The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (33 page)

Isn’t it an odd concept, Gwen? Living with domesticated animals
for pleasure? I’ve always thought so. I say “pleasure” because I’m not talking about the more utilitarian human valuations on animals: dogs to alert us of intruders, cats to mouse, horses to ride, sheep to shear, cows and pigs to eat. I’m talking about animals employed exclusively as “pets.” Animals that humans care for simply out of—what, love? Is that the right word? Love? We may weep when they die, do we not? Or entertainment? Think of chihuahuas, shih tzus, Yorkshire terriers: indeed, it seems we deliberately breed dogs for certain traits solely to make us laugh! What a strange thing it is for us to keep animals for primarily emotional reasons. The social contract we seem to have with our pets is that we continue to keep them alive and safe and fed in exchange for the amusement and emotional satisfaction they provide us. At first this idea will strike a first-generation immigrant to the human species—such as myself—as more than a little bizarre. I suppose, in a way, I myself have personal experience with being a pet, for what is a zoo animal but a public pet? But household pets—dogs, cats—these are the animals human beings have selected to take with them as passengers on their insane journey through, over, and against nature. We have such a tortured relationship with the other animals that live in our world, Gwen. Even as we ridicule them, we can let ourselves love them. I would come to know Sukie well.

Mr. Lawrence scooted back his chair, stretched his long denim-clad arms and sang out a playful noise that was half yawn and half yodel.

“What say we take a tour of the ranch?” he said.

“We would love to,” said Lydia, looking at me.

Rita cleared the table and began to wash the dishes. Clever Hands seemed to want to come with us, as did Sukie, the dog. Hilarious Larry and Lily expressed no especial interest in Mr. Lawrence’s proposed outing, and so Mrs. Lawrence announced that she would stay behind to keep them company.

Lydia and I returned to the room we had slept in the previous night to bundle ourselves up in our coats and hats and to put on our shoes. When we came back downstairs, Mr. Lawrence was already all duded out in a fresh cowboy hat, cowboy boots, and a pair of bottle-green aviator sunglasses. Clever Hands also wore a cowboy hat, a very small one that fit him well. Sukie, sensing action was imminent, scurried around wildly and yapped at their feet. Seeing the rugged Western garb that Clever and Mr. Lawrence both wore, Lydia and I suffered flashes of acute embarrassment at our fancier, more urban clothes. Mr. Lawrence led us into a long, spacious garage, and of the cars that were parked in it, he selected a green Jeep, whose canvas top was down. We all piled into this automobile: Mr. Lawrence driving, Lydia in the passenger seat, me and Clever in the back, with Sukie yelping and slobbering between us. Clever was quite comfortable with the dog. After the initial hubbub of getting into the car, Sukie relaxed and lay down on the backseat of the Jeep, resting her furry head in Clever’s lap. Clever grinned at me with an almost conspiratorial mischievousness. He was glad to have my company.

As he sat next to me in the car, Clever was making all kinds of weird movements with his hands at me. His eyes were wide and imploring as he made all these enigmatic gestures with his hands and arms and fingers. I did not understand what he was getting at. Later I would realize that he was trying to communicate with me in sign language.

Mr. Lawrence, by the touch of a button, commanded the garage door to roll noisily open on greased metal tracks to reveal the sun, the pale blue sky, and the bright snowy mountains that corrugated the horizon, and the Jeep grumbled out of the garage and into the day. I had seen this place at night, but by the light of day—oh!—I had no idea that this earth might contain a place so beautiful, that all these rocks and plants, all this water and dirt, could have ever
arranged themselves into such spectacular formations! The air was fresher, sharper, sweeter-smelling, and the light was crisper here, such that everything in sight seemed to be hypernaturally well-defined, in focus, more sharply drawn, as if the air and light of the city had a way of making things a little blurry, like a soft-focus lens. There was snow on the ground, but it was not particularly cold outside.

“We started the ranch as a sanctuary for endangered animals,” Mr. Lawrence said to Lydia, as I looked around at the landscape.

Clever had decided that I could not understand him. He sighed in resignation and quit trying to sign to me. Sukie sat between us and panted. Her flat pink tongue hung out of her mouth, slightly pulsating in and out of it with the rhythm of her panting. Occasionally her tongue would dry out and she quit panting to bring it back inside of her, swallow, and smile. Then she would let it fall back out of her mouth and continue the business of panting until her tongue dried out again. Clever gingerly stroked her fur.

“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?

I
n 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.