A meditation on apes, corporate greed, feelings of extinction, and the loss of literacy #OccupyBarnesAndNoble

by Shawn Thompson

It's terrible to contemplate the death of a species like the orangutan. 

I've been thinking of various ways to try to comprehend this unimaginable event. I imagine that extinction is a big death similar in some ways to the small death of the individual.

But what jolted me into thinking about this in a different way was the shock of strolling into my favourite Barnes and Noble bookstore in Seattle this weekend and discovering that the bookstore will come to an end on December 31, 2011. Good bye to the old year and hello to the new era!

As a book author writing about orangutans and someone concerned about literacy, a bookstore is my sacred space. In a bookstore I see the people like me who cherish the flow of the written word pass through the commercial arches.

Now the space in the fifth largest Barnes and Noble store in the United States, in the readership district of the hinterland of the University of Washington, shrinks day by day towards its demise at the end of the year, one book at a time, just as the forest of orangutans shrinks one tree at a time.

If we didn't have memories, we might not notice the change and just think that the size of the shrinking forest has always been the same.

Certainly corporations, whether book chains, mall owners or the companies converting the rain forest to palm oil plantations, must feel safe in the knowledge that people and orangutans feel powerless and simply adjust to change over time. The annoying sounds they make in protest will simply grow fainter and fainter.

I was talking to a frustrated and introverted employee of Barnes and Noble, with the word Graham on his name plate, and learning that he and the others were suddenly laid off, with one week's pay for each year of bookselling, his dedication to books and literacy eroded over the years by corporate insensitive and illiteracy. A customer came up while Graham and I were discussing  localized fate and change, and when I asked the customer how she felt about the store closing, she shrugged. It made her sad. "But there is nothing we can do," she said and seemed uncomfortable that I wanted to discuss the issue. She wanted to buy a book instead.

I had already told Graham that, as the author of a book about the looming extinction of orangutans, I am a great supporter of lost causes. Just because you think a cause is lost doesn't mean that you should stop the fight.

But the change is relentless. The death of books. The death of literacy. The death of a noble species of ape.

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF CHANCE ENCOUNTERS

In the case of the University Village mall in Seattle, Graham told me that the mall corporation wanted to raise the rent of Barnes and Noble while the bookstore had declining sales and was pruning its sales staff over the years in a corporate reflex action. The book business in general has declining sales of hard copy books and a surge of sales of ebooks that doesn't compensate for the difference. Which means that a book author like me is a species under pressure.

Graham, who studied literature in university and not the more relevant subject of corporate greed, also said that the mall wants to chop up the Barnes and Noble space into smaller stores to make more money, the same way land is subdivided for smaller house lots to make it worth more. The responsibility to literacy in a devoted community of readers around the university, in a city with one of the highest rates of book consumption  per capita in the United States, doesn't matter as much as making a buck. No surprise. That we know.

At the same time, in a mirror universe, the local University Village bookstore was also in the clutches of its corporate office in New York, which wouldn't let the local store support local writers, such as me as the author of a book about orangutans living several blocks away. When corporate headquarters decided it had sold enough of an orangutan book in Seattle, maybe less than a dozen copies, it was no longer interested in stocking them on the shelves. The importance of the cause underlying an orangutan book does not matter to the corporation. The fate of the orangutan does not matter to the palm oil plantation.

One of the issues I discussed with Graham was how often you discover by chance a new interest by browsing in a bookstore. An old statistic from ancient pre-web days said that 60 per cent of purchases in bookstores came from people who bought on impulse in a bookstore. With fewer bookstores, we will lose that. If a book chain does not take the responsibility to stock its shelves with books worth stumbling over, then that opportunity vanishes.

