Project Nim – Watching with An Environmental Justice Eye

Off Topic - but...

 I’ve never had a personal face on animal rights – This is where anthropomorphizing an animal can help attract people to at least look at the issues of animal cruelty, ethics, and responsibility., since the beginning of this course I had zero qualms about EJ this being such a human centered paradigm considering there are many other organizations where they have found success at protecting ecosystems and species. But, Environmental Justice is not just a human issue and this documentary helped me actually see this clearly.

I just watched this great documentary about one of the famous chimps that have involved in learning sign language. It was the 1970’s -Trying to answer the question is a chimp could learn to communicate in ASL if treated like a human since birth. Nim started out living in a home with a large family a raised as a human child with a mother and many siblings.

Herbert Terrace, who ran the program, ended it abruptly when he surmised that Nim was only performing sign language to get what he wants out of his trainers, that no real language skills have been conferred to the chimp in his years in the program. Much like in the recent Planet of the Ape Reboot, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Nim was sent to live with a chimp colony in Oklahoma, where I can only assume he had little in common with the other chimps. Mirroring the movie even more the ranch even included a cattle prod wielding antagonist.

When Nim was 10 years old he was sold to a TB lab and became a medical experiment. Eventually he was “rescued” by supporters and sent to live in upstate NY in a large cage where he ultimately died at the age of 28.

So the EJ Issues are obviously

Agency – Not that a chimp should be roaming the US making his own decisions, but I can be certain he would not choose to be moved from NYC to Oklahoma ranch, and then to a medical research lab.

Structural Violence – Obviously the whole mechanism that allows this chimp to be sold to a medical research lab and really any movement outside of the home in Manhattan where he spent the first two years of his life was a cruel cold machine if not literally, at least psychologically grinds chimps into pulp.

IGHT – This continued structural violence of selling and testing on chimps generation after generation is can be nothing other than IGHT – could Nim’s mother had a wonderful life? I doubt it.

Place Based knowledge – Chimps, I’m sure, do best in the place where they can know where to go for food, water and recreation – this is what is taught to them as children in a natural colony. Removing them from this place integrated to their culture can create a disjointed and confused chimp.

The mother of the NYC family said “essentially tricking him into believing him thinking he’s human being with no plan whatsoever of protecting him” and I think this is the key to watching this movie – If you are going to get this chimp to perform for you in a manner unlike anything he would do in nature, you have a responsibility to his well being for the rest of his life.