Almost Human. Alfred Fidjestøl

Glad family’s charity receipts from the Norwegian Rescue Mission.³⁴ In March he began eating solid foods and was offered baby food, which he hated with a passion. It took heaps of patience and spilled mush before Julius finally got used to the human fare.

      Julius began to live more and more frequently with the Moseid family, and Edvard Moseid often brought Julius to the zoo so that he could spend time alone with Grete Svendsen. She fed him milk from a bottle without any resistance. Julius seemed to be accepting of everything that they wanted him to accept. Their devised system of the three “family groups” appeared to have worked. The only problem was that Julius had become more and more dependent on human attention. He no longer wanted to be put down after his feeding but insisted on playing and being entertained. This exhausted his human keepers, particularly Edvard, who had more than enough to do already as the father of two small children and a zoo director. The zoo now had more than 200,000 visitors per year and hosted a wide variety of species, from brown bears to kangaroos. It had turned into a complex logistical operation involving the production and the importation of various types of feed, organizing and caring for all of the different species, ensuring safety procedures for the employees and humane conditions for the animals, marketing and planning for the future. Moseid’s mind was constantly brimming with new ideas. He dreamed of establishing a zoo hotel complete with a swim hall and solarium.³⁵ On top of everything else, he was mourning the loss of a cousin in the tragic oil platform accident of March 27, 1980, when the Alexander Kielland capsized in the Ekofisk oil field in the North Sea, killing 123 people on board. In the midst of all of this, he was now responsible for the care of a baby chimpanzee at home.

      Reidun also began to feel the strain of looking after Julius. During the weeks when Julius lived with the Glads, she couldn’t let him out of her sight. If she tried to accomplish any other task while he was awake, he would howl loudly for her attention. “It’s high time he moved out,” Billy noted on April 14, 1980.³⁶

      At the end of April, the Glad and Moseid families, plus Grete Svendsen, met at the zoo to introduce Julius to the chimpanzee community for the first time. Julius was now four months old and had been separated from the other chimps for two and a half months. A cot had been set up for Julius near the window of the private sleeping quarters, and the other chimpanzees would be able to see Julius through a window. It was the first small step on a long road back. They put Julius down on his cot, opened the flap between the common enclosure and the sleeping quarters and waited. His mother Sanne was the first to come in. Julius whimpered and Sanne made a trumpet shape with her mouth and a sound they had not heard before. But she was otherwise uninterested, though she did not appear upset. The other chimpanzees arrived shortly after, gathering at the window and staring wide-eyed at their prodigal community member through the glass. They huddled around the window, except for Dennis, who performed his ritual laps in the background in order to make an impression, as an alpha male leader must do in the chimpanzee world. Julius seemed unafraid as he sat gazing at his chimp family for twenty minutes. Edvard and Billy were entranced by the session, which had gone much better than they had predicted.³⁷

       TALKING CHIMPANZEES

      Back at Moseid’s house in Vennesla, Julius was becoming a worthy playmate for the two girls. He slept at night in a cardboard box, which was sometimes kept in the bathroom and sometimes on the floor of Edvard and Marit Moseid’s bedroom. As soon as he woke up, however, Julius would dart into the girls’ room to play. He was physically smaller than his “sisters,” but much more advanced in his motor skills. He climbed the curtains in spite of their efforts to deter him. In truth, he needed all of the climbing practice he could get in advance of the day when he would be returned to the chimpanzee group. He enjoyed wrestling and play-fighting, playing tag and racing with Ane and Siv. If they raced, he made absolutely certain no one cheated. He stood on the start line swaying back and forth while waiting for the start signal. Together with Ane—and only with her—he developed his own game: one of them would sit with a stick or piece of grass sticking out of their mouth while the other tried to grab it with their lips. If the stick happened to slip out of Julius’s mouth or if he lost the game, he would get very sour-tempered. The girls also taught him how to draw and paint. He was allowed to lie on their beds for hours on end, though always with the rule that he was not permitted to get used to sleeping in a bed or sitting at a table. For the girls, mealtimes were heart-wrenching, as Julius, the family’s uncontested center of attention, would be banned from their company only because it was time to eat. Sweets were also against the rules for Julius but he was quick to learn the art of flattery. When the two girls sat on the sofa, watching children’s TV with their snacks, he would squeeze between them, place one arm around each and kiss them on the cheeks, melting their hearts and undoing their parents’ principles. Somehow, a piece of candy would “fall” onto the floor or a third straw would just happen to appear in the bottle of soda.³⁸

      It was inevitable; Julius began adopting more and more human behaviors each day. He learned to recognize verbal messages such as “time to eat” or “we’re going outside now.” He understood their meaning without difficulty and reacted just like any other child. Unlike other children, however, Julius never gave the impression that he was planning to try speaking up for himself. No single word ever passed his lips.

      In 1947, a decisive study was conducted to find out whether it was possible to teach chimpanzees to speak. The psychologist Keith Hayes and his wife, Cathy Hayes, adopted a one-month-old chimpanzee infant named Viki and raised her as a human child with intensive language training. When Viki died at six years of age, she had only learned to say and use four words: “papa,” “mama,” “cup” and “up.” Later studies determined that due to differences in tongue motor skills, it is impossible for chimpanzees to create many of the sounds required for human speech. In 1966, however, the researcher couple, Allen and Beatrice Gardner, was able to teach the chimp Washoe, who lived with them, to communicate using several gestures taken from ASL, or American Sign Language. By the time Washoe left the couple in 1970 to become a part of Roger Fouts’s research at the Institute for Primate Studies in Oklahoma, she had mastered 130 different signs.³⁹ The experiment was hugely significant, suddenly allowing for a relatively advanced method of communication between humans and chimpanzees. Washoe was observed teaching the signs to an adopted chimpanzee son. The following year, inspired by the Gardners’ breakthrough, several other chimpanzees were taught ASL. Research with these chimps showed that they were able to group differing objects under the same concept, for example grouping various types of dogs under the term “dog” and various insects under the term “insect.” They could transfer signs that they had learned correctly in one context into other contexts. For instance, Washoe had learned the sign for “to open” in the context of a door, but could apply it herself to other situations, such as when she wished to open a crate. And chimps were able to combine different signs into meaningful combinations. Washoe signed the gestures for “water” and “bird” when she saw a swan for the first time. Another chimpanzee combined the signs for “cry” and “fruit” when explaining the concept of an onion.⁴⁰

      Although these experiments were well known by the time Julius was born, and though it was apparent that he was able to comprehend quite a lot, there was no point in teaching him sign language communication. On the contrary, the goal for Julius was that he would come to understand and remember that he was a chimpanzee and not a human. Of course, psychologically and commercially it may have been an intriguing idea to raise him the opposite way in order to see just how human-like he could possibly become. Such experiments had been carried out many times in the past. In 1931, the renowned American psychologist Winthrop Niles Kellogg adopted Gua, a seven-month-old chimpanzee, and raised him together with his own ten-month-old son, Donald—in principle providing both youngsters with an identical upbringing. The experiment was called off after only nine months due to Kellogg’s disappointment over the chimp’s lack of verbal development, but also because he and his wife had begun to realize the danger and unpredictability of certain situations for their human son. A more stalwart couple, Jane and Maurice Temerlin, raised the female chimpanzee Lucy in their home from 1964 until 1976, from the time the chimp was a single day old until she reached the age of twelve. She slept in a crib at their bedside, was fed human formula from a bottle and received care and bodily contact around the clock. At the age of one,