Original subtitles

Chimpanzee infant left with his mother is a thing, a lump.

Taken away, he acquires…

human psychological tests… performances,

which are well nigh unbelievable.

Nim was born at the primate center in Oklahoma,

and I went out there to get him.

I had never been near that many chimpanzees.

It was frightening and 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 6 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… this drama, this feeling of something about to happen.

And Dr. Lemmon shot her with a tranquilizing 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 acquire 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,

and a chimp could not have a better mother.

I know nothing about chimpanzees,

and I never actually sat down to study them, uh,

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, Vicky.

So why not teach 'em 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 2 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 3 children

and with my husband, who had 4 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? You know.

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…

It's not a human, it's a chimp, and it's 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 seventies.

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 3 months old, I think,

and starting to be ambulatory,

he was just right there.

Nothing passive, nothing passive ever.

You know, I think he figured that

he could just get in between Wer and Stephanie,

on some level.

When Wer put his arm around her,

and… and Nim just, you know,

half asleep having a bottle, you know…

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,

um, 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.

Um, 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… as a child.

I regarded him as an intelligent, personable center

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.

I mean, 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 mold 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, OK, we're off now.

We just got to build up the vocabulary.

As much as we were molding him,

we were molding these damn hands and all this stuff,

he was starting to mold us.

He knew every dynamic

that was in the room instantly.

He knew when you were upset,

whatever had happened in… whatever, you know, 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.

And it was amazing, you know. Just unconditional.

He was my lifeline, 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, you know, 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," you know? 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 hardwired 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… 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… 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 did… 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.

He… 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 disheveled

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.

You know, 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, um, anything language.

When Nim began to discover my body,

my nakedness, he'd be cur…

I mean, 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 a… was a…

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 realized 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 going to take Nim to school,

and I realize 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…

you know, words, words, words, words, words.

Word order, word order, word order.

Uh, he couldn't… he couldn't see anything else.

Herb started seeing the signs grow on that little graph,

every day,

every other day, every 3 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.

Um, and here I was married to a poet,

working for a linguist.

You know, I was… you know,

words were the… became the enemy.

She started restricting

the times we can come in the house.

Uh, she started throwing us out.

She apparently was,

uh, you know, 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, um, 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… it was heartbreaking…

Um…

Saying good-bye.

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'd pay for the heat.

And he said, "sure."

This was amazing.

This was a fairy tale.

We got… 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.

Um, 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… the… the daily bodily requirements

that Nim had had to be addressed, and very quickly.

I eventually couldn't handle the diapers anymore.

He was getting bigger, and he was eating more of our food.

So, pragmatically, I had to get him off those diapers.

I had 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 interesting,

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, uh, to Nim,

and they were supposed to also teach him

everyday activities.

Uh, dress yourself, undress yourself.

This sort of thing.

Like children, after they learn a few words,

uh, Nim has spontaneously put signs together.

In many instances, we allow,

uh, Nim to use his own signs

that he almost invents, so long as they're consistent.

For example, this is the sign for "play,"

um, 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 5 to 6 times the strength of a man.

And how are you going to be able to handle him then?

He had grown, I guess he was probably

something like that.

Um, and he, you know,

if you had to hold him, you really had to hold him.

And he'd gone from being this meek little huggable toy

to, uh, quite a robust young chimpanzee.

His eyeteeth 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 2 seconds,

uh, whether they were confident

or secretly unconfident.

If I stood up too quickly,

if I accidentally showed him my back too quickly,

uh, if I had food and I wouldn't… 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… I'd feel it inside,

that… 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, uh,

looking ahead with blinkers and not wanting to hear that.

This is 37 stitches.

Um, I had 4 here. 9 here.

This one sent me into the hospital.

This one, actually, was the most dangerous one

'cause 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 naive 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 in 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'd just like to feel the touch.

Something about it.

He'd, like… would hold her and be like…

And you could see him, like, shaking

because he'd be like so excited that he had her.

He actually, like, kind of pushed her down on the ground,

and then curled around her

and just, like, lay 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, "huh, jeez,

would he sort of stop this Laura thing?"

If someone showed me some attention,

I thought it meant that they cared for me.

He had power.

I am sure that, you know, unconsciously, I took advantage of her.

Um, 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 4 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.

I said, "oh, this is nice."

I didn't set out to have women on the project

predominantly, but it certainly turned out that way.

And, you know, 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 am I 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 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.

You felt… 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."

And 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.

You know, 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,

uh, that I was hoping for.

Dick, 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 have rather 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."

What?

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 recognizing situations

that he could take advantage 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 I'd say, you're going to hurt yourself.

That's a rock!

Like, look at himself and go, "what's that?"

As this whole thing with the physicality became,

um, you know, an issue,

we were much more cautious, I think,

about letting the cats around… around him,

letting him play with… 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."

Let go.

We realized… I think all of us did…

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 and about how to, you know,

sort of how to deal with Nim.

He doesn't want to jump into my arms.

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… you're holding… 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, we… you 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. "Aah."

He just crunched my face.

It just happened.

And I grabbed Nim and just dragged him into the house,

and he was like, ohh! "Sorry, sorry, sorry." And I'm, "no, no, no."

And I passed that armoire with that mirror

and saw all this blood.

He'd 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 that something like that happened.

Mm.

It was just… it was just bad.

I was probably worried that she would sue me,

um, or this would become a public…

this would become public knowledge about

how… life-threatening the project might be.

They couldn't sew it because of the infection and risk of infection,

so I had an open, gaping wound on my face for 3 months.

And when I got out of the hospital,

I said, you know, I… I want to see Nim.

He went, "ooh," 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.

