Poor Lucy

Lucy Temerlin was not a movie star, or a human even. Lucy was a chimpanzee born in 1964 and part of an experiment conducted by Dr. Maurice Temerlin, and his wife Jane to see what would happen if a chimp was raised as a human child. The following might sound unbelievable, and sad but it's all true.
So Lucy was raised as a little girl, and lived with the Temerlin's for 12 years. She wore clothes, and was potty trained. She ate with silverware at the dinner table. She learned 120 signs in sign language. She would make tea (boil water, get tea bags out of pantry, the whole thing from start to finish) for guests that came over to visit her. She had a pet cat which she took care of. She loved gin and tonics, and mixed her own. She could lie, and did so frequently when she thought she was going to get in trouble. She watched TV, and liked to color and flip through magazines. Like a normal child she was terrified when they introduced her to another chimpanzee, and said she thought it was ugly. Lucy thought she was a human. When separating pictures of animals and humans she was 100% accurate except when she placed her own photo on the "human" pile. She was not attracted to chimps but rather human men, and she masturbated to PlayGirl magazine, and ads with attractive men in them. She was very perceptive to human moods and often tried to make people feel better by giving lots of hugs and being silly to "cheer them up".
She was, for all intents and purposes, a little girl with friends, hobbies and all the normal little girl things.
But after 12 years the experiment had run it's course. So Dr. Temerlin and his wife took Lucy to a chimpanzee reserve in Africa where they basically abandoned her. They stayed a week to help their "daughter" adjust to living in the jungle, and then went home and got on with their lives. Lucy who had been a raised as a human child, who lived in a house and slept in a bed, who had a mom and dad, who liked to have tea parties and watch movies, was literally dumped by her parents into the middle of the jungle all on her own. She was terrified. She didn't know how to forage for food and she was afraid of the other chimps.
Luckily there was a woman named Janis Carter who stayed with Lucy for several years and helped her adjust.
There was no happy ending for Lucy though. In 1987 Lucy's body was found by Janis. She had been skinned and her hands and feet had been cut off. And that's the end of the story.

When I read about this I was outraged. I still am. That poor little chimp. That a supposed scientist (a psychotherapist, if you can believe that) could be so cruel and heartless is beyond my imagination. How could they raise her like a child and then treat her like an animal afterward? It just boggles my mind. The traditional superiority that we have when we think about our place in the animal world is wrong. These kinds of experiments would never happen if we didn't incorrectly label humans and animals as two separate things. I don't know if this kind of experimentation still happens or not, but I certainly hope it doesn't. I'll tell you something, some days I feel privileged to be a member of my species, and some days I am ashamed of it. The day I "met" Lucy I was the latter.