“We’re sitting on about two hundred acres,” Mr. Lawrence continued, to Lydia. “The whole property’s surrounded by a twenty-foot-high electric fence. That’s more to keep intruders out than it is to keep the animals in. We’ve got our own little Eden here, our own Noah’s Ark. We acquire most of the animals from the entertainment industry, biomedical labs, zoos. We just want to give the animals a good home and a chance to be happy, to roam the land. Inside the property, the animals have free range. Of course in the winter most of the animals stay inside in their barns, where it’s warm. All the barns are good and heated. Most of them are African animals. They’re not used to these winters. It’s a nice day, though. I bet we’ll see some of them out and about.” Lydia nodded and put on her sunglasses. “The chimps, though?” said Mr. Lawrence. “The house chimps we just treat like regular members of the family. They’re used to living with people. They sleep in our house, they eat our food. We live with them. We live like a family. Everybody who works for us knows to treat them just like they’d treat me or Regina.”
Soon, as Mr. Lawrence piloted the rumbling vehicle down the narrow dirt road that wound snakily through the grounds of the ranch, we espied some of the animals that I had, in the life I led previously as an ape, grown up in close proximity to, often hearing, but seldom actually catching sight of, in the Lincoln Park Zoo: zebras, giraffes, rhinoceri, hippopotami, and even several elephants, lumbering around in the distance, looking absurdly out of place amid all the coniferous trees and snowy hills. This was the Lawrence Ranch, in the mountains of southern Colorado. This place was to be our new home.
Mr. Lawrence also drove us around the perimeter of his vineyard. He was a renaissance man, a man of great and many passions, but two of them ruled above the rest like a king and queen: one was the fate of the animals on this earth, and the other?—wine. Mr. Lawrence was an avid and passionate oenophile. His ranch was—is, I should say—located in Grand Valley, a wine-growing region on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains. The vineyard was a large swath of his property that no animals were allowed into. Not even me or Clever were allowed to go there. Maybe he didn’t trust us not to pick and eat the grapes that grew in gorgeous plump dew-dappled bunches all along the rows of long fences, and if so, this distrust was probably an accurate one. I loved the smell of the vineyards, though, and in the future Clever and I would take many a long walk together along the perimeter of the vineyard, breathing the fruit-sweeted air and discussing philosophical subjects.
We toured the grounds of the ranch all day, visiting the barns where the less adventurous of the Lawrence Ranch animals slept in beds of straw beneath tracks of red glowing heat lamps that hung from the high ceilings of these structures, these huge metal barns that were more like airplane hangars, built cavernous enough to comfortably house elephants and rhinos. We saw the clear black water of a creek trickling over smooth stones beneath ledges of ice, descending from a spring in the nearby mountains. We saw the antelope and the gazelles, the gnus and the gemsboks, the emus, ostriches, zebras, and Bactrian camels. A huge humid glass enclosure full of plants and trees housed smaller animals: wombats, monkeys, lemurs, gibbons, echidnas, and tapirs. Who would have thought that there would be a remote expanse of acreage somewhere in the Wild West of Colorado positively teeming with all manner of exotic animalia, a secret peaceable kingdom hidden deep in the mountains of the New World?
XXIII
In 1970 (twenty-five years before I arrived at the Lawrence Ranch) Dr. Henry Troutwine, a cognitive research psychologist at Princeton University, initiated the Clever Hands project, now mostly famous for being widely regarded as a failure.
At the time the Clever Hands project was the most ambitious, well-organized and well-funded experiment in ape language acquisition to date. Dr. Troutwine acquired a male infant chimpanzee from Bill Lemon, a rogue psychologist at the University of Oklahoma. Lemon was a staunch Freudian, which is extremely unusual for a research psychologist. Lemon was also a chimp breeder. He owned a farm just outside of Norman, Oklahoma, where he raised and kept a menagerie of exotic animals—among them a large group of chimps that he kept on an island in the middle of a lake on his farm. Lemon was intensely interested in experiments in cross-fostering chimps in human households. He would lend out his infant chimps to research volunteers (most of them his graduate students) to raise in their homes as human children. Lemon had promised to sell Dr. Troutwine an infant chimp for his experiment as soon as one became available; so, although Troutwine had not yet fully set up the logistics of the experiment, when a baby chimp was born at the Lemon farm, he jumped at the chance to acquire him. Troutwine bought the baby from Lemon and brought the two-week-old chimp back to Princeton, New Jersey, where he had him placed as a foster child in the home of his first volunteers, the Saltonseas.