I bought several books on impulse after talking to Graham, although I regretted that it would be no benefit to him personally. I found a book by Jacques Derrida called The Animal That I Therefore Am, which I didn't know existed until I saw it on the shelf. Before that moment, I would not have known if it disappeared. The back of the book says, "The book is at once an affectionate look back over the multiple roles played by animals in Derrida's work and a profound philosophical investigation and critique of the relegation of animal life that takes place as a result of the distinction -- dating from Descartes -- between man as thinking animal and every other living species." The affectionate and the profound are what I want, plus relationships with unincorporated animals.

I also bought a cheap abridged paperback copy of Alexander Dumas's novel The Count of Monte Cristo, thinking it was somehow relevant to the experience of life and would help.

When I took the books to the checkout counter, the butch, overly tall woman at the cash register was being cheerful and said, "Would you like to purchase a Barnes and Noble membership?" I responded by reflex, in solidarity, by saying, "Why would I want to buy a membership in a company that is closing this bookstore and laying off people like you?"

IMAGINING EXTINCTION

The psychology of all this is similar to the rain forest and orangutans. The rain forest is like the space of the bookstore and the orangutan the individual literacy that inhabits it. Orangutans, after all, discover things, create their own culture and share what they learn with the group. That is basic rain forest literacy. Losing just one orangutan is like losing the information in a book. And it can't be replicated by a printing press.

Part of the genius of Jane Goodall is to recognize the importance of an individual ape in this way. She says in a collection called The Great Ape Project, "Each chimpanzee has a unique personality and each has his or her own individual life history ... And we find that individual chimpanzees can make a difference to the course of chimpanzee history, as is the case with humans."

That reminds me of what the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury called "the butterfly effect." Change one tiny element and it has a huge ripple effect accumulating and amplifying over a long period of time. The loss of the effect of the individual could be great over time.

So when we talk about the extinction of a species of ape we are talking about an abstraction and not the effect of the loss to the whole of the individual. Extinction is bad enough, but the loss of an individual can have a ripple effect. And you are never aware of what you have lost.

So the printed book is doomed. The rain forest is doomed. The orangutan is doomed.

How would an orangutan feel about a shrinking forest? Photo by Shawn Thompson

IMAGINING EXTINCTION

What does extinction feel like? Can we imagine something so big and terrible? 

I wonder if an orangutan would feel like me wandering around the shrinking space in my local bookstore habitat and feeling the palpable way that the absence is expanding, like a big godly thumb pressing down on my small squishy soul. It makes me feel the personal presence of it all. Maybe the Count of Monte Cristo could deal with the experience, but not me.

I was curious what sections of books would disappear first and what kind of strategy there was, probably mapped out by consultants for the corporation, to lessen the sense that books are disappearing. The westerns were gone first and a selection of  Science Fiction and children's books. Book shelves were removed to eliminate the traces that something was missing on the shelves.

I tried to imagine what this would be like for an orangutan. Every morning you wake up and a few more trees are gone. The sunlight is breaking through the edges of your forest more. The annoying mechanical and human sounds from outside are growing closer and muffled less by the buffer of trees.

In the bookstore, I felt myself herded to the sections of books that remained, a kind of unconscious adaptive strategy. The variety is shrinking. Some pleasures and interests are vanishing. I try to compensate by other pleasures and interests so that I won't notice and feel bad.

For an orangutan in the forest, the variety of fruit trees is shrinking. Maybe during the day you retreat more to the higher parts of a tree or to the shifting centre of the forest. At night, maybe you don't sleep as deeply. You dream of vague vanished pleasures and interests and when you wake up try to enjoy the fruit that remains. How conscious are you of missing fruit?

In the bookstore, as the number of books diminishes, so do the fellow book lovers. I am feeling more and more solitary. I am more aware of myself in an emptiness that is growing larger. I feel smaller but more important too.

For the orangutan, already solitary, the orangutans out in the trees that you once heard and saw from time to time are diminishing. There are more human beings invading the jungle. There are fewer social pleasures. Fewer dating opportunities. More compromises.

I think my mind had drifted a bit in the bookstore and then I felt that Graham had exhausted what he wanted to say. Maybe he felt embarrassed that he had revealled too much about his private pain.