It's 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 5 years,

because at 5 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 anymore,"

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 a chance to really analyze our data.

I just knew that we had reams of data.

This whole mass of data

that needed to be organized,

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 conclusion to that.

We had to wait and see.

It's kind of like, you know,

you get… you're almost there

and you feel like there's going to be a conclusion,

and, um, it's like,

OK. 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 OK.

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.

Then 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 tranquilizers

to reduce the possibility of his getting out of hand.

If he was tranquilized, he'd be easier to control

and not do any damage to the plane, which could be quite dangerous.

So that's how we'd 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.

And 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… 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.

'Cause 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 behavior.

We had to put up an electric fence around the island

'cause we had had several murders

and 2 suicides.

They'd just push them out into the water.

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 going to do.

And Nim was screaming and holding on to me very tightly.

And the only reason he let go

is because he got zapped with the electric prod.

OK. It's OK, it's OK.

Come here a minute. Mac, come here.

Mac, come here. Come here. Psst. 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.

Bill, whispering; Hey, do you want a tickle?

Look at that.

Sit down, Mac. Sit down.

Oh, no. Hey, Mac. Uh-uh. Bah.

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, you know, he and Mac got it off.

I feel very good about this

because I can leave now knowing that, um,

Nim has a friend,

and he's going to worry less about his human companions

and have, you know, 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.

Um, so I just decided I was going to do it.

You know, we coaxed him down there,

and then… Because he trusted us.

I just let him in there and took the lead

and tied it around the far end of the cage

and said good-bye and walked out

and shut the door.

He was sort of hooting and trying to come after me,

um, 'cause he didn't really know where he was,

but, um, I just… I just walked away.

And then when he wasn't looking,

he ran… Out the door.

I did feel badly.

Um, 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 anymore.

So you got to socialize,

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.

You know, they weren't ordinary chimps.

You know, they had the capacity for higher consciousness.

Terrace came back a year later.

Herb arrived, and…

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'm going to 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.

And it was…

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 can 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 behavior 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?

Sit down. 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.

And I didn't do the kind of things that…

that would interrupt the relationship

or the building of the relationship.

He, you know… he grows on you quick.

He's… was so charming.

I mean 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 teacher suggested,

and the motive of 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.

And 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, right?

Right.

And 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.

Uh, you can learn a list of words by rote,

and that says nothing about your ability to use 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.

Favorite sign, "play."

Hey.

Oh.

Oh, he certainly doesn't know which one to grab.

He knew what pot was, or hash, or whatever.

And he wanted to smoke a joint.

Yeah. I'm going to erase it.

Stone.

Smoke.

Now.

When we went out on walks with Nim, 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, I mean, hell, who doesn't?

And there's something in marijuana that…

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.

I had the best time of 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…

actually, being with Nim…

I'd rather be with Nim than Jerry,

and that's… for me, that's saying something.

That's real… yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's a banana?

You want to eat the shoe? Go for it.

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 in his pad and whatever,

and 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… ooh.

Obviously, he was checking out the chimps for the lab.

Lemsip is best known by its acronym,

I-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, um,

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…

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. Come here.

Come here.

Don't… it's all right. It's over.

It's all over.

It's all 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 Ba…

a new batch of vaccine can be released on the American market,

it must be tested in 4 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 realized 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…

of 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… that's 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… 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 a chimp. Bring him to court.

Our opponents were pig-headed, but they weren't stupid.

They realized 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, OK, you don't get a television

if that's going to 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.

And they wanted to make that pretty clear.

And they did make that pretty clear.

You know, "if you come here, you'll be arrested."

I… I… I felt it, you know,

and I just wanted to…

like, 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,

but he never slept in the bed in his house.

One time when he came in the house,

there was a little white poodle.

Thing 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… this is a very miserable chimpanzee, you know.

He'd had such a checkered life.

He'd gone from here, to here, to here, to here, to here.

They should be left…

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 recognized 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 recognized 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… a, "oh, isn't he beautiful,"

or anything like that.

He was… 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 going to sign?

If it's going to happen, what's it going to 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.

Opened the gate and walked in.

Nim went up to the, like, first-and-a-half story.

Something like that. Pretty high up.

And I realized 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 thought he was going to kill her,

that he was going to 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 fun,

they purchased a female chimpanzee to be with him.

Around 10 years after that,

I heard she was in failing health.

I was worried that Nim was gonna be on his own again.

At that same time I was told that a new guy had taken over the ranch,

and his name was Chris Byrne.

And so I approached Chris about visiting Nim.

Once I met Chris,

I was really, really reassured

that things were gonna be much better for Nim.

Look, Nim. Somebody's come to see you.

Oh, he's got his hackles up.

Aww.

- Hey, it's OK. - Hi, Nim.

What's up, bud? Nim.

He's going to do a couple of minutes of displaying.

Oh, that's OK. 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.

It's been a long time.

Yes!

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 a while, though. It's taken a long time.

It 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, Lou-Lou. 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 going to be your new roommate.

Ready? Yeah. Yeah.

Isn't that nice?

He wants some of that yogurt.

Look at that.

What do you think, Mitch?

I told you it would be nice, didn't I?

Jim Mahoney moved literally 50, 60 chimps.

And we did, indeed, get 2 chimps from Lemsip

through Mahoney to black beauty ranch.

Mitch was a youngish adult male,

and Lou-Lou was very gentle.

Lou-Lou immediately went to her defense,

and Nim came over.

Very good, Lou-Lou. She's so good.

Yeah, your friend, Lou-Lou.

I think Mitch and Lou-Lou really helped him out enormously.

What, now you're making noises for it.

What's… what's the name of this?

Hey… I'm… Nim's. Nim's what?

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… they'll forgive you.