Project Nim

Few days ago I heard an interesting news on the Net which is about a chimpanzee named Nim. It's called, the "Project Nim." "Project Nim," run by Columbia University psychologist, Herbert Terrace, was hope to disapprove Chamskyan, the MIT linguist, about his theory of the uniqueness of language to humans, and to show that chimpanzee could develop language. To Terrance, the question is, "What would Nim do?" Nim was assigned Stephanie LaFarge to be Nim’s fake mother. For LaFarge who was studying psychology, it was thrilling. However, in the end there came raising problems…Nim started to break things all over the house. Finally, Nim was put into a different home. Nim learned about 125 signs then, but was he really learning language?

One day watching a video with Nim signing with a teacher, Terrance found that Nim was tracking most of the teacher’s signs, imitating most of the teacher’s signs, and Nim almost never made a sign spontaneously, Terrance came to believe that Nim would never use language the way humans do, perform sentences and express ideas. That was the end of the project. Therefore, Nim was returned to the research institute to live a very different life, in a cage with other chimps. Later, Nim was sold to a medical lab because the institution ran out of funds. Thanks to Nim’s supporters managed to rescue Nim out of it and finally taking Nim to an animal sanctuary so that Nim could rest in peace in the year 2000.

Here comes an ethical problem. Should a chimp be treated and raised like a human for a research purpose and even with no plan whatsoever of protecting the animal? Or should any animal be treated like that? Of course the scientists will never agree that they’re unethical deeds or they will have a hard time to do the research. But should we treat other animals like we own them and destroy their lives merely to satisfy our own curiosity. We curious about how other animal communicate with their kinds, so we cage them, change their nature, and study them. The most ironic thing is that lots of knowledge we’ve now discovered were mainly found out by this method. My point is, since the ethical issue has been raised, should we stop doing this and find a new way out, or we simply ignore it?