I could see that Graham the crushed and introverted former idealist felt powerless, his world, his dreams, his ambitions, his small role in literacy, devastated. He had trouble looking me in the eye, but thanked me for listening patiently to his long tale and then shook my hand with the iron power one expects from a dock worker, not a distracted dispenser of books.

GOING HOME

I went home to tell my partner Wendy the disaster. The best thing about our location in Seattle is being close to a huge literacy space and the abundance of urban trees. Our street is noisy with traffic, which I don't like.

Wendy understood right away and gave me a big hug and then told me the other disastrous news. Our 14-year-old dog Emo had consumed five chocolate bars he found cached in a bedroom, which could send his already fluttery heart into death throes. It's what I call the chocolate "flush." Very healthy. No need to go into details.

So it was not a good moment as I sat down in a white heat to write this account.

Maybe this is akin to what it is like to feel the green and fluid wave of corporate greed sweep over a forest and a species.

In losing orangutans, we are losing a kind of literacy, a kind of literate space. I feel another dimension of that now. I feel the handshake from an individual orangutan saying goodbye.

On December 31, 2011, at the arbitrary afternoon hour of 1 p.m., I will spend an hour by myself in the Barnes and Noble bookstore in the University Village mall in Seattle meditating in one of their upholstered chairs on the death of species and literate spaces and how powerless we feel. Orangutans and the rain forest will be in my mind. Then I will go home to Wendy and the dog and eat Chinese vegetarian dumplings. 

                                                                      

Background information: The University Village mall in Seattle is owned by Sloan Capital, which is owned by Seattle sixty-something businessman Stuart M. Sloan, who has dabbled in grocery stores and a vineyard in California.

The Christmas card I sent this year to mall owner Stuart Sloan with a Christmas wish.

 

reference: article on the store closing in the Seattle Time
declining hard copy book sales for Barnes and Noble
Reuters on Barnes and Noble 
wikinvest on Barnes and Noble

 

Project Nim: humans make and break connections with a chimp

I saw a movie today that is surely heads and shoulders above any other documentary this year. In my Chimp Trainer's Daughter blog, I review Project Nim, a movie that will be released in July. I cannot speak any plainer... Any person who respects great apes, and who wants to understand them, simply must see this movie. If you want to understand the human betrayal of great apes, you have no choice but to see Project Nim.

I remember the first time I held a chimp’s hand. The first touch between human and ape fingers establishes a connection, and you never forget the soft leathery feel of a chimp’s palm. What should be an ordinary sensation is not. It is unforgettable and forever.

The problem arises when the chimp-human connection becomes subject to human arrogance, sometimes cloaked in love, other times defined by science, and often supported by stupidity.

Project Nim is the true story of a chimp who was taken from his mother to participate in a 1970s university research project on communications. The movie has all three components: love, science, and stupidity, all adding up to a level of human arrogance that is almost incomprehensible.

Mark your calendars now, for Project Nim. You won't regret it.

-- Dawn

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

Musical apes: Should we be surprised that they can get the beat?

Chimpanzees at the Taipei zoo  Photo by Shawn Thompson

We take our appreciation of the arts very seriously and may not want to share it with the apes, but maybe it is time to admit that we are not the only species that can swing to a beat.

I thought I had great musical ape stories, like the time I took a professional French horn player into the jungles of Borneo to play for orangutans. Then I got a phone call from Chicago from a bluesy, fifty-two-year-old guitar player with sweet attitude and a warm, husky voice. His name is Harry Hmura. He created a group called Musicians for Apes and he has seen his music move the apes.

One time Hmura took his guitar to the Fauna Foundation sanctuary for apes outside Montreal, Quebec. The facility is Canada's first for apes who are refugees from laboratory experiments.

Hmura told me that he never gets stage fright as a musician, but he didn't sleep the night before. He was nervous how a crowd that had been abused by human beings like him in "very notorious laboratories" would receive him. He thought he might even "break down" with emotion and be overwhelmed. He said he asked himself, "Would I be able to deal with that as a person and be able to hang with them? How were they going to perceive me as a stranger because they have dealt with strangers in the laboratories all their lives?"

