My life with Lucy, the human chimp
Ex-teacher lived in jungle for six years training pal how to be wild
what am I doing? I did advertise for somebody to work for me and a couple of people answered.
“Neither got out of the boat on the jetty– the chimps just went nuts. This was a stranger to our little world, and they didn’t want anyone there at all.
“That left me, alone, completely alone with them. There was no one that could take over in my absence. They fulfilled all those human needs that I had for social contact.
“Lucy and I had more of a friendship. My feelings for Dash
[another chimp] it was more motheroffspring. I don’t know if I ever became a chimp so to speak. But I do think our personalities and cultural tendencies all met together at some point.” But the loneliness and slow progress took an increasing toll and at one stage Janis collapsed. When she came around she saw Lucy eating leaves, having at last followed Janis’s foraging example. “Lucy knew me very well, she was sensitive to moods,” she says. “It was perhaps a breaking point for her that she had to give in.” But there was more to do otherwise Lucy “couldn’t have survived” without Janis.
“She had to integrate socially with the chimps but wanted all her emotional needs met by me.
“So I had to withdraw for her to feel empty to the point she would look to someone else to fulfil those needs.”
It worked and months later a horror encounter with a “pumped-up” Dash convinced Janis to leave. “He was like bouncing on his toes,” she says. “I was gonna get it that day.
“I was leader, but he was the oldest male, so it was inevitable he was going to take over. He charged me... grabbed my leg and dragged me everywhere.”
Janis returned to the site for one more visit a year later, before that heartfelt final embrace from Lucy.
“At the end of it, she just got up turned around and walked back to the other chimps,” Janis recalls.
“It had been so hard for so long, I just never thought she would walk away from me. But Lucy had finally made it, which is what we all wanted.”
Lucy died the following year in 1987, but Janis remained in the region.
There is now a chimp sanctuary on the Gambian islands where 140 of the endangered animals run freely.
■ Lucy, the Human Chimp is on Channel 4 on Monday night at 9pm.
I don’t know if I became a chimp but I do think our and cultural tendencies met
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