Millicent Saltonsea was a psychologist, and her husband, Winn Saltonsea, was a ponytailed poet who dressed in white linen pants, came from a patrician line of old money, and spoke with a Locust Valley lockjaw. For the first year of the project, Clever Hands—as he was whimsically dubbed—lived with the Saltonseas and their four young children in their palatial estate in the suburbs of Princeton. Troutwine’s idea was that Clever Hands would be brought up in a human environment, co-reared alongside the Saltonseas’ four children. Meanwhile, Troutwine was rushing to put together the funds and facilities necessary for the experiment. He wanted to see if a chimpanzee could learn American Sign Language. There had been a few other notable attempts to teach sign language to chimps—most notably Allen and Beatrice Gardener’s experiments with the female chimp Washoe—but those experiments were dogged by accusations of sloppy methodology and data-fudging, and the results were dubious and disappointing at best. Troutwine thought this was in part because the chimps in previous experiments had been too old when serious attempts at language instruction had begun; you must begin molding the plastic of an animal mind with language right from birth. (I am an exception.) It is worth mentioning that neither Millicent nor Winn Saltonsea nor any of their children were fluent—or even capable—ASL signers. Troutwine had an ASL teacher instruct them in signs that they might impart to Clever. Unfruitful months passed as Troutwine dithered, and Clever quickly became too big and unruly for Winn Saltonsea. After a relatively short time of living with baby Clever, Winn had come to regret agreeing to house the chimp. Clever had begun to tear apart books, furniture, drapes—anything in the Saltonseas’ home that could be torn apart, including their marriage. But that is another story.
The Saltonseas had to forsake Clever and end their involvement in the project. Clever was passed from one home to another (never, by the way, to Troutwine’s own home) until Troutwine was finally able to secure enough funding and resources to begin the experiment in earnest. Eventually he managed to secure the use of a large and elegant Georgian mansion near the Princeton campus, owned by the university. The donor of the property had envisioned it as a botanical research station, as the house featured an English garden, sprawling lawns, koi ponds, and a greenhouse. For whatever reason this never happened, and since its donation the property had sat vacant and neglected, and had fallen into disrepair while the Princeton administration dragged its feet as to the question of what to do with it. Through faculty chatter Troutwine became apprised of its existence and asked Princeton to let him headquarter the Clever Hands project there. They said yes, and that was that: he had the house refurbished and chimp-proofed to the best of his knowledge and funding, hired a small army of caretakers and tutors to provide round-the-clock handling and upkeep, and moved Clever into the house. Only then was Troutwine able to provide enough space, facilities, and personnel to properly throw everything he could into the experiment, and by that time Clever was nearly three years old.
