You
Tarzan, Me InsaneThis may be a chimp study, but I'm the one trapped in a lab experiment
ELLENSBURG, Wash., Sept. 14 – Let’s assume, for a moment, that you dislike country music. Now let’s assume that — in a sincere attempt to broaden yourself — you’ve volunteered for two weeks at an institute devoted to researching the behavior of country music artists. For the first four days, you sit in a classroom and undergo data collection training from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., watching videotapes of five seemingly identical performers all wearing cowboy hats, large belt buckles and Wrangler jeans.
As
the tapes roll, your instructor points out distinguishing characteristics
of these artists, helping to prepare you for a series of identification
tests. "In this slide," your instructor says, "you will
notice that Alan Jackson’s belt buckle is significantly larger than
George Strait’s. Now, here you can see that Garth Brooks is
not only taller than Clint Black but also has less hair. You can also
see that Alan Jackson spends much more time on the left side of the stage
than does Randy Travis."
You have now acquired at least a minimal understanding of my experience thus far at the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute (CHCI) here at Central Washington University.
As I admitted previously, I have never felt much kinship with the animal kingdom. I realize this is an appalling statement to make, especially in a country where many dogs have their own psychologists. So, this week — in the spirit of M:I — I am attempting to overcome my indifference toward animals by volunteering on their behalf.
I chose to help chimpanzees because they are our closest relatives, sharing 98.4 percent of our genes. I figured I’d have a better chance of empathizing with chimps than I would of bonding with, say, the Costa Rican caterpillar. Also, I find it appalling that wild chimps are being poached to near extinction in Africa and that captive chimps in the United States are routinely tortured, confined to small, barren cages and, in the name of "biomedical research," infected with HIV, hepatitis and other deadly viruses.
But here’s another grim reality: After four days of observing and recording the behavior of chimpanzees, I am BORED OUT OF MY FUCKING MIND.
I am staying in a dorm at CWU with the six other members of my research team. We have all been sent by Earthwatch Institute, an organization that funds conservation research worldwide. Every few weeks, Earthwatch dispatches a new team of volunteers to collect data for a study investigating the toys and tools that keep chimps most stimulated. (Bored chimps, like bored humans, tend to become depressed and self-destructive.) Ultimately, researchers here hope to prove that captive chimps need far more "enrichment" items than are typically provided to them in zoos and biomedical labs.
This
is important stuff, as I try to remind myself during those moments when
I am not contemplating taking the next plane out of Seattle.
The five chimps housed here — Washoe, Dar, Moja, Tatu and Loulis — are all adults (ages 22 to 35) who were rescued as infants from biomed labs. Four of them were raised in human households just like human children — wearing diapers, sitting in high chairs, sleeping in beds — and all five, remarkably, can speak American Sign Language. They spend their days roaming at will between large indoor and outdoor enclosures, swinging from fire hoses, climbing on wooden structures and lounging on sturdy hammocks. The compelling life story of these chimps is detailed in Next of Kin, a moving and eye-opening memoir by Roger Fouts, the co-director, with his wife, Debbi, of CHCI.
In order for the enrichment research to be published in scientific journals, the data collection process must adhere to certain standards. Unfortunately, training us to meet these standards took place during the most tedious four days I have ever spent indoors — and this includes the week I spent at home with the chickenpox.
Let me first discuss chimpanzee identification. In order to qualify for data collection, we needed to correctly identify the five chimps in a series of 20 video clips; 80 percent was a passing score. On the first day, we were informed that testing would start near the end of Day 3 and continue, for those still needing to pass, on Day 4.
Identifying these chimps in person wasn’t that tough. But the bulk of our training was conducted in the classroom so that we wouldn’t have to pester the primates by pointing and staring at them as they roamed around their indoor and outdoor enclosures. For hours on end, various staff members -- some quite friendly, others quite morose — took turns pointing out distinguishing characteristics of the five chimps. By the end of the second day, they had successfully drilled into my head the fact that Moja’s lips are pursed, whereas Washoe’s are straight, and that Dar’s brow ridge is more pronounced than Loulis’. I knew that Moja’s bottom is round, whereas Tatu’s is pear-shaped and that Dar’s ears are floppier than everyone else’s.
But
when confronted with practice tests, here is what I saw in each video
clip: a black, hairy blob.
