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

 

let the season begin (insert accordian solo here).

My morning run & Belle and Sebastian's I'm a Cuckoo were interrupted by a brief phone call from one of my favorite girlfriends, who I call Mama Fox (she some-of-the-times refers to me as the Runaway Bunny & other times Peter Pan). I used the opportunity to stretch and cool down when a box labeled POETRY hanging from a wrought iron gate caught my eye. I peeked inside as I confirmed plans on the phone & pulled out an atomic green sheet of paper w/ not one but TWO poems (!!) printed in black. While saying goodbye to the other end of the line I folded up the pen-to-paper tangos, and then bolted down E Aloha (imagining that I was not running, but rather swinging through lush canopy formed by the trees on either side of the street-- these are the thoughts that keep my feet moving when I am tired from the previous mileage).

The last stanza of the second poem (both written by a man called Gary Snyder), read:

I pledge allegience to the soil 
of Turtle Island
and to the beings who thereon dwell
one ecosystem
in diversity
under the sun
With joyful interpenetration for all.

The first two lines of the piece, entitled For All, are "Ah to be alive/ on a mid-September morn". The sentiment is so relevant-- one I felt as my lungs filled with crisp almost-autumn air and then again with ev'ry exhalation... and one I felt yesterday while I visited Towan & he came over to the glass to show me his chalk drawing. My heart beats a little quicker when I share a moment like this with him. Mostly because he makes me feel like I'm not the only ape that is excited to share little bits of beauty w/ people nearby. That feeling of sameness is one of the more reassuring I've ever felt. I suppose I owe Mr. T and Gary Snyder a v.v. big Thank You! for providing reminders of why this mid-September is an especially lovely time to be living here in the now. 


The last day that I felt compelled to write, it was because of a person I met who invites adventure into his life, who sees magic in the tiniest places. When we are together strangers approach us for conversation & he is always ready to engage a new face in the Latest&Greatest. He is willing to allow a ten minute walk to take an hour, because he understands that sometimes one must stop and absorb ev'ry detail of this bustling world (& that takes time, takes patience). He doesn't mind that when I see a dead bumblebee on the sidewalk I have to pick it up and place it in a garden to rest in peace; he doesn't mind that when I see a piece of neat graffiti that I am compelled to photograph it and ponder the source; and most of all, he doesn't mind that inevitably at some point during our daily excursions I mention that I wish Towan could see ALL the things I see because I know with all my heart he'd feel so inspired and just as in awe of how strangely golden the world is (and his reactions would no doubt fuel his art).



Interpenetration is a word I had not known before reading it in Snyder's poem, but it is now one of my favorites. To wish for those around you to experience the visceral joy of being one with their environment and to take the time to be a part of whatever surrounds them is laudable. I have nothing but respect for the people & creatures who facilitate and encourage that experience. Towan lives at the zoo, which means he is limited to what shows up at his door-step, but! he never seems to miss a chance to investigate a novel garment or an interesting visage.

Perhaps, it is his ability to appreciate the little things that allows him to deal with annoyances so stoically. After showing me his art, he settled down to work on it some more. Bela followed him and made a grab for one of his two pieces of chalk. While her second attempt was successful, Towan did not seem to acknowledge her trespass. His tolerance is admirable, but then again he has so many traits that I admire and try to cultivate in my own self-- he is a Bodhisattva if there ever was one. 

--Emma (coffee with Towan)

one ape in particular

This is Towan (the same Towan mentioned in Sean's orangunookie post). At 43 he is entering old age for an orangutan, but he's more than achy joints and wrinkles-- he is an ambassador to his wild cousins in Borneo and Sumatra, allowing us city-folk a small glimpse into the ways of the arboreal ape.

Back in December I started a blog called Coffee with Towan so that I could share thoughts/observations & photos of Mr T and his family. Once in a while I throw in a set of gorilla or jaguar shots, but the orangs are my focus.

Towan, Chinta, Melati, Bela, and Heran each have incredibly varied personalities, yet all share enviable zen-like qualities. After having had the chance to observe them consistently for the past eight months, I can confidently say that no matter a person's gender, age, creed, music preference or hair color we can all learn something about ourselves from this awesome species. Here are some shots from a recent visit with Towan.

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.

Is a red ape a Communist?

Does the word "red" signal "Communist" to the American mind?

I had a flash of paranoia yesterday at the U.S. border when I thought my Red Ape licence plate had got me into trouble.

I was grilled by a female officer with the personality of a piece of granite and my car was searched with mechanical dispassion.

The male officer at the crossing post had commented on my Red Ape licence plate and then with few questions sent me to be searched with a form scrawled with the words "RED APE" in bold letters. It was at that moment that I panicked at the thought that the word "red" can have inflammatory connotations in the United States that it doesn't elsewhere.

