Lucy, a chimpanzee was taken in by Maurice Temerlin and his wife Jane. They raised Lucy as if she was their own child; treating her like any other human child. They wanted to see how human a chimpanzee could be. What they found out was indeed she could be. She could speak in sign language, which she used to combine words to create phrases for things she didn't know the actual word for proving she had an incredibly developed her brain. She even dressed herself, ate normal human meals, and even became attracted to human men, not to other chimpanzee males as would be expected. When Lucy got to old and challenging for Maurice and Jane they finally had to let her go. They let her go into the hands of Janis Carter. She became the caretaker for Lucy and many other chimpanzees as she led them to a lone island in order for them to finally be free. However Lucy's, being so human-like could not handle being abandoned and she was depressed for a long time. But, Janis, being a devoted caretaker, didn't leave for more than a year as she hoped Lucy would finally become comfortable with her surroundings and peers. Finally Janis left and returned a couple times to check up on Lucy. The second time she arrived on the island she was horrified to see the bones of Lucy. She had been poached and her hands were taken. Janis believed it happened because Lucy, being friendly and not afraid to be with humans, probably walked up to the poachers, not knowing what they were going to do to her. The last years of Lucy's life went on slowly and with not much enthusiasm, but she did teach the world about the incredible minds of chimpanzees
Overall Lucy taught the world much about chimpanzees brain and intelligence. She taught us that by being nurtured you can become a whole other species, and that nature can only play so much of a role when one is enveloped in another (similar) species environment and culture. She taught us that the things we do subconsciously, are incredible, like language and simple things of creating words and such.
Before I learned about Lucy, I knew chimpanzees were smart, but I never understood to what extent. Lucy was a groundbreaking discovery because she literally became a human. Besides the looks and small differences, she acted as a child. However, I never realized how close we truly are to chimpanzees.
I believe the experiment was not worth while for Lucy's sake because it ended in disspare and sadness. However, for those who saw this as a ground-breaking experiment believe it was important and definitely worthwhile. To me, I feel it could go either way because we learned so much yet we did put the life of a wild chimpanzee at risk.
The end to this emotional and amazing discovery put a damper on the whole story. It was already sad enough and these emotions just intensified as I heard about Lucy being poached. I was also angry that they would raise her and then leave her to her own defenses with no knowledge of the outside world. I was angry how they chose to treat her like a human and not follow up. Even though raising her for that long was difficult, I feel it was cruel to all of a sudden take away her life and make her change into a chimpanzee, which she could never return to.
No comments:
Post a Comment