When tiger moms go ape: why so much strife about the mystery of raising the kids?

Photo by Shawn Thompson

The controversy about tiger moms reminds me of what happens when human beings take the role of being a parent to an ape. There can be a lot of tension and strife.

A tiger mom like Amy Chua in her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother argues for an aggressive, controlling mother to forge a successful, responsible and accomplished child.

That notion stings the sense of parenthood in the west, which has opted more for freedom, independence and self-esteem in raising children. I'll call that the rabbit mom because I can't think of a better name.

Some say the tiger mom produces angry, frustrated, anxious children.

Some say the rabbit mom produces irresponsible, passive, self-indulgent children who don't have sensible goals in life.

The clash is fierce between these points of view, tiger and rabbit. Both sides are sensitive to the idea that the kids will suffer the consequences. Plus, if one side is right, the other is wrong, and that is damaging to the sense of self of the parent. Tigers don't want to live like rabbits and rabbits don't want to live like tigers. Hence the heat of the controversy about tiger moms -- which are also found in the west, I might add. Just look who is yelling at her children the loudest from the sidelines at a game of hockey or soccer. That is no rabbit.

But what is also intriguing about this is the similarity in the clash of points of view when human beings are looking after orphan orangutans. I saw this when I was writing my book about orangutans, The Intimate Ape. I didn't write about the depth of this strife in the book because I wanted to keep the focus on orangutans.

But the IMAX film being released this April called Born To Be Wild, about orangutans and elephants, features the primatologist Birute Galdikas, who has been at the centre of the controversy for years in orangutan circles.

The issue with children, human or ape, is how much involvement the parent should have in the life of the child. How much should a parent try to shape and control the life of a child? Does too much contaminate the child? Does too little leave the child adrift?

Birute Galdikas in Borneo       Photo by Shawn Thompson

I don't want to take sides on the red ape version of the controversy. However, I can say from the time  I spent with Galdikas in Borneo that Galdikas believes in more involvement in the lives of young orangutans than others, who want the apes returned to the jungle quickly for more independence and less contact with human beings. Galdikas thinks human beings should be more involved in nurturing orphan orangutans, aware that they normally spend eight years with their mother learning how to be whole, well-functioning members of orangutan society.

When it comes to an issue like this of orangutans, the ape kids, the human emotions get hot and explosive. I can tell you that I have seen human beings on the verge of virtual combustion.

Tiger mom

When I look at the controversy that the tiger mom situation has fuelled, and the polarization that develops between east and west, male and female, husband and wife, parent and child, I see extremes, which are by nature polarized.

Each side chooses an extreme and tries to make its case by selecting examples of just the success or failure, the disaster or the miracle, of the extreme. We all know someone who is an example of the extreme. Grouping them together just proves that we know how to group things that are similar together.

Human beings may have some need to see extremes, to be in opposition, to create strife, whether it is politically or in relationships or in the treatment of apes. 

Human beings can create opposition and strife out of good intentions. That is one unexamined aspect of the tiger mom controversy.

Can we ever manage that side of ourselves to raise children, make a marriage work, settle the politics of a nation, and save a species like orangutans from extinction?

Where is the ability to negotiate with the tiger mom? 

Practically, as Aristotle would say, the mediation is in moderation. We can mix east and west, tiger and rabbit, parent and child, person and ape. It's a blending, not a polarization.

I have to add, as the father of two children, neither of whom turned out like Charlie Sheen, sometimes kids just turn out to be themselves whatever you do. I see the same thing happen as a teacher. You might amplify or dampen a trait or two, in a student, in a child, but how much do you ever radically alter the result in a human being?

Sometimes as a parent you are just along for the ride.

My kids are very different. One a tiger. One a rabbit. From two very different parents,  now divorced. So it's all both a mystery and a miracle to me, in this Chinese Year of the Rabbit. Sometimes you just buy the ticket and take the ride.