This is a country that got uptight that the universal health care bill of President Barak Obama was the kind of subversive socialism that is found in Cuba, a country which, as Fidel Castro pointed out last year, had universal health care for its people half a century earlier. In Canada, socialism and universal health care are so perfectly natural that we don't question them. We call it democracy. (Canada was founded as an almost-sovereign state in 1867, the same year that Marx's Das Kapital was published, purely by coincidence.)

But the real reason why I got grilled and searched at the border was a tale of misunderstood love. Apparently I am visiting my girlfriend Wendy too much.

My red ape keeps watch on humanity from my car

Somehow it is suspicious that a grey-haired university professor would be visiting his girlfriend regularly in a humble but efficient black Subaru wagon loaded with books and clothes and a big stuffed red orangutan in the back. 

I have been searched many times before in airports in the U.S. and other countries, and accepted it like you would locker room humour. It is rite of passage. It was always cheerful, but efficient, professional in a friendly way.

But this was different. It had an air of ill will and cold suspicion that left me troubled overnight. They make you feel guilty and suspicious even when you aren't.

I wondered why I was affected so much, because I accept the need to be screened and checked and I was never bothered by being frisked at the airport.

I think it was because the female officer seemed to take whatever I said as sinister and incriminating. The truth was no longer plausible and I felt that I was being criminalized. In all the years I worked as a journalist covering police and prisons I never experienced this side of the law personally, although I certainly heard the tales.

Yes, border agents, Wendy exists.

I have to say that these are tough times to be idealistic and romantic, when good intentions are apparently not credible any more.

Officer Granite had a lot of probing questions. Income? Mortgage payments? Rental income? Clothes kept at Wendy's? Why take summer clothes across the border now? What is the value of the clothes and books being left at Wendy's? Engaged? Why no engagement ring on my finger?

The officer had trouble with the $25 silver ring from Bali on my left little finger. "What is a Bali ring?" she asked when I called it that. "A ring I got in Bali," I said with a smile, "a place I like very much." Now I can talk about Bali, I thought, but the officer wasn't interested in that enchanted isle. She wanted to know why I didn't move the Bali ring to my left ring finger -- where it wouldn't fit, as Wendy reminded me later. Wendy thinks more practically than I do when being interrogated. She also warned me later to be totally serious at the border with my poker face, although I don't have a poker face.

"What will I find in the car when I search it?" the officer asked yesterday. I was so annoyed I wanted to say "enough guns and cocaine to keep the Pacific Northwest happy for a while," but said the truth instead, "A lot of cereal, plus books." I explained that there is a type of cereal I like that I can't get in the U.S. so I was bringing a summer supply down early. I think I brought 12 boxes. You can never have enough cereal. But the border guards seemed baffled by someone who thinks ahead.

Won't eat expired dog biscuits from Canada.

I also had some dog treats in the car for Wendy's sweet dog Emo and wondered if I needed to declare them too. Wendy pointed out later, that, practically, the dog treats had expired, so they might kill a fragile old pooch like Emo. I felt guilty about that too.

While my car was being searched, and everything unzipped by the thorough female officer but not zipped back again, I sat with two ordinary-looking men who didn't have much to say. I told them that I was being searched for visiting my girlfriend too often, as a way of asking them indirectly why they were being searched. It didn't work. They looked like people who had eaten expired dog biscuits.

Usually when I cross the border there is some sort of discussion of orangutans. It is so much a part of my life and work and I am ready to seize any opportunity. I had a bit of a chat with a female immigration officer in the Seattle airport the time I was wearing a bright orange shirt emblazoned with the words "Orangutan appreciation day," like something a harmless crank would wear. This officer liked animals and was a big fan of the San Diego zoo. We connected about animals. I can be the harmless crank for orangutans.

But my last time through the Seattle airport I was grilled about whether I was engaged, whether a date had been set for marriage and had I started the "paperwork," which it took me a while to figure out might mean immigration papers. The male guard seemed like he was taking the time to type into the computer a novel about my relationship with Wendy. I thought, this is a  guy without a girlfriend.

And then yesterday I got the criminal treatment for romantic Canadians.

It bothered me more than I realized at first. It was so easy to break the sense of trust that I have always had about Americans just because of the nasty cynicism of a female officer.

The Marijuana Nation flag?

But Canada is a small nation and often misunderstood. It is something we live with. I remember the time on the enchanted isle of Bali when a cab driver insisted that Canada's red maple leaf flag is marijuana. He was totally convinced that Canada was a liberated country flying the symbol of the great weed openly and wouldn't take the word of an actual Canadian that it was otherwise. Everybody who went through his taxi for years must have learned from him that Canada is Amsterdam North. It took some time to persuade him of the truth. He looked terribly disappointed in the end. Canada will never be the same for him, nor crossing the border for me.

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.

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.

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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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