’t know, because none of us wanted to put him to the test. Incredibly, Angus used to allow Finnegan to take the most brazen liberties with his food. The small monkey would stand over Angus’s dish, daring him to do something about it, and would actually reach up and tweak Angus’s nose if he didn’t back down. For all his menacing growling, Angus never once attempted to bite Finnegan or put him in his place. Of course, Finnegan wasn’t the least bit interested in Angus’s food; it was just one more way to goad Angus on.
BY THE TIME MOLLY had reached six or seven months of age, she began to exhibit a most odd behavior. She discovered that one of the most relaxing positions of rest involves placing her bottom on one step of a staircase while her front paws are planted on the step beneath, as if the step she’s sitting on were a little chair. She spends hours sometimes sitting in this pose; often, with her neck extended forward, her head drooped, she nods off to sleep, reminding me of a horse who has learned to sleep while still in the shafts. Every evening, Molly sits patiently on the top step of the back stairs, looking up the steeply inclined driveway through the end window of the house, listening intently, with her earflaps extended upwards, for the first sound of Marie-Paule’s return from school. I have no idea of the significance of her sitting stance; it seems to be just a unique quirk of Molly’s, because I have never seen any other dog do it, wild or domesticated.
Apart from her penchant for garbage (she also sits in wait on the Tuesday and Friday pickup days for the crows who have a similar appetite), Molly is, on the whole, a very well-behaved dog with whom you can reason to quite a remarkable extent. I don’t say this only as a proud parent might; I’ll readily admit that Angus was a handful, constantly getting himself into trouble and becoming remarkably deaf when he decided he didn’t want to toe the line. No, Molly is, as I say, a pretty well-behaved little dog. This is mostly because we don’t have to give her specific commands to do, or not do, things. From a very young age, she has responded to conversational tones and is constantly listening, like her mother used to do, to what is being said, trying to pick up on key words so that she can stay ahead of the game. We have to be careful about certain words, like “whiskey,” which happens to be the name of a springer spaniel that lives over the hill, whom she secretly admires, although she barks ferociously should he appear on our land.
This is not to say, however, that Molly doesn’t sometimes behave badly. Then, we have a problem, as Molly becomes an indignant, resentful princess. Such crises are usually precipitated during our evening meal, when Molly may have picked up, with her incredibly acute sense of hearing, that some stranger has entered the little dead-end road that we live on, or that Whiskey has come to visit. She begins to bark and soon is out of control, despite my repeated scolding. “M-o-l-l-y,” I say if she persists, drawing out the syllables for emphasis, “that’s enough! Go sit on the mat!” which she interprets to mean sit or lie anywhere on the floor. “Grmmmph,” she replies in grumbling tone as she hunkers down to lie on the floor. “Molly,” I repeat, but this time more sharply, “don’t answer back.”
“Hummph,” Molly replies, in even more indignant tones as she squirms from side to side on the floor. If I persist beyond this point, I’m immediately sent to Coventry, and Molly totally ignores my presence, making up extra specially to Marie-Paule to emphasize her point. After a minute or so of this exchange, Molly can’t take it any longer, and with a final series of grumbles she slinks off upstairs to bed. Sometimes Molly becomes so resentful that she won’t come to lick my face when I finally get into bed, which is her usual way of saying good night. With the memory still fresh, she won’t even greet me the following morning, nor come to the back door to see me off to work, as is her habit.
Marie-Paule gets very annoyed with me on these occasions. It’s for me, she feels, to make the peace, not Molly. “After all,” she chastises me, “Molly is only a little dog, and you’re supposed to be the big ‘veet,’” which is Marie-Paule’s way of making fun of me by imitating the way the Scots farmers used to refer to me. I think it’s the scientist in me, my desire to see how far one can go with an animal, to explore the limit of an animal’s memory, its sense of self, its notion of right and wrong, or even whether it has a sense of humor, that makes me want to do it. It’s a bit cruel, I suppose, but I can’t resist the temptation.
CHIMPS, OF COURSE, ARE more intelligent than dogs. At work I quite often see them reacting to or participating in events in a way that leaves me in awe of their intellectual capabilities. But there is one particular incident that involved Art, an old, former aerospace-research veteran, that I shall always remember.
Art is one of the biggest chimps we have at LEMSIP, a handsome mass of muscle and brawn, in spite of his receding gums and worn teeth. He isn’t a nasty animal and doesn’t show any dislike towards me—unlike Jaybee, who spits on me with real meanness every chance he gets, or Spot and Joanna, two females who disliked me from day one and try to gouge me with the crooked tip of a finger if I get too close to their cage. I, like all the technicians at the lab, mean nothing to Art. So long as he is fed, watered, and given whatever else he needs or demands, he cares not a fig for any of us. In a word, Art is arrogant.