Some among our group performed quite brilliantly. Seana, an eager UCLA student, would shout out the correct answers faster than I could identify my own family members. Emma, a congenial British personnel manager, was more modest about her abilities but emerged as a star pupil nonetheless.
To my great relief, however, I was not the only volunteer both daunted and tormented by chimpanzee identification. I quickly discovered my own next of kin: Colin, a 51-year-old police officer from Exeter, England. Colin, who has a skull and crossbones tattoo on his forearm and — like me — happens to adore country music, is here as a favor to his wife, Margaret, to whom he affectionately refers as "my little coil of barbed wire" and "my little ice bucket." Over the course of four days, "rubbish," "bullocks" and "bloody outrageous" were the only three profanity-free terms that Colin used to describe the training procedure.
Every time I looked over at Colin in the classroom, he rolled his eyes, pointed his fingers to his head to suggest a handgun or pretended to shove two fingers down his throat.
Ah, but learning to identify the chimps by name was only a small part of our training. The majority of these four days were spent learning to code the chimps’ interaction with the various toys and tools, such as purses, toothbrushes, garden hoses, magazines and plastic mirrors.
Several times a day we were shown 15-minute video clips focusing on one chimp, and every 15 seconds we’d have to note exactly what category of object the chimp was playing with. A "container," such as a Gatorade bottle or a sand-castle mold, would be coded as a category #1. A "grooming object" such as a hair brush or nail file, would be coded as a category #2. But this coding business was not so simple. For instance: Should a Halloween mask be coded as a toy or a dress-up object? (Answer: a toy.) Is a cardboard box considered a container or a paper object? (A paper object.) Does a handbag count as a dress-up object or a container? (A container.)
Perhaps you are now beginning to understand why Colin and I have spent so much of our time here in beautiful Central Washington discussing the various possible ways to commit suicide.
But I still haven’t gotten to the hardest part. Not only must we categorize the objects but we must also identify by code exactly what a particular chimp is doing with this object. Let’s say Washoe (the one with the largest bottom) is sitting on a burlap sack. The correct marking is "5 PC" — meaning that she is having "Passive Contact" with an item in Category 5, Dress Up Objects. Or, let’s say Washoe is affixing a hair clip to her forearm. The right answer is "2 MH" — she is performing a "Manipulate with Hand" activity with an item in Category 2, Grooming Object.
It gets worse. Often, a chimp is holding several items and performing several activities at once. For instance, let’s say Tatu (the one with the bald spot) is wearing a sweatshirt while lying on a magazine, shaking ketchup bottle and clutching a diaper pin in her foot. We had 15 seconds to mark down the correct coding: 9 XX 5 WC 7 PC 1 FC 4 MF.
Perhaps
now you can understand why, when one of our instructors asked if we needed
a drink of water, Colin said, "No, but I could use a rope to go hang
myself."
Remarkably, by the end of our four days, all seven of us volunteers had passed both the chimp identification tests and the six so-called object ID tests. But that was only due to incredible repetition — we were tested something like 18 times — and a wee bit of fudging on these self-scored tests. (The fudging was ultimately of no consequence, as all of us proved quite capable of distinguishing the chimps in real life, as was required for actual data collection.)
This afternoon, after the pressure was off and all seven of us had been certified as "reliable" data collectors (to use scientific jargon), we spent an hour making vine-like decorations for the CHCI lobby, one of several projects we can work on between data-collection duties. While Seana painted paper masks for the chimps and created elaborate stuffed toys out of shopping bags, Colin and I cut dozens and dozens of leaves out of green felt. At one point, I mentioned to Colin how superbly symmetrical his leaves were. "I can’t remember when I’ve had so much fun," he replied. "Oh yes, it was when I fell off a chair and broke my arm."
Tomorrow we begin data collection.
Does
Jane Goodall
Ever
Have Days Like This?
Data
collection officially begins,
and I’m at my wit’s end
ELLENSBURG, Wash., Sept. 16 – I can compare our first official day of data collection to only one event in recent history: the Y2K scare.
During our four stressful days of training, we had prepared for the worst. Through videotapes and lectures and practice exams, we had been taught to handle the most daunting and complex scenarios: a chimp, for example, chewing on a garden hose while sitting on a silk negligee, wearing a string of fake pearls, clutching a rubber dinosaur in one hand, and shaking an aerobics shoe with the other.
