July 27, 2011

MOVIES: Project Nim (James Marsh, 2011)

This documentary tells the story of Nim Chimpsky, a chimp who was the subject of a linguistics experiment in the early 1970s. As an infant, Nim was placed in the home of a New York family, who were instructed to treat him as they would a human baby; the goal was to teach him sign language and see if he could learn to actually communicate.

The project seemed to go reasonably well at first, but as Nim got older (larger, stronger, less adorable, more dangerous), he was shuttled from person to person and from facility to facility. His early years in such close contact with humans made it difficult to adopt to life among other chimps.

It's a fascinating story, and if nothing else, you should come out of it freed of the desire to anthropomorphize animals; Project Nim makes it clear that pretending that animals are people is good for neither the animals nor the people involved. And yet, it's a hard habit to break; even the people who were most closely involved with Nim are describing what happened to him as "betrayal," or talking about his "forgiving" nature, words that simply have no meaning in an animal mind.

A sad story, and an important cautionary tale.

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