But the reception was as warm and boisterous as it was for Johnny Cash's revolutionary Folsom prison concert. If chimpanzees had been in Folsom prison with Johnny Cash, they would have loved his rhythm and wanted to dance. Music sounds even sweeter in captivity and it is a great liberator.

At first, chimpanzee eyes were staring at Hmura and there was "loud hooting and banging." Hmura was shaking from the emotion of meeting chimpanzees who have been abused. "I felt beyond terror and sympathy for these folks," he told me. He felt appalled by what human beings have done.

Hmura took some time to let the chimpanzees see him from the other side of the steel grate. He helped prepare food for them. A little later he got out his electric acoustical guitar to play to a lone chimpanzee named Toby. The history of Toby is that he is thirty-two, after spending his first twenty-four years in zoos. Toby took the loss badly of the death a close chimpanzee friend of his in the zoo, but now has a great friend in the chimpanzee Rachel. 

Hmura started playing a simple rhythm and Toby liked it. "I just started playing a rhythmic, upbeat, chordal thing, slapping the guitar and strumming. As I started strumming, all of the sudden Toby starts moving a rope back and forth as his head starts swaying back and forth to the rhythm of the strumming. And as he's swaying back and forth and bopping his head, he purses his lips out looking like the bell of a horn and begins to sing ever so lightly, woooing, and he's holding a melody to himself. He was trying to do a pitch. It was relatively the same pitch as mine. He was expressing himself."

Hmura played for another lone chimpanzee, a troubled soul named Billy Jo, who has since died at the age of thirty-seven. Billy Jo was employed with his sister as an entertainer for fifteen years, until he got too big and strong and had is teeth knocked out by a crowbar. Then he was sold to a laboratory for fourteen years. After living like a human being, Hmura told me, these chimpanzees had to endure the next decades of their lives being exploited by science and human beings. "So, Billy was quite confused. He didn't like males very much."

Hmura was with a female staff member that Billy Jo liked and she talked to Billy Jo to introduce the stranger with the guitar. Billy Jo was staring at Hmura with chimpanzee fists clenched on the grating. "I start playing this rhythmic pattern again. He starts swaying his head back and forth to the rhythm and accepting me as who I was with my guitar and enjoying the music. He grooved to the music." Hmura thinks that the chimpanzee who hated males accepted the music from him as an act of friendship and companionship.

Afterwards, Hmura fixed his signature spaghetti sauce from garden vegetables for the chimpanzees, who love spaghetti. The sauce had tomatoes, bell peppers, zucchini, carrots and garlic. "They love garlic," Hmura says. After lunch Hmura sat on a stool inside the chimpanzee house and "played quietly for everybody." The staff remarked that it was calm and quiet, a sign of acceptance.

Another time Hmura played for two adolescent male orangutans, Chuckie and Radcliffe, at Patti Ragan's Center for Great Apes in Wauchula, Florida. Chuckie, now twenty-five, was born in a zoo, then sold to a circus, where he was castrated, never a pleasant experience. He may have a few circus "issues" now. The tall, thirty-one-year-old Radcliffe is Chuckie's good pal. Radcliffe has some TV experience and worked with Chuckie in the circus, where he too went under "the knife." The pair were reunited at the Florida sanctuary after sixteen years of life "on the circuit." They play together and share food. Chuckie knows how to whistle too. Like Lauren Bacall once said, "You just put your lips together and blow." It's the same for apes.

Chuckie and Radcliffe reacted differently than chimpanzees to the music, which suits the differences in character between the two species. Orangutans are the engineers and problem solvers of the ape world, fascinated by how things work and are put together. They like to take things apart and put them together again and are ingenious at untying knots.

