Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
THE BESTIE
Chimp Nim was sign lingo champ
The Jungle Book movie showed power-crazed cartoon orangutan King Louie telling man-cub Mowgli: “I wanna be like you, I wanna walk like you, talk like you, too.”
Well, one real-life orangutan managed to do just that.
Chantek stopped “monkeyin’ around” and learned to live like a human.
He is still the only orangutan to master sign language and “speak” with humans. But he did not stop there.
The lovable primate learned to direct drivers to his favourite fast food takeaway, tell lies, and play practical jokes.
He even went to university, listening to lectures and posing for yearbook pictures with students.
Chantek died on Monday, aged 39, having changed the way we view apes.
Professor Lyn Miles, who raised and taught him until he was eight years-old, says: “It was magical. Sometimes I felt like his servant, but I very much thought of Chantek as my foster son.
“I feel like I had the luckiest job in the world.” Chantek was born in captivity at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center near Atlanta, Georgia. But after being rejected by his mother, he was chosen for a unique experiment at the University of Tennessee in 1978.
He was sent to live in a trailer with Lyn, an anthropologist who raised him as a human child.
She dressed him in nappies and romper suits to study whether apes could learn human behaviour.
Lyn learned sign language and began teaching it to Chantek. But the NIM Chimpsky, named as a dig at Noam Chomsky, the US philosopher who said language was uniquely human, was the first chimp to master sign language.
He was raised in a human home from the age of two weeks for a study by the experiment was derided by other scientists as a waste of time.
“They told me orangutans weren’t interesting because they could never communicate,” Lyn recalls.
Within weeks, Chantek proved the doubters wrong.
He didn’t just learn words, he started stringing them together. He started with basic instructions like “food eat” and “gimme drink”. Soon, he added words for all his favourite things: apple, bike, toy and Lyn. It was all the University of Columbia in New York. Nim reportedly “signed” a 16-word sentence asking for an orange to eat.
After the study, he went back to the Institute of Primate Studies, Oklahoma, and died in 2000, aged 27. more remarkable as he was still just nine months old, an age when most babies are babbling incoherently.
He learned to sign more than 150 words. If he didn’t know a suitable word, he would combine several others to achieve the effect. Ketchup became “tomato toothpaste” while his beloved Big Macs were “cheese meat bread”.
Encouraged by Chantek’s success with sign language, Lyn started sending him to nursery, where he proved a hit with his classmates. He loved painting, being tickled, and having his fur vacuumed.
At home, he learned to make his own breakfast in the morning and tidy his room. Lyn says: “He had toys and he had human doctors, not vets.”
Chantek was given pocket money, which he spent on cheeseburgers and ice cream, trips to the amusement park, and rides to the local eaterie.
He started going to lectures with the university students.
Incredibly, he even learned to lie – something he did on average three times a week.
Lyn says: “He’d tell me he had to g the bathroom, then go in there jus