In the next scene, she’s solving a puzzle in a lab. The movie begins in Africa with the capture of a female chimpanzee. Watching it, I was struck by how much the protagonist’s story paralleled Nim’s. He died in 2000 at the age of 26, quite young for an animal that can live up to 45 years in the wild and 60 in captivity.īy the time Project Nim ended, I was ready to cheer on the ape rebellion in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. But there’s no real happy ending for him. Nim eventually gets some chimp companionship. He lives there in almost total isolation, as the owners don’t know how to care for an ape. Later he moves to a sanctuary-for horses. He is sold to a medical lab for vaccine testing. One former worker describes Nim as a “spoiled child.” The workers shock the animals with cattle prods to keep them in line. Nim gets locked up, forced to live alone in a small cage next to the cages of strange creatures he’d never seen before: other chimps. ![]() This scene is why you should bring tissues to the theater. Nim is then returned to the Oklahoma lab. “Nobody keeps a chimp for more than five years,” Terrace says. One former teacher claims Nim used the sign “dirty,” meaning he needed to use the bathroom (he knew how to use a toilet), to get out of the classroom.Īs Nim got older, he became stronger, unpredictable-and violent (his teachers have the scars to prove it he bit one woman’s face so hard that she had a gaping hole in her cheek for months.) This is normal for a chimpanzee. Nim also made trips to the university’s campus for language training sessions, which he apparently disliked. Nim lived there with a few college students who were his teachers. This time he brought him to an old mansion in the New York suburbs owned by Columbia. Lacking results, Terrace once again took Nim away from his mother. Life there was chaotic, with few rules, and no one in Nim’s human family really knew sign language. Terrace gave Nim to one of his former graduate students, a mother in a Brady Bunch-style household. The best way to do this, Terrace thought, was to raise Nim among humans. Because apes do not have the proper physiology to speak, Terrace decided to teach Nim sign language. Herbert Terrace, a psychologist at Columbia University, wanted to see if he could communicate with a chimpanzee through language (Nim was named after linguist Noam Chomsky). In 1973, just days old, Nim was taken from his mom at an ape lab in Oklahoma and brought to New York City. Project Nim chronicles the life of Nim Chimpsky, the chimpanzee who was the focus of one of the most (in)famous ape language studies. The documentary Project Nim and the sci-fi flick Rise of the Planet of the Apes offer audiences very different forms of simian entertainment, but moviegoers will walk away from both wondering, “Is it ethical to use chimps in research?” We have contacted the University and have discontinued our funding.” This is a big victory for animals and an encouraging sign that animal experimentation is rapidly on its way to becoming another chapter in the history of severely messed-up stuff we wish we had never thought of in the first place.It’s the summer of the chimpanzee, at least at the movies. Strickland also talked about a deadly physiology test on taste reception in rats that PETA had discovered Coca-Cola was funding through the year 2008, saying, “Recently senior management became aware that research involving rats was being conducted as part of a grant we had funded at Virginia Commonwealth University to study taste reception. … We are sending letters to our partners and research organizations who may conduct safety evaluations on … ingredients insisting they use alternatives to animal testing ….” “The Coca-Cola Company does not conduct animal tests and does not directly fund animal tests on its beverages. Here’s what Coca-Cola’s senior vice president, Danny Strickland, said in his letter to us announcing the company’s decision: Coke had something of a history of invasive animal experimentation-including cutting open chimpanzees’ faces in order to conduct taste tests and force-feeding chemicals to rodents to test “caramel color”-so this compassionate decision by the company is a huge step forward, and it sends a powerful message to all companies that still test on animals about how a responsible, progressive company does business. ![]() Just weeks after Pepsi announced that it would stop testing on animals, Coca-Cola has sent a letter to PETA announcing that it will no longer fund or conduct animal experiments.
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