This is the story of Lucy the chimpanzee. When Lucy was only two days old, she was adopted by psychologist Dr. Maurice K. Temerlin and his wife Jane. The Temerlins wondered, if given the right environment and socialization, how human could Lucy become?
Temerlin and his wife raised Lucy as if she were a human child, teaching her to eat with silverware, dress herself, flip through magazines, and sit in a chair at the dinner table. She was taught rudimentary American Sign Language eventually learned 140 signs. When Temerlins introduced her for the first time to a male chimpanzee, and she was frightened and did not relate to him, let alone find him attractive. Fouts has written that when he arrived at Lucy's home every morning, Lucy would greet him with a hug, take the kettle, fill it with water, find two cups and tea bags, and serve the tea.
By the time she was 12, Lucy had become very strong and was very destructive in the Temerlin house. Eventually, she was shipped to a chimpanzee rehabilitation center in Gambia, accompanied by graduate student Janis Carter. For years, Lucy was unable to relate to the other chimps in the rehabilitation center. Lucy showed many signs of depression, including refusal to eat, and expressed "hurt" via sign language. Though her adopted Temerlin parents stayed with Lucy for only a few weeks in Gambia, Janis Carter remained at the Center for years, devoting a great deal of time to helping Lucy assimilate to life in the wild.
A year after leaving Lucy, Carter returned with some of Lucy's belongings. Lucy and a group of chimps greeted her, and Lucy embraced her, and then left with the other chimps without turning back, which Carter interpreted as Lucy having adapted to life as a chimpanzee. One year after that, Carter returned and found Lucy's skeleton with hands missing and head separated from the rest of the body, and no sign of skin or hair, from which Carter concluded that Lucy had been poached.
Lucy has taught us that chimpanzees are very intelligent (near human level) and if socialized / raised differently, the only difference between the two species would be our physical characteristics. This also shows us that being “human” isn’t necessarily biological, but psychological (nurture, not nature). Although in the end it was painful for the Temerlins, I feel that this experiment was worth the sacrifice in order to better understand the psychological similarities between humans and chimpanzees. Lucy's end was very tragic but couldn't have ben helped. All her life she was taught that all humans are kind and nice, so she wasn't even aware that something like poachers even existed.
