I recently saw the movie Project Nim, a very sad but fascinating documentary about a chimp who was the subject of an experiment into whether, if raised in a human family using sign language, the chimp would learn language the way a human baby does. After living its childhood with a human family in a brownstone on the Upper West Side, then in a mansion in the Bronx with language educators, the lead scientist ended the experiment, and Nim was a talking chimp who had lived its life with loving human caretakers/famaily who had nowhere to go. He was taken to various caged chimpanzee facilities, and at one point ended up at a pharmaceutical animal testing laboratory run by NYU.
Watching this, I was actually jealous of the ingenuity of this concept as a piece of fictional satire: you couldn't devise a more perfect thought-experiment to highlight the hypocricies of animal testing. We believe that testing on animals for the benefit of humans is moral, but what if one of the animals was not only our closest relative, the chimpanzee, but one who had been taught to speak?
And then I realized, from the dim memory of my earliest days as a cartoonist, why I felt a strong connection to this concept: I had devised a version of that very satire! I had wondered how far we would take animal testing, and how far away from our evolutionary branch would we be willing to accept cruel treatment for the sake of our own marginal betterment. So I used my character Charley the Australopithecine (an ancestral species to humans) in an animal-testing setting. I even used a sign-language speaking chimp. (I'm sure I had heard of Nim — and another chimp used in a similar experiment, Washoe — but that I was unaware of the sad and bizarrely ironic fate that had befallen Nim.
By the way, I think my favorite hero of the movie was the lawyer who devised a legal strategy to free Nim from the testing facility, and planned to have him TESTIFY in court to gain his freedom. The very threat of this litigation was successful in getting Nim out of there (and into another facility with other challenges).
Anyway, I thought it would be fun to publish this four-part series, from the very beginnings of Tom the Dancing Bug. I'll run one per day.
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