The history of global innovation and discovery sadly includes plenty of controversial and
unethical acts. In a strange and cruel experiment, the chimpanzee known as Lucy was raised as a human
for the first 12 years of her life. This is the tragic story of Lucy the chimp.
Lucy's story began in 1964. She was born at a roadside zoo in Florida
called Noell's Ark Chimp Farm. Had things gone differently, she likely would have
followed in the footsteps of her parents, who were both performers at the carnival.
As fate would have it, though, a language researcher and psychologist named William
Lemmon bought Lucy when she was just two days old, separating her from her sedated mother.
Lemmon was the founder and director of the Oklahoma-based Institute for Primate Studies
and had a reputation for his experiments involving chimpanzees. She was allegedly
meant to be returned to the carnival after the study's conclusion, but that didn't happen.
Lucy was cared for by psychologists Maurice and Jane Temerlin. The Temerlins brought Lucy home as
part of what would become a controversial — and ultimately tragic — experiment.
In the Temerlin household, Lucy was raised as a human child,
growing up alongside the Temerlins' ten-year-old boy. The couple wanted
to see if being raised like a person could override Lucy's natural, non-human instincts.
In his book "Lucy: Growing Up Human: A Chimpanzee Daughter
in a Psychotherapist's Family," Maurice Temerlin described Lucy's remarkable development:
"She quickly learned to hold her own bottle. At two months,
her eyes would focus. At three months, she was trying to climb out of her crib
to go to people, and at six months, she was pretty mobile on all four limbs."
Lucy even learned how to use eating utensils and dress herself. All of these efforts were for the
purpose of answering a single question: "With the right upbringing, how human could Lucy become?"
The next part of Lucy's education began when she was around six years old — and it was in the hands
of a man whose claim to fame was successfully teaching another chimp American Sign Language.
Primatologist Roger Fouts managed to teach Lucy about 100 ASL signs.
In an episode of the podcast Radiolab, Fouts shared that he'd stay at the Temerlins for hours,
fulfilling the roles of teacher, friend, and babysitter all at once.
Aside from teaching Lucy ASL,
Fouts accompanied her on walks around the neighborhood and even read books with her.
Some have questioned whether Lucy and other chimps who were taught
ASL actually understood the signs they were making, but according to Fouts,
Lucy did. Instead of just mimicking signs back to people, she came up with new ways to say things.
Once, after getting a taste of watermelon, Lucy referred to the fruit as "candy drink" — and
she also came up with an interesting way to refer to a spoiled radish.
"She decided to eat this old radish, and she took a bite, and spit it out.
I said, 'Well, what is that?' And she called it 'cry hurt food.'"
Interestingly, Fouts believed that Lucy had learned how to lie as well.
One example he gave was a time that Lucy, despite her potty training, had an accident on the floor.
When Fouts confronted her about it, she used sign language to blame it on one of his grad students.
As time went on, Lucy developed habits and behaviors that were thought to be uniquely human.
Aside from putting on clothes and visiting fast food outlets, she also knew how to make tea.
Fouts and his grad student, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh,
recalled in their interview with Radiolab how Lucy would almost immediately start making tea
every time they walked into the Temerlins' residence. Savage-Rumbaugh, in particular,
was struck by Lucy's nonchalant demeanor as she went about her business. She recalled,
"[Lucy would] walk casually into the kitchen and search through the cupboard for the kind
of tea she wanted that day, put some water in a kettle and put it on the stove, and make us tea."
After serving them tea, she would sit down
and start listening to radio programs or browsing whatever magazine was available.
Lucy attracted media attention and even landed a spot in Life magazine.
In his journal, Maurice mused,
"We wondered how chimp she would turn out to be, or how human?"
With Lucy's continued growth came increasingly aggressive tendencies.
Soon, the Temerlins found her to be quite a handful. It reached the point where they could
no longer peacefully coexist with Lucy. They set up a cage for her on top of their roof,
isolating her and keeping her away from the humans living inside.
Unable to leave their "daughter" that way without at least trying to provide proper care,
the Temerlins decided to hire a caretaker. In 1976, then-grad student Janis Carter
applied for the job. The 25-year-old was greatly interested in primate studies,
and she saw this as a welcome opportunity. Upon hiring Carter,
the Temerlins stressed that under no circumstances should she touch Lucy.
Initially, Lucy is said to have acted arrogant and condescending to her caretaker,
because Carter couldn't understand what the chimp was trying to say through sign language.
But things changed one day when Lucy signaled to Carter that she wanted to be groomed.
In response, Carter broke the "no touching" rule, starting a bonding process that would
eventually blossom into a tight friendship between chimpanzee and caretaker.
A year later, the Temerlins realized that Lucy had become too wild and rowdy to continue staying at
their home. Stella Brewer, founder and chair of the Gambia-based Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Trust,
shared in a letter to Animal People that the Temerlins had contacted her and her father
about releasing Lucy into a wild chimpanzee community. Brewer wrote,
"At that time, wild chimp behavior was not well enough known for me
or anyone else to realize that this was an attempt more or less doomed from the outset."
The Temerlins received the go-ahead to send Lucy to the Brewers. By that time,
however, Janis Carter had already developed such a strong bond with
Lucy that she felt compelled to make the journey with her.