A daughter's dark tale of abuse at the zoo chimp show: how kids and apes suffer together

Performing for humans, Detroit zoo, 1950s

It’s never a good time to beat a chimpanzee, even if it happened years ago and you can try to make some weak excuse for it, that people didn’t know better then, that those were the old days when we were only partly human.

But people always know better. We know better now and still do things we shouldn’t do. That’s human nature.

Years ago the Detroit zoo had a chimpanzee show that was cute for its time and would still be cute today by some people’s standards.

One of the trainers was a troubled man named Arthur. Not long ago I started chatting with his daughter Dawn Forsythe on the Facebook network I have for people around the world interested in apes and wild animals.

What an inspiring story that would be, I thought, to be a child raised by a chimp trainer. That would show real humanity and a child would have a unique perspective on apes. I had just written a blog about how orangutan moms were better than tiger moms and now I could talk about the great chimpanzee dad.

But something was wrong. Dawn hinted there was a darker side that I might not want to know. In the end it was one of those stories you hear before you can absorb it all fully and then realized you have been a bit tainted just to have listened.

But Dawn had a need to tell the story and I had a need to hear it. You can’t be fully human if you ignore the cruelty of life and want only romantic images to make you feel good.

This is a survivor's tale. It tells the ugly story of the abuse of chimps in a way that gives us a personal connection to what happened. It is easy for human beings to ignore the abuse of apes -- including keeping them confined and in captivity against their will without having committed a crime -- because apes are "just apes," different from us, apparently without the greater sensitivity to bad treatment that we have, apparently somehow able to tolerate abuse better as "animals." But  apes  are part of the same evolutionary family tree as we are, with similar thoughts and feelings. 

Arthur training the chimpanzees in the 1950s.

The story of this woman as a child puts the abuse in a startling light: we have to consider that the same abuse is being given to human and ape alike and might feel the same. An ape suffers like a child suffers.

“When other kids had an ailing grandma staying at their house,” Dawn told me, “my family had a recuperating chimp in the basement. My aunt also owned a chimp. Keepers took animals home with them in those olden days.

“I can still remember the first time I held a chimp’s hand. I can remember the leathery feel of his palm and fingers, the thrill of connecting, a real, physical connection.”

The background is hazy from her childhood. She is not sure about the details of her father, Arthur. The family whispered that he was in the marines for a few weeks until he got kicked out and maybe had a chance at redemption, by the fluke of getting a job at the zoo, seen “in newspaper articles and in family pictures, surrounded by adoring chimps.”

“The most favourite times of my young life was when I went to the Detroit Zoo chimp shows. Oh, the thrill when the chimps zoomed onto the stage, in their little electric cars, or on their bikes. They were so cute, and I was so proud to see my dad there.

The wild, wild west in old Detroit

“In the 1950s, the zoo had three 30-minutes shows daily. They would dress the chimps in cowboy outfits or sailor suits or striped prison garb. The chimps would pedal a bike or ride in little electric cars, or they’d walk on stilts. One of the chimps rode a motorcycle. Little Tarzan mastered the pogo stick. The chimps actually rode Shetland ponies! I think it was during a Davy Crockett skit. I also loved it when they would pretend to be a band, which each one playing a fiddle or drums.”

One day, when she was five or six, she was backstage at the chimp show, close to the chimps, the professional performers.  “I was in heaven. No grills or cages or walls between us, so close that I could reach out to touch them when they went by. I felt like I knew them personally. Sort of like they were my stepsisters and stepbrothers. After all, we kind of shared the same dad. I imagined they must have been having a wonderful time. I thought that chimps stayed darling forever.

“Dad always talked with pride about Jo Mendi II, how he was so smart and good. When dad wasn’t happy with the bunch of us kids arguing, he used Jo as the example of a perfect child. It’s hard to live up to that!

“To outsiders, it looked like the chimps were one big happy family. What the zoo visitors didn’t realize was that, until 1971, the entertainment chimps lived in small individual cages, without normal social interaction. I don’t remember ever seeing them on natural ground. It was all tile and cement and cages.”

