Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh Page A

hammer around in her hand, but still was frustrated by her lack of success. After eight minutes, Ricci joined Nina, who immediately gave the hammer to her mother. Ricci took the hammer and, with deliberate slowness, turned the hammer to the most effective position, cracked some nuts (which she shared with Nina), and handed the hammer back. Nina took the hammer, held it in the position demonstrated by her mother, and proceeded to open four nuts. This example is particularly interesting, said Boesch, because “the mother, seeing the difficulties of her daughter,
corrected an error
in her daughter’s behavior in a very conspicuous way and then proceeded to demonstrate to her how it works with the proper grip.” 17
    These instances are the first field examples of active teaching—another behavior supposedly unique to humans—in a nonhuman primate population. As Kathleen Gibson kept remarking throughout the conference, “Every time I learned something unique about humans, it wasn’t unique!” The gap was closing, or at least bridgeable.
    As the week wore on, I grew anxious for an opportunity to show the video of Kanzi: Sydel Silverman finally relented under my repeated requests and promised that I could show my tape. I had lugged an American machine with me, along with all the required adapters, so I could run the tape (which has different specifications from European videotapes). I had been testing the system in my hotel room a few days before I was due to show the tape. Disaster struck. I had left the machine plugged in when a series of power outages—common in the region, I learned later—destroyed a key component in the set. Philip Lieberman, an expert on the structure of the vocal tract and a professor at Brown University, helped me search for replacement parts in the local town. He stripped the set down, put in the new parts,reassembled it all—but it still failed to work. In desperation, I called LRC (the Language Research Center, my lab in Georgia) and asked if a tape could be transformed to European specifications and sent express to Cascais. It arrived late, not until the very last day.
    With the tape in hand, I was now ready for Kanzi to demonstrate to a critical but finally open-minded audience just why the remaining bricks in the constantly patrolled man/animal wall should be cast aside.

2
The Meaning of Words
    I first saw chimpanzees in the St. Louis “monkey show” when I was about eight years old. They rode a motorcycle and walked on stilts. They wore clothes and sometimes had temper tantrums in which they began screaming at each other in the middle of the show. I remember thinking that the things they were doing looked like fun, but that the chimpanzees themselves did not look as if they were having a good time, except for the one who was permitted to ride the motorcycle. He went round and round with his chin tucked down and a rather fiendish grin on his face that I can still recall. He jumped the bike through a hoop of fire for the finale—and all this was before Evel Knievel.
    I wondered how the chimps felt about what they were doing. I tried hard to broach that question with my parents, but they seemed to think it was an odd question and dismissed it, saying something about how it was not really possible to tell exactly how animals felt about things, since they could not talk.
    I also saw the lion and tiger show, in which a trainer with a whip kept ten different large cats on pedestals while each took a turn doing tricks. The most impressive trick was when one of them jumped through a flaming hoop. In contrast to the chimpanzee on the motorcycle, the cat seemed afraid. He readily jumped through the hoop without the fire, but when it was lit, he hesitated and had to be persuaded with a great deal of whip cracking by a trainer who was sweating profusely. At the time, Ihad no sense of how dangerous apes can be; neither, I think, did the rest of the audience.
    The big cats, however, looked perfectly