Biology Reference
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same is true of the way we think of bonobos, though by human and chimp standards, they do dis-
play remarkable restraint.
My encounters with the bonobos were pleasant, all of them according me some time. They used
frequent eye-contact, looking into my eyes as if trying to figure out why I was there. But they didn't
react to me in any dramatic way, except for Elykia, who, as I walked through the building, hooted
and peeked from every corner of her enclosure, finally flirting, excited to see a new male.
Kanzi pushed his belly against the mesh and motioned to Tyler, who crouched and tickled him.
Kanzi picked up his laminated sheet of lexigrams. Each time he pointed to one, Tyler explained it
to me. Kanzi was requesting grape Kool-Aid and celery now, but he was also pointing at lexigrams
to indicate that he wanted strawberries before bedtime. Watching, I recalled words from a topic
Savage-Rumbaugh had co-written with two fellow researchers, Pär Segerdahl and William Fields:
“That Kanzi lives in a world permeated with language is visible in his physiognomy. . . . The way
his eyes meet your eyes, the way he glances at other persons or cultural objects, the way he gestures
towards you or manipulates objects with his hands: everything bears witness to his language.” As
Tyler went to the kitchen to get Kool-Aid and celery, I sat on one side of the mesh, Kanzi on the
other, a few inches between us. He glanced over and sighed, then just stared off, content with my
company on this sleepy afternoon.
Even before my experiences here, my definition of humanity was larger than the one prevalent
a few decades ago. Philosopher and anthropologist Raymond Corbey, in his essay “Ambiguous
Apes,” describes how, in the 1950s, Belgian cinemas showed a film in which a scientist kills a moth-
er gorilla and skins her body as her infant, soon to be sent to a zoo, sits crying next to her. He writes,
“Ten or fifteen years later, such a scene, in a film meant to be seen by Western families with their
children, had become unthinkable.” He reflects on French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas's theory
that the gaze of another “appeals directly, without mediation, to our moral awareness,” and he asks
whether this holds true when it is not the gaze of “a human child but that of a gorilla child or an
orang-utan child?” However, human attitudes are changing, and if we were exposed to the suffering
of hunted and imprisoned great apes rather than to glossy photos of wildlife beauty on NGO fund-
raising calendars—and if we understood the causes, frequency, and severity of this suffering—we
might respond in greater numbers.
A firsthand experience, of course, has a different level of power, and for me, even during my
short visit to the Great Ape Trust, there was no doubting the intelligence in the gazes of the bonobos.
When we look into another's eyes, we can tell whether her mind is spacious, holding room to
consider, to see things from different angles and evaluate them, or whether she is simply carrying
through motions, confined, driven by instinct and habit.
How would the bonobos in the Congo appear to me? Kanzi and Panbanisha were used to hu-
mans, my own visit insignificant to them. They'd taken a step into our world despite the gap
between us, a gap made clear by the steel mesh of the enclosures—one no doubt smaller for those
who worked with them. Though I was curious to know how I would perceive bonobos in the abund-
ant rainforest that had formed their bodies, instincts, and cultures, I also wanted to see how con-
servation efforts could protect them. I was only beginning to understand that bonobos lived in so-
cial groups not so different from those of humans, sharing many behavioral traits with us: playing
games, daydreaming, teaching children, establishing friendships, caring for each other's injuries, or
grieving for the loss of loved ones. It was hard to imagine their families broken apart, the adults
shot, their bodies butchered or smoked, sold in bushmeat markets; the traumatized infants tied in