  
The shows stopped years ago. In 2003, the Detroit Zoo’s anniversary publication admitted that animal shows were “a practice that today we would consider cruel ... The animals succumbed out of fear...Too many of the animals in the Detroit Zoo's shows, it is now believed, were intimidated, prodded, even beaten."

“It all makes sense now,” says Dawn. “At home, dad was a brutal man, often punching my mother and my little brother. I got the belt a lot. He was an alcoholic and, mom told us later, took “street drugs,” whatever they were. He would flare at any moment, reaching out to grab or punch or slap, or verbally abuse. At one point, he chased my mother out of the house and down the block, waving a gun at her. He thought it was okay to use violence to “teach” his kids and “discipline” his wife.

Joan, the wife and mother, was a manic-depressive and spent years later in psychiatric wards. Why did she put up with the abuse? She had no way, says Dawn, of taking care of five children her own. After the chimp trainer, she  led an unsettled life, marrying and divorcing six or seven times. 

Arthur with the "adoring" chimpanzees. He was later fired.

So, in a way, the chimps were an extension of a dysfunctional human family. “It must have been really bad for the chimps under his control," says Dawn. "In later years, mom would hint that dad had been abusive with the chimps, but she never came out and admitted it.

“Dad was fired sometime in the late 1950s, after someone saw him throw a young chimp against the wall. I’m betting it wasn’t the first time.

“I had such a strange relationship with my father. I loved seeing him with the chimps, and hearing his stories when he came home from work. His stories about the zoo would make me laugh or gasp with amazement. He had a huge scar across his chest, and he told us that an elephant had tried to crush him and that’s how he got the scar. Wow, such a brave man. The true story is that he sliced himself, intentionally, with a knife. I don’t know if that was before or after mom found him with a gun pointing at his head, rigged up to fire when his toes pulled a piece of rope.

“When I was 14 years old, dad had been unemployed for a couple of years. He spent several months at Pontiac State Hospital, originally named Eastern Michigan Asylum.  One February night in 1964, I was watching television. Dad started throwing papers into the fireplace, producing a blazing fire. Then he punched a mantel clock, bloodying his fist. He ripped his shirt off and wrapped his fist. I went and woke my mother and returned to the front room. And then I just sat there. Mom asked dad what he was injecting into his arm, and he said “vitamins.” She knew better, and ran for the phone. He hit her, and shoved her against the wall. Then he drank the mixture. It was cyanide. Mom sent me out of the house, and told me to go to where my kid sister was babysitting. As I walked out into the night, dad yelled at me to “tell the neighbourhood what a lousy dad you have.”

It’s all old history now. The cruelty of the man towards others was also self-destructive. 

Dawn, born in Detroit in 1952, left home at sixteen, then later joined the army. She has been a legislative analyst, political consultant, lobbyist, and public affairs director and lived in Chicago, Honolulu, and South Lake Tahoe. Married and divorced twice, she works now for the NOAA in Washington, D.C. and has a dog and four cats. 

Did her childhood leaves scars? She says the hatred of her father did -- and the chimps would have suffered mentally and emotionally too. The family hid the suicide and Dawn felt a terrible guilt. She tried to commit suicide twice in her twenties and then says she realized he had to forgive her father to find a release for herself. "So I did."

The Detroit zoo stopped using chimps in entertainment shows, but the practice continues elsewhere in different parts of the world. Orangutans are used in boxing matches in Thailand and I saw them used in an entertainment show at Universal Studios Hollywood theme park in 2004. Dawn says it is a practice that appalls her. "I won't watch shows or the ads. I won't even buy any greeting cards with the 'funny' chimp faces."

Detroit Zoo program from 1948

What happened to the chimps? Jo Mendi II retired from his theatrical career in 1953 after eight seasons on the boards. He stayed on the zoo under the rank of “trained chimp emeritus.” Others were sold as “cage animals.”

In 1956, the zoo sold Mike to an animal dealer, who sold him to a New York nightclub owner for $500. After he went on a rampage in New York city, the zoo brought him back, then sold him to the federal space program when it was cheaper to risk the life of a fellow ape.

