When the world’s most widely admired scientist died this month, still on the job at 91, her meeting with a now largely forgotten chimpanzee leapt to mind.
Jane Goodall and I found ourselves standing inside a dismal room on the campus of Central Washington University in Ellensburg one day in the 1980s, looking at something neither of us wanted to see: primates imprisoned behind bars inside a small space, unable to go outside.
We were visiting a celebrity, Washoe the chimp, and her adopted son, Loulis.
Goodall had changed our understanding of non-human primate intelligence by documenting wild chimp behavior in Tanzania. She did not go to there just to study chimps, of course; she was there to study us. Genetically, chimps are our closest kin. Observing them in the wild, it was thought, might give us clearer insights into our own nature.
Goodall had come to Ellensburg partly because something that never had happened in Earth’s history seemed to be happening inside that building: Washoe was the first non-human to learn to communicate with humans in American Sign Language, according to the people who taught it to her. An astonishing claim.
Even more hair-raising was that Washoe had taken it upon herself to teach sign language to Loulis, and they sometimes used it to communicate with one another, according to Washoe’s trainer, Dr. Roger Fouts.
Washoe’s former owners, University of Nevada cognitive researchers R. Allen Gardner and Beatrix T. Gardner, said Washoe also could combine signs in ways she hadn’t been taught. Riding in the car one day she saw swans on a lake. Unprompted, Washoe signed “Water. Birds.”
Harvard psychologist Roger Brown aptly summed up the sensation caused by news of this barrier-breaking interspecies communication — it “was like getting an S.O.S. from outer space.”
Nothing seems to alarm some scientists more than being confronted with evidence that animals have more intellectual/emotional capacity than humans want them to have. Academic attacks challenging claims that Washoe understood the meaning of what she was signing were unsparing. Consequently, funding for such studies dried up.
During our visit, Fouts cautioned us against getting close to Washoe’s cage. If out of sorts, she might spit on us.
Washoe had reason to spit.
Washoe’s journey
Born in West Africa, her provenance was murky. Carried here by the United States Air Force as a baby, she came under the care of the Gardners, a childless couple, at age 10 months. For five years they raised her as a human child while reportedly using only American Sign Language to communicate with her.
Washoe wore clothes and sometimes ate with the Gardners at their dinner table. She had her own trailer with a couch, cooking area, refrigerator and a bed with sheets and blankets. She had toys, tea parties and a toothbrush, played outdoors and did chores.
Fouts was a psychology student when he was hired to help train her. The first time the often stand-offish Washoe saw him, she ran to him, catapulted into his arms and embraced him.
When the Gardners were done with Washoe, they assigned Fouts to continue her training at the University of Oklahoma’s Institute of Primate Studies. Allan Gardner told Fouts: “Now Washoe belongs to science.”
In Oklahoma, science wanted more from Washoe than Fouts was prepared for her to give. Controversy over the ethics of invasive animal experimentation had become heated, and Fouts said he wanted to find Washoe a home where she would be safe from it.
That turned out to be in Ellensburg at what would become Central Washington University Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute. But no one was pretending that those cramped living quarters were a humane solution to housing an animal raised to live, and converse, with humans.
Goodall quietly studied Washoe while Fouts told us about her. I studied Goodall studying Washoe. Washoe studied us.
What did the world’s foremost authority on wild chimps think about what was being done to captive ones in the name of science?
Powerful voice
I tried to draw Goodall out on this touchy question, but she wasn’t going there. Diplomatic and circumspect, she radiated the calmness that allowed her to disarm wild creatures — and journalists.
Yet she did have an answer. Goodall became the world’s most powerful voice for humane treatment of captive animals.
Goodall addressed the Washington State Legislature In April of 1989, urging funding of a new home for Washoe and four other chimps. “It will bring credit to the university, and it will bring added recognition to the amazing chimpanzee beings who for so long people have really not understood at all,” she testified.
Taxpayers paid 90% of the $2.3 million spent to build a new home for the chimps. In 1993, before they were moved, they were shown a video of it and given a signed tour by Debbie and Roger Fouts, then tranquilized overnight. When they awoke, they recognized their new home, the institute reported.
Washoe died in 2007 at age 42; 300 humans attended her memorial. In 2012, a bronze statue of Washoe signing “Friend” was erected in Friendship Park in Ellensburg. In 2013, the institute closed. In 2018, the building erected to house Washoe was demolished to build dorms for human primates.
And Jane Goodall? She died while traveling 300 days a year urging us to treat animals, the Earth and one another with more care.
Solveig Torvik lives in Winthrop.
