Lucy

I heard a fascinating story today. You should really listen to it on the latest episode of Radiolab, but in case you don’t get a chance, I’ll tell it to you.

Lucy was a chimpanzee adopted by Maurice and Jane Temerlin when she was just two days old. The psychologist and his wife wanted to see how her behaviour would be affected by being raised by human parents. Lucy was taught sign language and ate her meals at the table with her adoptive parents. She wore human clothes, coloured in colouring books and made hot tea for visitors. She seemed to be able to read human emotion and would comfort her ‘parents’ when they were sad. She was, to all intents and purposes, the Temerlins’ daughter. Until she was twelve years old.

As Lucy matured, she became difficult to manage. She became increasingly destructive and the Temerlins had to build her a cage to protect their home from her. Eventually, they came to the conclusion that they could no longer keep her and took her to a nature reserve in Senegal.

Lucy found it incredibly difficult to adjust to life away from the comfortable American home she had grown up in. She wasn’t human but she wasn’t really a chimp either. She was caught between the species, fitting easily into neither camp. In this new environment, Lucy stopped eating, developed skin disorders and lost a lot of her hair.

Lucy from Radiolab on Vimeo.

Her primary caretaker at this time was Janis Carter, who had known Lucy towards the end of her time with the Temerlins. Carter, who had only intended to stay at the reserve with Lucy for a few weeks while she settled in, quickly realised that Lucy could not survive in this environment and took her and the reserve’s other human-reared chimps to an abandoned island in the Gambia River. She had intended to allow them to roam the island freely but the chimps weren’t yet able to live like wild chimps. They refused to leave Carter’s side.

Carter gradually weaned the chimps off their attachment to her, shutting herself away from them in a purpose-built cage. Eventually the majority of chimps started to explore the island without her. But Lucy would not leave. She stayed beside Carter, signing that she felt hurt.

It took several more years before Carter was able to persuade her to leave her side but eventually Lucy learned to find her own food and joined the other chimps on the island.

Janis Carter was finally able to leave and only once she was confident that Lucy had settled did she allow herself to visit the chimps.

The first time she did this there was an emotional reunion but Carter was relived to find that Lucy was able to walk away from her with the other chimps. The second time, Lucy was nowhere to be found.

Carter eventually found Lucy’s skeleton in the place where the cage had once been.

It is thought that her unnatural trust in humans lead her into the hands of poachers.

Lucy’s upbringing meant that she was unable to survive efficiently in the wild. Although she was eventually able to fend for herself, she remained thin for the rest of her life. Her death, not confirmed but strongly suspected to be at the hands of a human, seems symbolic of her story.

I don’t think Maurice and Jane Temerlin ever intended any harm to come to Lucy but they utterly destroyed her natural life as a chimp. Although they doubtlessly loved her as though she really was their own daughter, their actions serve to illustrate the destruction humans can cause when we take nature into our own hands.

Thankfully, contemporary studies on chimpanzees keep the animals in more natural environments and do not separate them from their mothers. Lucy taught us that although chimps have a lot in common with us, they are not, cannot be, and should not be treated as though they are the same.

The guys at Radiolab tell this story much better than I do. You should really listen to them tell it if you have a spare hour. I promise it will be an hour well spent.

Image by Aaron Logan (Note: this is not Lucy)