Mike became a test pilot for acceleration tests. That's because human beings want to travel faster and faster and get away from their planet and got Mike to help. But going faster or leaving the planet are not necessarily a solution to what ails us, as any chimpanzee knows. 

As for Mike, too bad we didn't know him better. He was a chimpanzee.

Postscript: Within days of this blog being posted, Dawn Forsythe set up her own blog to explore the intersection of the lives of human beings and chimpanzees beginning with her experience years ago. It should be an amazing journey and will make a fascinating book in the end. You can follow Dawn's story at her blog site linked to this Intimate Ape blog site  www.chimptrainersdaughter.blogspot.com

Why orangutan moms are better than tiger moms

Orangutans are no tiger moms. Nu-nu with her 10-day-old infant in the Taipei zoo...... Photo by Shawn Thompson

We’ve heard a lot lately about the philosophy of tiger moms, which is the Chinese version of tough love for your child and not the sort of thing that the liberated westerner wants to hear.

Yale University law professor Amy Chua explains in her 2011 book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom that western parents have weakened their children by making them self-satisfied and indulgent under-achievers.

Is tiger mom Amy Chua right?

By contrast, the tiger mom cares for her children more deeply, in a more respectful way, through toughness and discipline, giving the child strength, confidence, aspirations and accomplishments. That, in turn, makes the child happier.

The fault, says Chua, lies in poorly adjusted western parents. Chua says in her uncompromisingly blunt way, “Western parents have to struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement, and try to persuade themselves that they are not disappointed about how their kids turned out.”

If ever there were a taboo that needed to be prodded and poked, it is what Chua is doing, criticizing  the already parentally insecure westerner where it hurts us the most. We know that differences in parenting styles are a big issue in a marriage that can inflame the tension between a couple and contribute to a divorce.

I have seen myself the same tensions in orangutan circles, where those caring for orphan orangutans clash over different styles of looking after "the kids," with tempers and outrage flaring in the same way.

But there is a part of me that understands the unpopular notions of Chua and that feels that westerners find it hard to listen to easterners because it puts us on the defensive about ourselves. It is a strange and different way of looking at life that challenges our basic notions of who we are.

Amy Chua and her daughters

I know what Chua is talking about and see some value in what she says. I see the difference in the attitude between my Chinese students and the western ones in the university courses that I teach. The westerners have been raised to value independence and self-esteem, and they question authority, which are important qualities that we should encourage. But sometimes the same qualities raise up the barriers of egos and create a battle with authority that gets in the way of learning. There are times when I wish the western students would accept more tiger in their teachers.

But how, as a teacher, do you decide what is right and natural in teaching your students?

As a parent, how do you decide what is right and natural in raising your children? There is so much advice and who really knows?

For an answer I turn to orangutan moms, who have been raising children for millions of years more than the Chinese tiger mom, longer even than we have been a species, and their rain forest children are happy and well adjusted. Orangutans become dysfunctional when human beings interfere with them by separating mother from child and putting them in a sterile environment.

Photo by Shawn Thompson

In the tropical rain forest, the orangutan mom spends eight years with one child teaching that child how to be an orangutan. Without that eight years with the mother, the orangutan becomes dysfunctional and does not know how to socialize, raise a child or survive properly in the jungle.

And orangutan moms are not tigers. (The predators have also disappeared from their forests in Borneo and Sumatra over time. where orangutans are the only Asian great ape.)

Orangutans are patient and gentle, probably more so than the average western parent. They rely on the initiative and curiosity of the child to learn, when the child wants to learn, at the pace the child wants to learn. The child is rewarded by its own curiosity and initiative.

And whether it is genetics or cultural, orangutans have an enormous natural curiosity and a strong desire to observe, learn and do new things. Their curiosity and initiative have not been damaged by the patience and gentleness of their mothers. That is something I find missing in my university students, who want the reward of marks for whatever they do. They basically want to be paid to learn. Such is the society we have created. Scientific studies have shown that the same result happens to the initiative of apes when they are rewarded for doing something. The material reward takes away the initiative to do the thing for its own sake.