For the next several years Clever lived like a mad aristocrat: imprisoned in luxury, disallowed to venture beyond the twenty-room house and the ten acres of land surrounding it, yet with his every crazy whim slavishly attended to by a revolving crew of
graduate students who kept him company, cared for him, fed and washed him, entertained him, and were always, and with steadily increasing desperation, trying to teach him sign language. As Clever got older and the experiment wore on, Troutwine frantically jumped from one methodological tack to another, changing methods of data collection and analysis in accordance with the nature of the results. Over the years, the logistics of the Clever Hands project exponentially compounded in complexity and eventually spiraled out into unmanageable oblivion. Not one fluent ASL signer ever worked on the experiment. Troutwine would sit Clever down for hours of deliberate instruction in a makeshift “classroom” they built in the house. His teachers would make signs and try to get him to mimic them, often molding his hands to make the signs. In order to keep getting funding from the National Science Foundation, Henry Troutwine (who gradually withdrew in all ways but in name from the daily experiments, and in the end had little actual contact with Clever) was forced to publish the results. What he called his data were measured by things like how many signs Clever had made on his own, with no instructional prompting, and whether or not he was making the signs in appropriate contexts. Such data were deeply vulnerable to subjective interpretation and often too amoebic and vague to measure; ergo, the data were difficult to gather in any way that conformed to acceptable scientific methodology. Clever learned hundreds of signs, but never used them in any way that met the experimenters’ definition of language. He never acquired anything that could be called syntax, never had anything resembling grammar. Although young Clever’s cuteness made him a darling of the public—he was featured on TV talk shows and so on (maybe even because of this public interest in his cuteness)—within the scientific community the Clever Hands experiment fell under deep scrutiny, then doubt, then outward hostility, until Troutwine lost his funding and the experiment went under. Troutwine shut down the project, closed the facilities, and washed his hands of it all. Then, to save face, he decided to join the opposition, and denounced the project as a failure in a paper he published in Science in 1979. In the paper, he lay down his arms and supplicated the forgiveness of the scientific community, declaring that language was an innately human capability, the Cartesian break between man and beast was all true, and any future animal language experiments were a foolish waste of time. Troutwine voluntarily agreed to abjure, curse, and detest his previous opinions on the matter, and he did not mutter “it still moves.” His penance paid, the true church of science absolved Henry Troutwine and welcomed him back into the fold, and it was henceforth decreed that all animal language experiments were sheer bunkum.
Meanwhile, Clever himself was abandoned. He was removed from his home in Princeton and for lack of a place to put him was shipped back to Bill Lemon’s farm in Oklahoma, where—for the first time in his life—he had to interact with other chimps. A lifetime of human pampering had made Clever shy, neurasthenic, and poorly socialized, and he had trouble getting along with other chimps. Four years later, Lemon also ran completely out of money, and began to sell off his chimps. He sold most of them to biomedical research facilities. Clever himself was sold to the Alamogordo Primate Research Facility on Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. He was never experimented on, though. When it leaked to the public that Clever Hands, the famous and adorable sign language chimp, sat languishing in a three-by-five-foot wooden box in the desert, waiting to be injected with hepatitis in order to be tested with experimental drugs, a small public outcry arose among animal rights activists. Eventually Clever wound up on a wildlife preserve in Texas. The wildlife preserve had no other chimps, and he spent several more years living in solitary confinement, until the Lawrences bought him and retired him to their ranch in southwestern Colorado, where he has been living ever since.
Clever had probably enjoyed a happier life than either Hilarious Larry or Lily. Larry’s and Lily’s minds had been reared only in dens of iniquity: noisy, smoke-filled tents resonant with squabbling and shouting voices and caterwauling children, where they would be treated to beatings, whippings, shocks and scourges if they did not clamber onstage to dance, to mock and humiliate themselves, to ride tricycles and remove their garments before the eyes of strangers. Hilarious Larry and Hilarious Lily were both broken, rattled, traumatized spirits; the ranch was as friendly a convalescent home as any for these two damaged souls to while away their days unto the ends of their haunted existences—but as content as their retirement may have been, they would clearly never be well again. But Clever was a somewhat different story: he had, in his way, been loved. He had been treated with respect by his handlers. Some of them, in any case. Of course their failure to “teach” him sign language was a failure not of Clever’s understanding, but of theirs. He still tried to communicate in sign language.
Now and then Clever would try to sign to me, thinking that maybe he finally had someone to talk to. I wish I could have understood him. Sadly, I did not. Instead he found in me a chimp who understood him only in the way that most humans would—that is, in every way but linguistically. One could easily look into Clever’s eyes and see that a great mind, a cultured consciousness, was alive and working away in there—but was pitifully imprisoned behind an opaque wall of incommunicability. His human adopters had gone so far with him and no farther; and the result was that they ignited in his soul a fierce desire to communicate, but provided him with inadequate tools to do so. His consciousness was like an unfinished sculpture whose clay had been allowed to harden before it had fully taken shape. You could see this in his eyes. For prerequisite to language is the desire to communicate, and prerequisite to the desire to communicate is the acknowledgment of the existence of consciousness outside of oneself.
