The Divide
A WORLD - FAMOUS BONOBO AND THE CELEBRATED PSYCHOLOGIST WHO RAISED HIM ARE NO LONGER ALLOWED TO SEE EACH OTHER. A STORY ABOUT THE MYSTERIOUS BOUNDARY BETWEEN HUMANS AND APES
A noted researcher spent 30 years studying and at times living with bonobos. But then primatologists questioned the wisdom of probing the inner lives of apes
ONE SPRING DAY IN 2005, a yellow school bus carrying six passengers turned onto a freshly paved driveway seven miles southeast of downtown Des Moines, Iowa. Passing beneath a tunnel of cottonwood trees listing in the wind, it rumbled past a lifesize sculpture of an elephant before pulling up beside a new building. Two glass towers loomed over the 13,000-square-foot laboratory, framed on three sides by a glittering blue lake. Sunlight glanced off the western tower, scrunching the faces pressed to the windows of the bus. Only three of them were human.
When the back door swung open, out climbed Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, her sister and collaborator Liz Pugh, a man named William Fields, and three bonobo apes, who were joining a group of five bonobos who had recently arrived at the facility. The $10 million, 18-room compound, known then as the Great Ape Trust, bore little resemblance to a traditional research center. Instead of in conventional cages, the apes, who ranged in age from 4 to 35, lived in rooms, linked by elevated walkways and hydraulic doors they could open themselves. There was a music room with drums and a keyboard, chalk for drawing, an indoor waterfall, and a sunwashed greenhouse stocked with bananas and sugar cane. Every feature of the facility was designed to encourage the apes’ agency: They could help prepare food in a specialized kitchen, press the buttons of a vending machine for snacks, and select DVDs to watch on a television. A monitor connected to a camera outside allowed the bonobos to screen human visitors who rang the doorbell; pressing a button, they granted or denied visitors access to a viewing area secured by laminated glass. But the center’s signature feature was the keyboard of pictorial symbols accessible on computerized touchscreens and packets placed in every room and even printed on researchers’ T-shirts. It consisted of more than 300 “lexigrams” corresponding to English words—a lingua franca that Savage-Rumbaugh had developed over many years to enable the bonobos to communicate with human beings.
“A lot of scientists don’t want that kind of study done. Because if the answer were yes ...” Here yes spark led .“Then, oh my god— who are we? ”