Next of Kin: My Conversations with Chimpanzees
by Roger Fouts, Stephen Tukel Mills
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Book Summary Information
Author: Roger Fouts, Stephen Tukel MillsEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1998-09-01
ISBN: 0380728222
Number of pages: 432
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
Book Reviews of Next of Kin: My Conversations with Chimpanzees
Book Review: The Injustice Of Man
Summary: 5 Stars
There's a good reason this book is rated so highly, and that's because it's a very well told story.
The story follow Roger Fouts' career, from a young graduate student, to a world authority on chimpanzee communication and behavior. Where Jane Goodall got to observe wild chimps in Gombe, and study their natural lives, Fouts works with "domestic" chimps, with the goal of teaching them sign language, and studying how they learn and use it.
The books is very entertaining and very engaging, and at times, heart breaking. It described the plight of chimps used in medical research, how these intelligent, sentient creatures spend their whole lives, which can be decades, in small cages with no contact with their own kind, and no mental stimulation.
Through his career are trials and troubles, but Fouts always tries his best to overcome them, while keeping his chimpanzee charges interests in mind. Unfortunately, this leads him to be forced to choose between his chimp friends, and his fellow scientific peers.
The most touching part was his reunion after a 13 year separation with his friend Booee, who remembered him, and remembered his signs, though he presumably hadn't used them in so long. Booee was taken away from him, and used in a biomedical lab, where he was injected with Hepatitis.
An interesting point is made in regards to humans using animals for tests, and that is that we seek to dehumanize that which we don't fully understand. Humans have used humans for slaves, Nazis used Jews for medical experiments, and up until the 1970s the US government was running a syphilis study on unknowing black men. All of this is condemned now, and is unthinkable in today's world, but as we move from one thing, we replace it with another, and it seems that we've moved to chimps now.
I believe in the future we'll look back and not be able to imagine how we imprisoned and experimented on our evolutionary cousins. I just hope that day isn't too far off.
The book ultimately ends on a fairly happy note, but the separations are agonizing to read about, and I found my eyes welling with tears on more than one occasion. Despite that (because of that?) this book is one of my favorites in my library, and I highly suggest it.
Summary of Next of Kin: My Conversations with Chimpanzees
For 30 years Roger Fouts has pioneered communication with chimpanzees through sign language--beginning with a mischievous baby chimp named Washoe. This remarkable book describes Fout's odyssey from novice researcher to celebrity scientist to impassioned crusader for the rights of animals. Living and conversing with these sensitive creatures has given him a profound appreciation of what they can teach us about ourselves. It has also made Fouts an outspoken opponent of biomedical experimentation on chimpanzees. A voyage of scientific discovery and interspecies communication, this is a stirring tale of friendship, courage, and compassion that will change forever the way we view our biological--and spritual--next of kin.For three decades, primatologist Roger Fouts has been involved in language studies of the chimpanzee, the animal most closely related to human beings. Among his subjects was the renowned Washoe, who was "endowed with a powerful need to learn and communicate," and who developed an extraordinary vocabulary in American sign language. Another chimpanzee, Fouts writes, "never made a grammatical error," which turned a whole school of linguistic theory upside down. While reporting these successes, Fouts also notes that chimpanzees are regularly abused in laboratory settings and that in the wild their number has fallen from 5,000,000 to fewer than 175,000 in the last century.
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