Project Nim Page #7

because they were all going through

the same thing.

I made a big, big stink about it

in every way I could.

I called the press.

We bitched as much as we could.

The student Bob Ingersoll,

he used to hound me every chance he got,

and I would start to get really annoyed.

And then it dawned on me

that he was the only one who cared.

Nobody, nobody,

except the press, helped us.

Is there anything

that you would consider doing

to prevent what is going

to happen to him?

Unfortunately, there's nothing I can do

because legally Nim is not mine.

Nim was loaned to me

for the duration of my project.

That project ran out of funds...

Somebody at the Boston Globe

told me to read a front-page story

on that day

and he said,

"I think you'd be interested,

"and I know you take unusual cases. "

As a human being, I thought it was

a kind of esoteric, unique form

of animal cruelty,

all the worse for that.

And as a lawyer

I thought it was just plain illegal.

If the facts are, as I'm being told,

that this young chimp

was brought up from infancy

in a human family, you can't stick him

into a little cage

in some horrible medical lab

and use him for medical experiments.

It's per se animal cruelty.

Early on, I decided this:

If this animal has been deliberately

brought up from infanthood

to think of himself as human,

then, if I'm going to represent him,

I have to treat him like a human client.

Give him his day in court.

Henry and I, Mr Herrmann, were in

communication pretty much every day.

He used a really cool strategy,

actually.

He said,

"Hey, this chimp can speak for himself.

"Let's bring him into court

and let him talk. "

What I had ready as a trial exhibit

was a steel cage

and a couple of strong guys with a pole

ready to carry it into court.

And I was going to get Nim to go into

a frenzy and signal "out, out, out".

And I believe the judge said

something to the effect that,

"I'm not letting a f***ing chimpanzee

"come in here and make a mockery

of my courtroom,"

or something to that effect.

And that's when I said

I'm going to bring, in effect,

a habeas corpus petition

on behalf of the chimp.

Bring him to court.

Our opponents were pigheaded,

but they weren't stupid.

They realised that win, lose or draw,

once I got into court, they'd be losing,

because even if the judge

refused to hear him,

the media attention would

have been devastating.

And the dean

of the medical faculty said,

"That's it, get that chimp out of here. "

Before anything could happen,

swooping down,

like in some Wagnerian drama,

comes Cleveland Amory.

I want this to be a place

where those animals

that have been abused,

that have been misused,

will finally and forever

have a place that they never

will have to fear again.

Mr Amory had, up until then,

perhaps a well-deserved reputation

for doing important work

for animal rights.

And he just went and buys the chimp,

takes him to his Black Horse Ranch

or whatever it was called,

and says, "I am saving Nim. "

Cleveland Amory

to the rescue again.

Nim will live here

for the rest of his natural life.

"Here my story ends,

my troubles are over, and I am at home. "

And that's what it says

as you drive into Black Beauty Ranch.

He was the only animal we ever bought.

And we didn't know

a thing about chimpanzees,

but we just thought it was better...

What we could do was better

than where he was.

It was never meant to be

a home for caged animals.

It is really a home for abused

and abandoned equine animals.

That's animals just with hooves.

We were aghast

that he would just pick up this chimp,

transport him to a horse ranch

somewhere in the middle of nowhere,

and there was nobody there

who knew how to take care of a chimp.

We brought him to Black Beauty

and built a house for him.

It was a big, kind of a square place

and it had a porch outside

so that he could go outside,

and he had all sorts of toys

to play with, but it was solitary.

Chimps are social animals.

And you can't just put

one chimp in a box

and expect everything to be cool.

Some of the time he was sitting

like this, in the corner.

And you just thought,

"What is he thinking,

"what is he missing, what can we do?"

Will you please be sure to stop off here

in the nation's capital?

We had a TV down and then he broke that,

and then we put one up in the ceiling,

and he found a way to get up there.

Well, okay,

you don't get a television

if that's gonna be your attitude.

I wrote letters to Cleveland

bitching at him about how

leaving Nim there alone

was virtually torture.

Not only did they not care

what I thought,

they wanted me as far away

from them as possible.

They wanted to make that pretty clear,

and they did make that pretty clear.

"If you come here, you'll be arrested. "

I felt it, you know,

and I just wanted to...

I don't know, I...

He got out a number of times.

What he wanted to do

was go in the ranch house,

be in the ranch house, be with people,

sleep in a bed.

Well, we had a bed for him in his house.

We never slept in the bed in his house.

One time when he came in the house,

there was a little white poodle

that just barked and barked and barked

at this chimpanzee

coming through the door.

He just picked it up

and swung him against the wall.

He meant to shut the dog up,

but, of course, he killed the dog.

There was another time

when he went in the house

and he picked up a chair

and threw it through the window.

This is a very miserable chimpanzee,

you know?

He'd had such a chequered life,

he'd gone from here to here

to here to here to here.

They should not be taken away

from their mothers in the first place.

I knew that Nim was there.

I didn't know anything about

the quality of his life there.

You heard good things and bad things

and so on.

And I thought, why not go?

So we all flew out to Texas,

we go to the ranch,

we meet the people taking care of him.

He was alone.

He was the only chimp there.

I happened to be looking at him

when Stephanie got out of the car,

and he saw her

and he recognised her right away,

and the look on his face was just,

"Oh, now you come.

"Now you come. Now I've been

through all this, and now you come. "

He definitely recognised us.

Whether he was happy to see us,

I don't know.

He wasn't

particularly attractive to me

now that he was an adult chimpanzee.

I didn't have a,

"Oh, isn't he beautiful,"

or anything like that.

He was... I didn't know him.

My mother decides

that she wants to go

into the enclosure with Nim.

Which didn't...

Which happened sort of,

"I'm going to go in with Nim. "

We said to her,

"He doesn't look like

he's going to welcome you,

"so maybe you shouldn't go

into his facility. "

I was curious. "Is he gonna sign?

"What's gonna happen?

What's it gonna be like?"

Stephanie, please don't go in there,

he's not in a good mood.

You know, you can tell

he's not in a good mood.

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