One evening, during my rounds, I came to stand in front of Art’s cage, which was situated midway down one side of the room. I looked up at him, sitting high above me on his tire perch, the characteristic expression of aloofness on his face. As I watched him gaze around the room, groom a little point on his elbow, and then scratch himself, totally ignoring my presence, I got to thinking that I had known this animal for fourteen years, and yet there was absolutely no understanding between us, no attempt at communication. I just didn’t count in Art’s world. I was determined to change this, and tonight was the night I would do it.
“How is he tonight, Art?” I called out, addressing him in the third person, as is my usual habit when talking to animals, and even very young children, now that I come to think about it. He ignored me. “Why won’t that old Art speak to me?” I continued. With that, he lazily extended his left arm towards me and gave me a sharp flick of his wrist—that’s Chimpanzee for “Clear off, now!” Not to be put off, as I had been so many times in the past, I persisted. “But, Art, I only want to talk to him,” I said. Again, Art flicked his wrist at me, but more aggressively this time. I was crowding him, getting into his personal space, but I resolved to continue.
I reached up, and with one finger touched one of the bars on his cage. That was it: Art was really miffed now, and he began to strike out at me with with increasing frequency as I continued to prattle to him. So violent did his actions become that, on recoil, he inadvertently caught the corner of his left eye with a fingernail. It must have hurt like hell, because Art suddenly grasped his face in both hands, in obvious pain. It was at that moment I committed the unforgivable sin: I laughed at him, something you should never do to an animal, especially a chimp. With that, he released his left wrist, his right hand still grasping his injured eye, and blindly lashed out at me again and again. Things have got out of hand, I said to myself, and after seeing that Art had done no real damage to his eye, I decided I had better leave.
The next day, when I entered Art’s room, he was sitting up on his tire, ignoring my presence. Recalling the previous evening’s events and, noticing that Art’s eye seemed perfectly fine now, I asked him, “How’s his old eye, Art?” To my astonishment, Art responded by grabbing his left eye with one hand and flicking his other wrist at me violently.
But now, he and I have a relationship, and when I enter his room, I see him off in the distance, squinting through the bars of the cages to watch me coming. As I approach his cage and come to stand in front of him, he turns his gaze away from me, but now he has a smile on his face, and I can hear him making soft little laughing sounds to himself. Of course, we continue our game of “I don’t care about you,” but when I touch his cage now he pretends he doesn’t want me to do this, and he presses a finger lightly on mine, just to remind me that it’s his territory. It’s very humbling to find yourself in the presence of an animal with such a sense of self, such haughtiness. His behavior on that morning showed me the extent of Art’s memory, but even more incredible, his subsequent behavior showed his real sense of humor.
I’ve often wondered whether nonhuman animals respond only to events of the moment, or if they’re able to project into the future. I’m not referring, of course, to animals like bears preparing for hibernation, when they gorge themselves to remain nourished until spring. I’m referring to whether animals, like human beings, can consciously plan ahead. The clearest example I ever had that a chimp might be capable of such planning was in an incident with Jaybee, the chimp who hates me with a passion. One evening—again during my rounds—I wandered in to talk to my old friend Jojo-M. As I sat before his cage chatting quietly to him, it occurred to me that Jaybee was in the cage directly behind me, on the opposite side of the room. That’s amazing, I thought; Jaybee hasn’t spat on me yet. I wondered if, as with Art, we might at long last have achieved some sort of friendship.
I cautiously swiveled around from my perch in front of Jojo’s cage. To my surprise, Jaybee was sitting, with arms outstretched, holding on to the front bars of his cage. He had a relaxed expression—not the nasty, scrunched-up face I was accustomed to. “Hi, Jaybee,” I said, hardly believing this turn of events. “How is he tonight?” He nodded his head repeatedly, a smile beginning to dawn on his face. “It’s so nice to see the Jaybee,” I continued, careful not to move from my crouched position so as not to startle him and break the spell. Jaybee continued to nod at me, obviously happy, or so I thought. He then turned his head sharply to stare intently at the small window in the door about twenty feet away at the end of the room. I, too, turned on my heels to look at the window, assuming Jaybee was responding to the presence of one of the technicians.