I own that it sounds kitschy, Gwen; it sounds like sugary romanticism to say the eyes are the windows to the soul, but I wish that poeticism weren’t so shopworn, because I think that it is true. Look into the eyes of another being—the eyes!—these two glistening globs of light-perceiving jelly in our skulls are our only external organs that shoot directly back into our brains. When you look, and look directly and look deeply, into the centers of another creature’s eyes—into the eyes of another being that has consciousness, emotions, a mind—then you have a profound crisis of experience (or you should, if you’re doing it right): you realize that this other being that is outside of your body lives in a world that is entirely other to your own, and that it may know things that you may not, and that you may know things that it may not, and that it may be possible to exchange information—and then you will want to talk. You will want to exchange your worlds. This is the beginning, not yet of language, but of the mother of language, the desire to communicate. This desire begets the birth of the conversation, and a conversation should strike us as the most beautiful and miraculous phenomenon we know of: the collaborative sharing of consciousnesses that creates the necessity for external symbols. Then comes—all in a wild rush of experimentation and improvisation—symbolic logic, vocabulary, syntax, etc., etc. But you must first have this seed of language, the desire to communicate. And the tragedy of Clever Hands was that he was permitted to take these first and most important steps—to look into another’s eyes, recognize the other, and want to compare worlds—yet he never learned to “speak.” At least not in a way that could be responsibly documented and published, in any case. But that is a matter having to do with the nature of science, not the nature of nature. It’s a pity they are not always the same thing. It was as if Clever Hands were forced to live in a glass box, through which he could see others and hear what they were saying, and yet those outside of his prison could not hear him. He lived a lonely life.
The nature of science I know—and in some oblique way I would say I even knew this at the time—was at the heart of why the life that Lydia and I had shared and known together in Chicago had come to an abrupt end, and why we had been violently uprooted and replanted in this new location that was alien to me—to both of us, as a matter of fact. Our project had grown too strange and dangerous for fun
ding to keep coming from the normal channels through which scientific dollars flow. I understood that we were here in this unknown place in Colorado because we were refugees, banished to the fringes of science. We were refugees to whom the Lawrences kindly gave asylum.
Of course I understand that we were also there because I was an unpredictable and often violent little monster who had become an untenable legal liability to the university. After all, I was a “wild animal.” We were also there because the experiment so far had been in many respects an utter failure, a flop, a bust, a bomb. I had done nothing yet that other chimps—including Clever Hands, who sat mutely beside me in the backseat of Mr. Lawrence’s Jeep—had not done before. I shiver to think of what would have become of me if Norm had been able to completely terminate the experiment when he wanted to. I think that if the experiment had ended there—if the Lawrences had not snatched us from the flames when they did—I surely would have wound up much like poor Clever, trapped behind the half-silvered mirror of his mind.
I probably would have languished once again in the Lincoln Park Zoo for the rest of my life, having been picked up by the cruel and curious child of science, toyed with until boredom and then unceremoniously dropped, returned to my fellow animals with a mind now damaged, deformed, and deranged by human civilization but perversely ungifted with any of its benefits, not enough culture or language to build a communicative consciousness, and so doomed to sit forever in idiot moody silence, comprehending what is said and done all around me and yet unable to offer a word in return. Was it love—the love between me and Lydia—that saved me from such a fate?
No. Perhaps—this is what I think only when my mind is sunk in the mud of its darkest meditations—perhaps I should lend more of the credit for my successfully completed education into manhood to Mr. Lawrence than to Lydia, that I should say it was not so much our love but Mr. Lawrence’s money that saved me, because in this world that we have made for ourselves, love alone is powerless—everything is powerless—without capital. Yes, let’s face it: love was part of it, but honestly I was simply saved by a wealthy and generous man’s money. Love alone never saved a thing.
The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore Page 25