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Review by Michael Sims
Few people in history have had such an intimate relationship with another
species as has Roger Fouts. For over 30 years he has been working with chimpanzees, teaching them sign language and watching them teach each other, sharing their lives, even battling their enemies. It has been his field of study and his crusade. The combination makes for a fascinating book that addresses many issues of front-page importance.
that addresses many issues
of front-page importance
"Next of Kin," written with Stephen Tukel Mills, is as much Fouts' story as the chimpanzees'. He describes his rebellion against doctrine regarding the mental and emotional limitations of chimpanzees and other animals. He also chronicles his hurdles in acquiring an education, his bouts with alcoholism, even his childhood relationship with animals.
There is plenty of humor. Fouts describes the games and jokes of the chimpanzees with glee, and he compares changing a baby chimpanzee's diaper to refueling a race car during the Indy 500. "Next of Kin" is filled with entertaining surprises. For example, Fouts was a consultant on the film "Greystoke." He refuses to work on films that use real chimpanzees, because the animals are routinely mistreated to get them to perform the antics directors prefer instead of realistic behavior. For "Greystoke" he trained human actors to behave like chimps. Later the same technique was used for gorillas in "Gorillas in the Mist."
Much of the story is heartbreakingly sad. Whatever one's convictions about research on living animals, there is no denying that much of it is unnecessary. Perhaps no other witness is as qualified to tell the victims' stories as Roger Fouts.
Inevitably, the zealot's passion sometimes undermines the scientist's objectivity. Consider a single sentence: "The chimpanzee child really does think, feel, and rebel just like the human child." That "really does" has the tone of someone poking you in the chest and insisting on a point, and there is no excuse for such a silly generalization as "just like." Occasionally there should be more evidence and less insistence.
Nonetheless, this book is destined to be popular, and it deserves to be. The twentieth century will be remembered for many sad things and some wonderful ones. Not the least wonderful will be that this is the era in which science proved that our old intuitive notions about the family of nature are dismayingly, joyfully true. Our changing relationship with our fellow primates is an inevitable consequence of such realization. It can be summed up in a question that Carl Sagan asked 20 years ago: "How smart does a chimpanzee have to be before killing him constitutes murder?"
Michael Sims writes often about science and nature.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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