Harry Hmura, a musician for the apes

Hmura started to play a "pseudo-African song," a melodic ballad that he had composed, but with a slower tempo that would be more suitable for orangutans. "That's when I got their attention." The pair came closer and stretched out on the ground to sit intently and listen. "It was the most serene, beautiful moment that they were so taken by the tempo. They were immobile. Very rarely would they ever look up at me. They would look at my eyes for a quick second and look right back down at my hands with intensity. I showed them the guitar up close because I could see the way they were looking at it. You could see the pleasure in their eyes afterward."

Hmura went to a group of male and female chimpanzees. The males started to bang whatever they could to assert themselves. Then Hmura started to play. "It didn't take but a few seconds for everybody to calm down. Everybody just sat and listened." Hmura switched to a more upbeat melody and moved to an enclosure with three chimpanzees, a male, female and child. "The young one started to jump and bop up and down to the rhythm. The adult, Jessie, was nodding her head up and down to the music. The male, Bubbles, Michael Jackson's chimpanzee, was just watching. I'm sure he was reminiscing from his younger days being around Michael Jackson."

Michael Jackson aside, how natural is it for chimpanzees to dance and for other apes to respond to music? Is this wishful thinking on our part or is something really happening here?

Hmura is saying that apes have a sense of rhythm and get pleasure from it. This sounds like an aesthetic pleasure, maybe the beginning of art and culture. Scientists accept that apes, who have the same basic thoughts and feelings that we do, have a rudimentary form of culture too.

Others, like Jane Goodall, say they have observed rhythmic swaying and stamping in wild chimpanzees and interpret it as a form of dance. Goodall observed these “rain dances” in chimpanzees during rainstorms and near waterfalls. Marc Bekoff of the University of Denver's Institute for Human-Animal Connection says that he and Goodall were told at a chimpanzee sanctuary near Girona, Spain, that a chimpanzee named Marco does a trancelike dance during thunderstorms.

The anthropologist Jill Pruetz of Iowa State University also made similar observations of chimpanzees dancing near grass fires in Senegal. Pruetz said that the chimpanzees made a peculiar vocalization at this time that she has not heard at any other time and that they showed expertise at predicting what the fire would do.

And so on. It is all anecdotal and interpretative, as much of life is.

I haven't seen any of this yet myself and would like to judge for myself some time, but I do reflect that how willing we are to accept the interpretation of events like these depends upon how willing we are to believe that apes are akin to us and share rudimentary things with us.

We can indulge in wishful thinking that something is true just as much as we can indulge in wishful thinking that it isn't true.

Do apes really respond to music? That is a tough question to answer. An individual ape could be responding in a social way to the presence of a person or perhaps even showing signs of captivity in anxious, repetitive motions.

But there is video of apes picking up the rhythm of music, such as chimpanzees at the Chimp Haven sanctuary in Keithville, Louisiana, swaying and bobbing to the beat of drums. And the musicians Peter Gabriel and Paul McCartney have jammed with bonobos. Bonobos are said to understand pitch and rhythm in music.

Flute music seems to work well with apes, according to Terri Hunnicutt, a former ape keeper at the St. Louis zoo who now works at the Center for Great Apes in Florida. Hunnicutt told me that a particular CD of Native American flute music that she played at the zoo “would always calm everyone.” The apes listened to it, which took their minds off other things. “When this one CD was played all of the apes, even the younger chimps and gorillas, would just sit or lie. I once played it and watched a young male gorilla and his dad lying next to each other on their backs, feet up in the air, both patting their feet in time to the music. The kid was laughing as he did it.”

I know for sure that I don't have any musical ability myself and I can't dance worth a hoot, but maybe chimpanzees and gorillas can pick up a musical rhythm and go with it. I bet that Johnny Cash would have enjoyed playing to a crowd like this.

****

Online Links:

Harry Hmura’s Musicians for Apes

Chimp Haven music video

Chimp Haven
The Fauna Foundation 
Center for Great Apes

Jill Pruetz and the fire dance

Check out my own Youtube video Orangutan music video

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