It's Raining Pigs and Chimps!

I apologize for my lack of posts lately. Spring is finally in the air and I have been completely unable to concentrate on reading! In preparation for a book talk I will be giving, I read two nonfiction "animal" books I would like to share with you. I was looking for read a-likes for Marley & Me by John Grogan and read The Good Good Pig: The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood by Sy Montgomery and Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human by Elizabeth Hess.

The Good Good Pig was a touching, fun read. The author takes in a sick piglet who is the runt of his litter and nurses him to health. The pig, named Christopher Hogwood, becomes famous around the author's small town. Townspeople bring their table scraps for Christopher's slop bucket, and children love to help give Christopher baths. Christopher frequently breaks free of his pen and is seen wandering around town, only to be brought home by the local police chief. If you enjoyed Marley & Me, this is quite similar: funny misadventures with a pet, the human-pet bond, etc. And, we learn some interesting facts about pigs. I never realized how intelligent pigs are. The hard part that I have with all these pet memoirs is what we know is coming in the end-the animal dies. They always do. Some of them, such as Ted Kerasote's Merle's Door (which is wonderful), take up quite a good portion of the book with the death, which leaves me sobbing. Fortunately, Chris's death was relatively quick, not drawn out and painful. So, thank you Sy Montgomery, for not leaving me a sobbing mess.

I picked up Nim Chimpsky because 1) I thought the chimp's name was quite humorous, and 2) I thought it would be funny misadventures with a chimp. Wrong. The story is about a chimp who was chosen to be part of an experiment at Columbia University that was supposed to shed light on how language is acquired by humans by teaching communication skills to a "humanized" chimpanzee. Nim was born in 1973 at the Institute for Primate Studies (IPS), headed by Dr. William Burton Lemmon. Just a few days after his birth, he was ripped away from his mother and sent to live with a human family in New York. Nim was raised like a human-made to wear human clothes, eat human food, and required to learn sign language skills. The family that raised Nim seemed to treat him well, but no one-including the psychologist in charge of the project, Herbert Terrace-was prepared for the amount of care Nim would require or that he would become difficult to manage as he entered adolescence and adulthood. The project was ended early due to lack of funding and because Nim was becoming more and more difficult to manage and teach. Nim was returned to Dr. Lemmon's care at the IPS. Lemmon was known to beat and electrocute the chimps in his care, in order to "dominate" them, so Nim's return to the IPS was not a good thing. When Lemmon began having difficulty funding the IPS, he sold several of the chimps, including Nim, to a medical experimentation lab at NYU that was conducting research on Hepatitis B. When word of this got out, the outrage from the public ended up getting Nim a reprieve. He was returned to the IPS until a better home could be found for him (he was lucky-the other chimps were not returned). He was eventually relocated to a sanctuary, where he lived out the rest of his life, albeit in a cage. I will admit that I read only half of this book. Because I was so appalled by this "experiment" and what happens to Nim, I could not bring myself to do more than skim the rest of the book. There were definitely some good people involved in the project who tried to do the right thing for Nim, but the decisions and actions of Dr. Lemmon and Dr. Terrace were abhorrent. People will debate endlessly about the ethics of animal experimentation and testing, and I will concede that some may provide useful results that save lives, but this experiment seemed to be a waste that only caused needless suffering of an innocent animal. The story is well told. Hess does not sugarcoat Nim's treatment and clearly points out the flaws of the project and its leaders. But this is not a Marley and Me-type book. If you are an animal lover, be prepared to get angry.