It may be hard to believe that orangutans may have some stronger common abilities than we do, and it may be too humbling to human pride to consider that we could learn something from observing orangutans.

One of our limitations is that we think that orangutans are only a biological machine without choice and the ability to think and change as an individual, according to individual differences like us of personality, inclination, temperament and aptitude. We think they are merely dominated by biology. That is a convenient way for us to think and removes some of our sense of responsibility toward a fellow species.

But I saw a remarkable incident at the Taipei zoo that reminded me how much different orangutans are and how considerate they are as parents.

It was a cool, drizzly day in old Taipei. I was standing at the orangutan enclosure at the Wildlife Rescue Center of the Taipei Zoo. Beside me was a smart, intuitive and somewhat romantic keeper named Yang Chiang Lan.

Yang learns by watching orangutans intently and intuiting what they want and need, which is similar to the way he wooed his reptile keeper wife Chiu Zo Jing, even taking a job at the Taipei zoo because he knew she would want to work there someday.

Yang Chiang Lan in the Taipei zoo.... Photo by Shawn Thompson

It took sixteen years to woo his wife, but Yang is a persistent and patient human being, the qualities he also needs to succeed with orangutans, along with flexibility and a sense of humour.

On this drizzly day I made the morning rounds for three hours with Yang of cleaning the night cages and feeding the orangutans. Yang took the time to commune with the German shepherd dogs that protect the zoo animals from wild dogs. Then Yang had time to stand and talk by the orangutan enclosure.

Yang had put out huge banana leaves for the big male Ahyong because he thought the orangutan might be a bit angry that a visitor like me was monopolizing Yang's time that day and upsetting the regular schedule.

But what happened next was expected. We witnessed a rare and remarkable family drama.

The female orangutan Shouquaytow and her son Neanzer were released into the enclosure with the father of the child, Ahyong, after a month-long absence that apparently left the female in Shouquaytow pent up with desire.

The female orangutan Shouquaytow and her son Neanzer... Photo by Shawn Thompson

Shouquaytow was munching on a big banana leaf as she decided what she wanted to do next.

I was talking to Yang through a translator. I told the translator that I felt like an orangutan in Taiwan because I understood none of the words of the language and had to watch the body language and expressions of people to make sense of what was happening.

But we stopped talking when we realized what a miraculous and complex event was unfolding.

Yang squatted by the mesh totally absorbed. He said in all his years at the zoo he had never seen anything like this.

The female orangutan and her two-year-old son had begun vocalizing rapidly back and forth for a few minutes in some kind of intense conversation. They played with each other tenderly by their mouths and fingers.

The male drew closer because of the conversation and the female took the initiative in an obvious attempt to seduce him. She lay back and spread her legs while still holding the child.

Ahyong accepted the invitation without hesitation and dragged Shouquaytow to a quiet corner. He is touchy about being watched by human beings he doesn't know.

But the child didn't like this lovemaking and there was a three-way conversation between male, female and child. 

The child started slapping and pushing against the male, who was strong enough to overpower both female and child, but didn't. Instead of behaving "like an animal," he relented to the discomfort of the child, who was peeing profusely out of stress.

The male, to vent his frustration, went to a corner and pulled and banged on the fire hoses used for climbing.

Meanwhile, the female tried to soothe her child with tender play, but he continued to voice his displeasure.

But the adult orangutans had listened to the child.

The mother didn't get the sex she wanted; the male surrendered his chance for the satisfaction of a romp with a willing partner; and the child prevailed as the cold drizzle fell everywhere in Taipei that day.

The parents had listened to a child who had been raised with the gentleness and patience that an orangutan mother gives. It is a way that orangutans have spent millions of years perfecting without needing to unleash the tiger within.

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Feel like more of a chimpanzee mom than an orangutan mom? Check out the poll on this blog site about which kind of ape best matches your personality.

My interviews at the Taipei Zoo were made possible by the kind assistance of Ming-Chieh Chao, the general curator of the animal department. 

I help Yang inside the Taipei zoo.