Project Nim

Nim and (true) friend Bob Ingersoll

I rented the movie/documentary Project Nim from Netflix last week. For a long time now I have been interested in learning more about our primate relatives, chimps, bonobos, gorillias etc. I have posted blogs about Lucy, and Washoe, both based on books, and while I've heard of Nim, I was unfamiliar with his story, so I thought I'd check it out.
Just the fact that the title of the film, prefaces his name with "Project" should have warned me that I wasn't going to like it (the content not the cinematography). And true enough, within the first five minutes I was almost in tears. Nim was one of something like 10 babies that the mother Carolyn, had snatched away from her right after birth. She lived in a small cell, with no fresh air or toys and after every one of her babies was born they were taken from her. She knew they were going to be taken, and they had to tranquilize her and then get the baby before she smothered it, trying to protect it. It was so sad and terrible and awful to see the actual video of when they took Nim from his mother.
The film shows footage of Nim growing up, and learning to sign, and in between there are interviews with the people involved in the project. The douche-bag womanizing professor in charge, the "research" assistants that happened to be almost exclusively pretty women, his teachers, the animal handlers at the research facility where Nim eventually ended up...
The man in charge, Herb Terrace was....well I can't even say exactly what I think of him here because it would be probably be offensive to some, and very unlady-like for sure. But basically he thought of Nim as a big furry...goldfish, something that had no self-awareness or feelings at all. And so he just did whatever he felt like, with not so much as a hint of remorse for the suffering he was creating. He took Nim first from his mother, then just as abruptly took him from his foster mother, then after several years, when Nim got too big, he just up and ended the project and dumped the chimp off at the grossly under-achieving place where he had been born. A chimp who had been raised as a person, who wore clothes, and liked to play with his pet cat, and slept in a bed was suddenly thrown in a cage and treated like an animal. I cannot even begin to express how angry it makes me to think that people got away with doing things like that, without any consequences.  As far as I am concerned I think Herb Terrace should spend the rest of his life in prison for what he did. Put him in a cage and see how he likes it.
That wasn't even the end of it, nor the worst of it either. Nim, and all the other chimps at the place where he was taken were sold to a research facility where they were testing vaccines for hepatitis and other stuff. They had some video of the researchers infecting the chimps, and the tiny cages they were housed in, and I actually felt physically sickened by the sight of it. It is...I don't understand how someone could see what I was seeing and not think it was wrong. There was Nim trying to sign to them to let him out of his cage, or to play with him, or hug him, and they didn't have the sense that injecting him with an infectious and painful disease was inhumane? He was talking to them for crying out loud!
Eventually Nim, and some (but not all) of the other chimps were rescued, but it wasn't an easy life for them. They were in cages for the rest of their lives, sometimes with other chimps, sometimes by themselves, lonely and bored, never having a choice or a say in what they wanted. Nim was reunited with his foster mother after ten or so years and his response was not like that of a dog wagging his tail happily. Nim was angry at her. She had betrayed him and he remembered.
The movie was sad but insightful too, and gave a good variety of perspectives of Nim, and chimps in general. The comparisons of him to a human child, the intelligent "person" that he was, the unpredictable beast he could be. (For example he would bite his teachers and then immediately feel remorse and sign that he was sorry for hurting them.) Half of the people who were interviewed said he was essentially a person, the other half said he was just an animal. I think they were both wrong. I think he was both person and wild animal....but, and maybe this is the point that we really need to remember, aren't we all?