The Temerlins and Carter brought Lucy to Gambia, a small country in mainland Africa,
where Brewer and her team were busy facilitating the integration of some chimps into a bigger
community. According to Brewer, Lucy was intended to join other chimps on a 300-acre island.
This way, she could run freely while still having access to toys, reading materials,
and all the other amenities she had grown accustomed to while living as a human child.
The plan was to have Lucy gradually transition from human life to chimp life over the
course of two weeks. Unfortunately — and perhaps unsurprisingly — said
plan did not go as intended. Lucy had already gotten so used to the comforts
of human living that she appeared to be unwilling to settle for anything else.
Overall, Stella Brewer described the attempt as an "adjustment" rather than a true rehabilitation.
Missing the human meals she had eaten in the Temerlin household and ill-equipped
to gather food for herself, the poor primate not only lost a ton of weight,
which she never fully regained, but she also exhibited signs of extreme depression.
When Maurice and Jane Temerlin saw this, they gave up hope for a smooth transition.
The couple opted to fly back to the United States
while Janis Carter made a decision that probably surprised everyone.
Realizing that Lucy desperately needed help adjusting to her new life, Janis Carter opted to
stay with the chimpanzees. The devoted caretaker wanted to be absolutely certain that her ward
could fend for herself in this new, unfamiliar setting. And so, for nearly seven years,
Carter effectively abandoned her relationships and career back home. She cut off all communication
with her human loved ones so that she could truly live the same life the chimpanzees had to adopt.
During her extended stay in the community, Carter became the de facto leader of the primate group.
She guided ten chimps, including Lucy, as they learned the ropes of living in the wild.
The nine other non-humans in the group were either orphaned or abandoned;
none of them had grown up in their natural habitat. Interestingly enough,
it only took them 12 months to fully adjust to their new life.
On her end, Carter learned how to survive in such an unwelcoming habitat.
Her experience was far from pleasant, with unsanitary conditions and an extended
separation from her more familiar life back home. But over time,
Carter began to feel that the company of the chimpanzees fulfilled all of her needs.
Janis Carter's stay on the island came to an end in 1985 after a member of the community,
a male chimpanzee named Dash, decided that it was his time to lead the pack.
He attacked and dragged Carter, who sustained injuries when her
body brushed up against a thorn bush. After escaping through the river and
treating her wounds, she realized that Dash had effectively evicted her from the troop.
At this point, Carter had come to see the chimpanzees as her own children. This betrayal
hit her deep, however, she knew she had no choice but to leave the island. Carter didn't completely
abandon Lucy, though, as she remained part of the chimp rehabilitation efforts in Gambia.
In 1986, she felt that it would be a good idea to visit Lucy and bring her
some of her favorite toys from back when she lived with the Temerlins.
Astonishingly, Lucy showed a complete lack of interest in the items. She did, however,
embrace Carter tightly upon seeing her — a clear expression of fondness and warmth
for a dear friend she hadn't seen in a long time. Lucy then turned and walked back into
the forest — a sign that her longing for life as a human was finally gone.
Sadly, the assumption that Lucy had successfully found a peaceful life in
the wild turned out to be wrong in the worst way possible. Sometime around the end of 1987,
a rehabilitation worker stumbled upon a grisly sight: the "widely scattered"
and incomplete skeleton of Lucy at Carter's old campsite, partially obscured by leaves.
An analysis showed no hint of accidental death, nor did any signs point to disease, snakebites,
or animal attacks as the cause of her demise. Of particular note was the fact that her hands
and feet were completely gone. At the time, people speculated that a hunter or poacher had violently
ended Lucy's life and took her extremities as trophies to sell on the black market.
For a time, this became the predominant theory about Lucy's mysterious death.
The news broke Janis Carter's heart. When she learned of Lucy's death, she almost decided to
fly back to the United States, and turn the page on this chapter of her life.
She reconsidered, however, when she realized that while she could no longer save Lucy,
she could still work toward increasing awareness of chimpanzee conservation.
In Maurice's book, he discussed the lesson he learned, perhaps a little too late:
Releasing chimpanzees into the wild after a life of being raised in
captivity could actually be detrimental — or even deadly — to those primates.
Not everyone was convinced that Lucy met her end at the hands of a poacher. Brewer noted
that when Lucy's remains were discovered, it was near the end of the annual rainy season.
The resulting humidity, coupled with scavenging animals on the island,
could have been the actual reason why Lucy's hands and feet were missing.
Brewer maintained that at this point, people could only speculate over the true cause of her death.
She also mentioned that when Lucy died at the age of 21, she left no offspring behind.
It seems the one thing everyone involved could agree upon is the
fact that throughout her existence, humans determined the course of poor Lucy's life.
From the Temerlins who took her away from her birth mother to the people who forced
a domesticated chimpanzee to suddenly live in the wild, Lucy was never in control of her own fate.
Maurice Temerlin died in 1988, but not before realizing the terrible consequences of his
12-year experiment. He acknowledged the painful truth in his book:
"Though Lucy taught us much and gave us great love and enriched our lives
and our growth as people, it was a horrible thing to do to her."
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