Data
collection was going to be fast and furious — it was going to require
all of the concentration and quick thinking we could muster — but
we were going to survive.
Our group reported for duty promptly at 8 a.m. In 15-minute shifts, we were to go to the observation room to view the chimps from behind bullet-proof glass. Only two or three of us would work at a time so as not to overwhelm our subjects.
Colin was among the first scheduled. He placed his Earthwatch Enrichment Project Data Sheet and his Multiple Object Use Sheet side by side on a clipboard and headed off. For this first session, Colin’s "focal chimp" was Dar, the one with the most prominent freckles.
Meanwhile, I passed the time in the computer room studying my schedule for the day. After 15 minutes, Colin returned to report that his session of data collection had been — like Y2K — a complete and total bust.
Although Dar had 50 objects available to him — including an elephant-shaped jug, a flower pot, an orange test tube and a floral handbag — he ignored them all and simply slumped on a wooden platform for the entire observation period. All 60 boxes on Colin’s data entry sheet — each box corresponding to a 15-second period — read "N N NU," which stands for, "No Object Category, No Object Type, No Object Use."
In lay terms this means, the chimp didn’t do a damn thing. "I actually thought he’d passed away," Colin remarked.
My first data-collection session was equally anticlimactic. I was scheduled to follow Tatu, the chimp with the bald spot and pear-shaped bottom. For 56 out of the 60 time slots, Tatu sat on a giant tractor tire and stared at me. Obviously, I had no idea what she was thinking, but it was probably something like: "I can’t believe you paid $1,700 to watch me sit on a tire."
(Forty-five percent of the fee goes to the Institute for Human and Chimpanzee Communication. The rest covers food, accommodations and Earthwatch administrative expenses.)
After each of our periods ended, we dutifully moved on to our next required tasks — returning to the computer room, entering the figures onto a computer program, then enlisting a fellow volunteer to double-check our work and sign off on it. For Colin, that meant entering "N N NU" 60 times. I was spared. I only had to enter it 56 times. I got the excitement of typing 4 D MH the other four times.
At one point during the process, Colin took out his pocket knife and pretended he was slitting his wrist. I then lifted the blade on the paper cutter and pretended I was going to cut my head off. We then resumed entering data.
By mid-afternoon, our entire group had completed data collection. Over the course of 315 minutes — nearly 5 1/2 hours — of observation of all five chimpanzees, the biggest excitement seemed to be a three-minute period during which Tatu inspected, sat on, then chewed a black-and-white striped purse.
But our day was not yet over. It was now time for clean-up duty. Colin, Margaret, Emma and I roamed around the grassy outdoor play area picking up the objects we’d dispersed that morning (when the chimps were safely in their night cages). Then we cleaned the bullet-proof glass with Windex.
Once we’d collected all of the items, one of the staff members said she needed only two of us to wash them off with a hose. Colin and I removed ourselves from contention for this job with the speed and agility of Olympic athletes. We turned to Margaret and Emma and said, "You guys do it." Margaret and Emma didn’t seem to mind, so Colin and I went to the kitchen to wash up with a special antiseptic cleanser that resembles soy sauce. As I was scrubbing my hands, Colin pulled out a carving knife and pretended he was slashing his throat.
Soon after, a bunch of us were sent to the "enrichment room" to choose 50 new objects for the chimps to play with the next day. Among our selections: a red shovel, a cowboy hat, a size-20 black sneaker and fire hose.
To prevent myself from lapsing into a boredom-induced coma, I volunteered to record these items on paper, then type them into the daily "manifest." Afterward, I wandered into the classroom to get some red licorice from my backpack. Moments later, one of the staff members came to inform me that I had made an error on the manifest: I had classified a scrub brush as a "grooming object" when, in fact, it should have been coded as a "toy."
"It only counts as a ‘grooming object’ if it’s a hair brush or a nail brush," she clarified. "This brush is for cleaning." I apologized and returned to the computer room to rectify my error.
Today, Saturday, we did not collect data. Instead, we went on a field trip to Roslyn, the town of 800 where the TV show Northern Exposure was filmed. We walked up and down Main Street, which featured a farm-equipment store, a junk shop and about four stores selling leftover Northern Exposure T-shirts and baseball caps at much less of a discount than you’d expect for a show that was cancelled in 1993. We also, for reasons that now escape me, visited the Roslyn cemetery. "This is about as fun as having jaundice," Colin said.
