DOCUMENTARY
She had devoted a decade to caring for Lucy the chimpanzee. But in an instant Janis Carter knew her friend no longer needed her. Lucy gave her a cuddle before swiftly turning to rejoin the other chimps and head off into the Gambian jungle.
Recalling the day for a new documentary, emotional Janis says: “We groomed each other and talked, then she grabbed me and pulled me really tight.
“It was very intense, it was not like any other embrace we had had.
“Lucy still loved me, that was very, very clear, but she didn’t need me in the way she had for so many years.”
Janis, now 70, had spent more than six extraordinary years in the Gambian rainforest – with almost no human contact – teaching Lucy to be wild.
It was as a 25-year-old student in 1976 that she had her first lifechanging meeting with the chimp, who was raised as a human in an experiment by psychotherapist Maurice Temerlin and his family in the US.
She was there to clean the cages but Janis and Lucy clicked, so much so her new pal trusted her above her owners.
“She asked me to groom her,” Janis said. “It was a very special moment for me. It was our moment.”
Once Janis started to go inside Lucy’s cage the pair began to talk in sign language.
Lucy knew 120 signs, slept on a human bed and could serve tea to guests.
But she soon became too big – and too destructive – for the home.
When Maurice and wife Jane decided to send her to her natural habitat in Gambia in 1977 Janis went along too.
The process was expected to take weeks and the Temerlins returned home after a fortnight. But Janis never left.
First Lucy lived in the Abuko nature reserve, but she was slow to learn the laws of the jungle.
When she was moved to a remote island uninhabited by humans in May 1979, Janis decided to go along too.
For her own safety from local leopards and hippos she slept in a cage alongside Lucy and eight other chimps. Despite no electricity or running water and letters arriving only every six months, Janis stayed for more than six years.
Being forced to decide whether to leave her pal suddenly made her “aware of the depth of my feeling for Lucy”.
With no training Janis says she learnt through “trial and error”, adding: “Whatever I’d thought the chimp would have done I would try to do that myself.”
She had left behind her boyfriend and a career as a teacher and it was tough.
Janis says: “I did think to myself, Jesus