Documentaries
on why she decided to live with a chimpanzee in the wild
WHEN SHE ASKED ME TO GROOM HER, IT WAS A VERY SPECIAL MOMENT
JANIS CARTER
When 25-year-old psychology graduate student Janis Carter applied for a part-time job in 1976, she could never have imagined it would lead to her living in the wild on an extraordinary mission to help a female chimpanzee achieve freedom.
The fascinating story begins in 1960s suburban America when psychologist Maurice ‘Maurie’ Temerlin and his wife, Jane, adopted a two-day-old chimp. Naming her Lucy, they set about raising her as if she were a human child, in the ultimate experiment of nature versus nurture.
But when Lucy reached maturity, the Temerlins realised that she was too strong to remain with her human family. So, in 1977, they decided to move her to the Abuko Nature Reserve in The Gambia, West Africa, in an attempt to teach her to be a wild chimp. They asked Janis – who had befriended Lucy while cleaning out her cage and making sure she was fed and watered – to accompany them to help with the settling-in process. However, when Lucy struggled to adapt to her new environment,
Janis decided to stay with her, and several more chimps, living on a remote, uninhabited island for six years.
This week,
Janis looks back on their incredible bond in a new C4 documentary,
Lucy, The Human Chimp.
‘Janis has waited 40 years to tell this story,’ says executive producer Matt Cole. ‘It takes us back to a very different time, but it has a powerful message for today.’
Here are some of the key moments in Janis and Lucy’s incredible friendship…
LEARNING TO COMMUNICATE
‘Lucy had been part of the sign language project, and she had 120 words in her vocabulary,’ recalls Janis. ‘She did try communicating with me, but my sign language was not up to the point where I could understand. Lucy was a very precise signer. She was a bit of a perfectionist, so when I asked her to repeat it, she kind of rolled her eyes like I was really dumb. She was very arrogant and very condescending.’
STEPS TO FREEDOM
‘Hearing that Lucy was going all the way to Africa seemed so out of left field,’ says Janis. ‘It was a big shock to me; I had never been to Africa. It wasn’t on my list of places to go either, but there was no way
I could say no. I needed to go, to give Lucy the support.
‘No one had taken a chimp that had been born in the States back to the wild, particularly one that had been deprived of growing up with chimpanzees.
‘The hope was that she would be part of a chimpanzee community and bond with them, but there were many, many steps and many, many hazards between the idea and the reality of that.
‘Lucy had a million physical reasons for being depressed, and she had the whopping emotional one of, “What am I doing here? Where are Maurie and Jane?” I had no way to explain this to Lucy.’