LAFF 2011: PROJECT NIM

Nim Chimpsky in Project Nim.

Chimp off the old blocks

By Don Chimpson

Project Nim commenced in 1973 when Columbia University psychology professor Herbert Terrace launched a study to determine if chimpanzees raised by human beings could learn to communicate with sign language. Nim Chimpsky was taken from his mother, Carolyn (an 18-year-old female), when he was two weeks old to be raised by human surrogate parents in an attempt to refute Noam Chomsky’s thesis that language is inherent only in humans because animals lack the “language acquisition device."

Terrace chooses a former lover, Stephanie LaFarge, with little to no experience with chimps or sign language to raise Nim Chimpsky (get it?) in her family’s Manhattan brownstone. LaFarge nurtures Nim Chimpsky as she would her very own offspring (she even breastfeeds him), raising him like a human baby/pet hybrid…and Nim Chimpsky matures into a possible romantic interest for LaFarge. Yeah, you read that correctly. 

Once Terrace becomes skeptical of LaFarge’s hippie-dippie parenting techniques, he whisks Nim Chimpsky away to a prim and proper 21-room mansion -- the Delafield estate in Riverdale -- where Nim Chimpsky is cared for by a series of teachers with various (and sometimes unrelated) skill sets. Several of the caretakers form deep and possibly dangerous bonds with Nim Chimpsky, who grows bigger, stronger, faster and sneakier by the day. Terrace’s next sexual conquest, Laura-Ann Petitto, becomes Nim Chimpsy's second surrogate mother. When Petitto leaves Project Nim, Joyce Butler steps in as Nim Chimpsky’s third mother-figure.

It is not much longer after that when Terrace finds himself in a position where he must pull the plug on Project Nim, fearing that Nim Chimpsky has grown too powerful and dangerous to control. So Nim Chimpsky ends up stuck in a cramped cage as a hepatitis test subject at New York University’s Laboratory of Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates. That is until Henry Herrmann, a Boston attorney, steps in and represents Nim Chimpsky in a court of law -- arguing that the usual standards for laboratory animals do not apply to Nim because of his unusual upbringing. Terrace probably never realized it, but by raising Nim Chimpsky as a surrogate human (and arguably teaching him to communicate with humans), he may have opened people’s minds to the possibility that animals should have rights, including the right to legal protection from research.

Project Nim addresses the ethics of raising animals as humans and/or using them as research subjects, but director James Marsh, in this follow-up to his Oscar-winning Man on Wire, purposefully stops short of giving any hard-fast answers. Marsh's documentary is not here to talk science or ethics; he merely wants to provide the audience with an intriguing and beguiling story. Which he does in spades! Nonetheless, Project Nim is a life-changing experience that will certainly alter many viewers’ perspectives on animal rights as well as what qualifies as scientific research.


Project Nim screens for free at the Los Angeles Film Festival June 25, 3:45 p.m., Regal Cinemas L.A. Live. For more information: Project Nim.