“But there’s no one there,” I said to Jaybee. He continued to nod his head and smile sweetly. This continued for a couple of minutes until Jaybee again stared at the window. This time I was certain I hadn’t heard one of the technicians. “There’s no one there, Jaybee,” I assured him. We continued on these friendly terms for a bit longer until Jaybee, for a third time, turned his attention to the window. He knew as well as I did that no one was at the window; he was creating a diversion. As I had turned away from Jaybee every so often to pay attention to Jojo or to look at the window, Jaybee had, inch by inch, leaned sideways until he was in easy reach of his water container. Before I could rise from my crouched position, Jaybee had sucked up a huge mouthful of water—a half gallon or more—and spat it full force over me, drenching me to the skin.
OUR FAMILY HAS ALWAYS had the habit of talking to our animals, including them in just about every conversation, asking them questions about what they would like, or what they might want to do, and never dreaming of walking past one without at least some word of recognition. We started talking to Molly from a very early age; probably as a result, she is more responsive to vocal cues than any dog I have ever met.
It is through such constant talking that an animal can pick up a great deal of understanding of human language, and, most likely, the earlier in life this process begins, the greater the extent of understanding becomes. I think this is probably true for all animals, not just dogs, and may have little to do with species, or intelligence, or even the size of their brains. Even, or perhaps especially, for animals confined in laboratory cages, talking to them becomes essential. After all, they are deprived of so many basic rights—the freedom of movement, the freedom to pick and choose their food and even their friends. These animals are so totally at our mercy, the least we can do is recognize their existence by talking to them and treating them as individuals. This is something I especially try to instill in the caregivers and technicians who work with the primates at LEMSIP.
Yet, for all my encouraging, I find that the men at the lab are less inclined to be talkative with animals than the women are. I’m not sure why this is so, but it may be because men feel embarrassed. It may be even a reflection of their lack of maternalism; after all, it’s usually the mother, not the father, who’s mainly responsible for teaching language to a child. Whatever it is, the women at the lab are the most consistent in their talking to the animals, and the woman who takes first prize is Bobbie.
Bobbie hails from New Jersey, and has the accent unique to that state. Worms to her are woyms, oil is earl, and duty is dudy. She is a veritable chatterbox. The monkeys, especially the Java macaques, which she seems to understand best, adore her. Sometimes, when I’m in the nearby clinic, concentrating on some delicate procedure or listening to an animal’s lungs with a stethoscope, she nearly drives me to distraction, blathering away off in the background. But the monkeys love it. As she goes about her morning work, bending down beneath the cages to clean the floor, or scrubbing the walls, or filling the feed barrels with biscuits, or attending to any other of the score of duties she has, Bobbie chatters to them: “I don’t know about all you monkeys, you make such a mess!” or “What’s up, Juan? You don’t like your celery?” or “You’re such a good girl, April, letting me tickle your tail like that.” And so she goes, hour after hour, the monkeys enthralled. I can hear their plaintive “whoo” replies, which don’t denote sadness, but rather a heightening curiosity, as they await the next treat Bobbie has in store for them. Then they all call out in their crisp little “whip-whip” sounds, their long-awaited anticipation about to be fulfilled. Despite this rapport, Bobbie still often finds her work difficult—as do many of the caregivers at the lab—because of the clash between their love for the animals and the demands of the research.
As much as possible, my other duties permitting, I try to keep in close contact with the animals. I’ve known many of the chimps at LEMSIP for close to twenty years now. I brought many of them into the world, and the technicians and I have sat up many a night struggling to get them through some particularly severe illness. Over the years, I’ve established some special communication with each one of them. When I enter his room, Conrad, a large, thirty-year-old male chimpanzee, immediately sticks his tongue out through the bars, because he knows I’ll come over to grab it with my fingers and wiggle it up and down in rhythm to a little song I sing to him every time. Not a particularly melodious song, it goes something like:
Iddle-liddle-liddle-dee,
Iddle-liddle-liddle-doh,
Iddle-liddle-iddle-dee . . .
After two refrains, it ends on a sharply rising and increasingly drawn out note:
Diddle-diddle, diddle-diddle, diddle-diddle-DEE!
at which point Conrad screws up his face, because he knows I’m going to tweak his nose as I let go of his tongue.
I greet Libbel, a ten-year-old female chimpanzee, with the rhyme:
There was an old lady who lived in a shoe,
She had so M-A-N-Y CHIL-DREN
She didn’t [and here I speed up] KNOW WHAT TO DO!
DID SHE?
At this, Libbel laughs, in her grunting, out-of-breath sort of way, and she performs a little pirouette. All of the animals wait for these special interactions, and I would no more dream of walking past one of them without stopping to say hello than of flying to the moon.