After a pizza dinner, we got back in the van, at which point Colin pretended to strangle himself with the seat belt.
Woman
on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
How much more can I take before I go completely bananas?
ELLENSBURG, Wash., Sept. 19 – This morning we experienced what was billed on our schedule as a big treat: We ate breakfast in the classroom while watching the chimps — via live video feed — as they ate their breakfast in their night cages.
At
one point, one of the chimps spun around and around, refusing to take
his vitamin from a staff member. Almost everyone in our group burst into
hysterical laughter, as if Jerry Seinfeld himself were performing right
in front of us. I looked over at Colin in disbelief; he looked back at
me cross-eyed.
After breakfast, it was time to familiarize ourselves with the new objects the chimps would get to play with today. This daily task is not insignificant. In order to accurately record that a chimp is, say, chewing on a gold purse, we need to know that the gold item in his mouth is, in fact, a purse. If we mistake the item for, say, a gold shawl, we will write down the wrong code.
So, we scrutinized the two dozen new items, including a yellow sun dress, a plastic Flintstones’ vehicle, a hockey mask and a red satin jacket. Once the items were dispersed throughout the chimps’ indoor and outdoor enclosures, the chimps were freed from their cages, and we were dispatched for data collection.
Once again, there wasn’t much action. I watched for 14 minutes and 30 seconds as Dar lay still on a magazine; only in the final 30 seconds did he open the magazine, at which point I changed the coding.
After
my session, I returned to the computer room to find Margaret double-checking
Colin’s data entry by reading his codes aloud.
"7-D-MH-N-N-NU," Margaret said.
"D-I-V-O-R-C-E," Colin said.
After my next session — during which Moja slept while wearing a red and yellow Minnie Mouse sweater — I returned to the computer room to find Colin humming "Suicide is Painless."
It was then that I decided to change my approach to this mission. I had spent so much time whining about the tedium of data collection that I had lost sight of my original goal: to be useful. So, instead of watching the clock and periodically sneaking outside between sessions to call my sister from my cell phone, I was going to try much harder to stay busy.
Since our official duties take up only about three hours a day, the staff has presented us with options to fill our down time. One choice is to watch chimp videos and record data; there are literally hundreds of hours of footage that nobody on staff has had the time to review. The tape I chose featured Washoe lying on her back while clutching a blanket.
I lasted 6 minutes and 24 seconds. (That’s what it said on the VCR timer when I gave up.) I simply could not focus. It was like sitting through an income tax lecture only to go home and watch a slightly different version of the same lecture on video.
So
I turned to another option: writing letters to the U.S. Department of
Agriculture urging a crackdown on The Coulston Foundation, a New Mexico
chimp facility that is in egregious violation of the Animal Welfare Act.
The place is truly gruesome: A female chimp died after vets failed to
expel the dead fetus that had been rotting inside her for as long as two
months. Two other chimps fried to death when heaters were left on. Those
incidents just scratch the surface of the horrors perpetrated on the chimps
there in the name of "research."
Reading news reports about Coulston did jolt me awake, and after I finished writing to the USDA, I wrote a letter to the National Institutes of Health, which pumps millions of taxpayer dollars into this nightmarish facility.
But after another session of data collection, I was back to being nearly comatose. It didn’t help that Colin was making loud snoring noises in my presence and saying things like, "I think I’m going to go stick pins in myself."
At the end of each day here, I have attempted to revive myself with a grande espresso Frappuccino at Starbucks followed by a shot of heavy-metal music in the weight room at the local gym. But in the last couple days, even that strategy has proved inadequate.
So I have turned to a new and unexpected coping mechanism: beauty treatments. Two days ago, I impulsively drove an hour to a spa in Snoqualmie, where I paid for an hour-and-a-half massage provided by a man wearing a black and red tunic.
Tonight I drove 45 minutes to Yakima and found myself at a nearly empty mall with the decor of a hospital cafeteria. As I wandered down the main corridor, I was somehow drawn to a manicure shop. Before I knew it, my nails were being painted by a teenage Korean boy wearing a thick gold chain and a fake Gucci shirt that said "Guggi."
If data collection goes the same way tomorrow, I may end up in Spokane for a facial. By the weekend — who knows — plastic surgery in Seattle?
Creature
ComfortI
make the stunning discovery that
I won't die from boredom
SEATTLE, Wash., Sept. 22 – Thankfully, I am in Seattle, but not for plastic surgery. I am here at the airport awaiting my flight back to LA. The chimp program ended today, and I must get home for the first of my sister’s three wedding showers (not to be confused with her two engagement parties).
The
final few days in Ellensburg brought a few unexpected developments. For
one, my attitude about data collection actually improved. Once I accepted
the fact that I’m just not cut out for this sort of detail-oriented
work, I found I was less bored and frustrated.
However, just when things got better, they got worse. Yesterday, our fifth and final day of data collection, I emerged from the observation room to report that, as usual, Washoe had done little besides lie on her back and scratch her foot. That’s when Seana turned to me and said: "You weren’t supposed to watch Washoe! You were supposed to watch Moja!"
I double-checked the daily schedule and saw that she was right. I had observed the wrong chimp. I was mortified. Granted, I lacked enthusiasm for data collection, but I really had tried to do my best to follow the instructions. Now, 15 minutes of data were lost. I crumpled up my sheet and filled out a new one with "B B BO" — the catch-all code for any glitch in observation.
My error wasn’t going to jeopardize the results of the study, but I still felt bad, so I compensated by writing yet another letter to the government.
After the next data-collection session, I sat down to read some literature on the barbaric treatment of circus animals. The descriptions were quite disturbing: chimps clubbed into submission, lions and tigers chained and choked, bears whose paws had been burned so they’d be forced to stand on their hind legs.
Later, I headed to the going-away barbecue that the lab staff was throwing for us. I brought along what I thought was the perfect dessert: a bag of those creamy pink and white animal cookies with colorful sprinkles. These, I just knew, would really show I was right in the spirit of things.
It wasn’t until I opened the bag to pour the cookies into a bowl that I realized the package said "CIRCUS Animal Cookies." I tossed the bag as quickly as I could, hoping nobody had noticed.
This morning we had a wrap-up meeting, and the staff presented some preliminary results of the research. The three-year project is due to be completed a year from now and published soon after.
According to what we were told, the first year’s worth of data suggests that the chimps at CHCI spend significantly more time playing with new objects than with items placed in their enclosures the day before.
Researchers here plan to use this information to help make their case: For chimps to stay happy and healthy, they — like humans — continually need lots of new stuff to play with. The government’s idea of enrichment — giving a chimp a single ball for two straight weeks — appears to be woefully inadequate.
Granted, this may seem to be a pretty common-sense conclusion, but as everyone knows by now, it usually takes scientific results with a Ph.D. attached to get attention and action.
Just hearing the preliminary results made me feel a bit more useful. I honestly can’t say I ever bonded with the chimps, but I certainly can respect their right to have a stimulating life. Of one more thing I also am certain: Scientific research is not my calling.
Epilogue
The Mysterious Case of Ballot Stuffing
LOS ANGELES., Sept. 23 -- After reading Part 4 of this chimp saga, you may be wondering what happened to Colin, the British cop who was a major player in the first three installments. I am wondering the same thing myself.
A few days ago — after Colin had developed quite a following on the M:I message board — I decided to show the Web site to him and his wife, Margaret (a.k.a. the "little coil of barbed wire"). Because they both seemed to have a superb sense of humor, I thought they’d be amused by it.
Sadly, I was mistaken. Margaret, who had enjoyed the data-collection process, expressed concern that these stories might, in some way, jeopardize Earthwatch’s funding of the chimp lab’s research. Colin — being the devoted husband — expressed concern about Margaret’s concern. I was so stunned I didn’t know what to say. The two of them, who had entertained me endlessly over the previous week, chose to ignore me for the rest of the trip.
I can only deduce that someone at the chimp lab also didn’t see much merit in M:I. Last night, 27 votes were recorded on the Do-Good Meter for each of my four missions; all selected George Costanza — a vote for "useless." My tech guy noticed the anomaly and did some sleuthing, and he was able to determine all the votes came from a single computer at Central Washington University.
Of course, you may wonder what I think about all this, and I guess it’s mostly befuddlement. I mean, honestly … If people out there want to knock me, I wish they’d at least have the courtesy to put some anonymous hate mail on my Message Board. I’ve been trying to get ANYBODY with a pulse to post on it for weeks now.
