Jungle Book redux as Eight-year-old found living amongst monkeys in Uttar Pradesh

LUCKNOW: Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli came alive in the jungles of Katraniyaghat in Bahraich district, 200 km from Lucknow, when local policemen rescued an eight-year-old girl from a troop of monkeys recently.

The cops had to face resistance from the simians before they could rescue the girl.

Mowgli, the man-cub protagonist of Kipling's ‘The Jungle Book’ was reared by wolves’ pack in 'Seeonee hills', now in MP.

The girl was spotted when a police party of Motinagar range in Bahariach headed by sub-inspector Suresh Yadav was on routine night patrol in the woods of Katarniyaghat.

“We spotted her playing among apes. As we tried to go near the girl, the monkeys surrounded her and some of them pounced on us,” says sub-inspector Yadav. Even the girl also resisted the cops and screeched at them.

The girl, without clothes, was significantly comfortable among the apes. She, however, was finally taken out by the police party and immediately admitted to the district hospital.

There is no lead about the family or parents of the girl who can neither talk nor can comprehend any language.

“She behaves like an ape and screams loudly if doctors try to reach out to her,” says Dr DK Singh, chief medical superintendent, Bahraich District Hospital adding that her behaviour is making her treatment difficult.

However, he says that the girl, who has been in the hospital for over two months now, is showing definite improvement in her medical condition.

The girl’s presence in the district hospital has evoked curiosity among the locals.

“As she sees anyone looking at her even from a distance, she starts growling,” says Shiraz, who is one among those visiting the strange patient in the district hospital regularly.

“When she was brought to the hospital, she had wounds all over her body. Her nails and hair were unkempt like monkeys,” says superintendent of police (City) Dinesh Tripathi.

“From her behaviour, it appears that she had been with the monkeys since birth. I visit her personally time-to-time,” Tripathi adds.

Sharing other details, Dr Singh says that the girl even walks, eats and sits like monkeys.

“Sometimes she walks on feet and suddenly comes down on all four,” says the doctor. Even while eating, the girl spreads the eatables on bed and doesn’t use hands to put them in her mouth. “She uses her mouth to pick the eatables,” says a nurse of Bahraich district hospital.

“The treatment is proving to be a difficult task for the doctors as she does not understand anything and makes noises and faces like monkeys, and attacks the doctors when they approach her,” says a junior doctor.

According to the hospital staff attending to her, the girl gets scared on seeing human beings and gets violent very often on seeing people looking at her.

I used to see one of those chimps being pushed around in a stroller back in the late 70s. Some wealthy character here in OC had hired post grad psychology students to teach the chimp to sign. I don’t know what ever became of this experiment.

I am not sure if you want to know. As products and agents of the demonic universe with its perverse alternatives to what God ordained, the distinction btwn species as well as genders is done away with, as well as moral laws regarding the same.

Seemingly determined to show that the division btwn chips apes and humans ("We only differ 1.5 percent in our DNA; a chimp is 98.5 percent human. ." they trumpet) is only nurture, not nature,

Herbert Terrace, a Columbia University behavioral psychologist (who still teaches and conducts research at Columbia) and the grand architect of the project, planned to raise a chimpanzee in a human home, with no other contact with other chimpanzees, and begin instructing him in sign language from infancy. Days after his birth, Terrace scooped up the infant Nim, flew him to New York, and had him placed, like a foster child, in the home of the LaFarges, asking the family to instruct the chimp in American Sign Language. Not a single member of the household was fluent, or even competent, in sign language. The LaFarges were wealthy, eccentric hippies—W.E.R., a pony-tailed and put-upon poet, and Stephanie, a former student and lover of Terrace’s—with a Brady-Bunch-sized family who lived in a brownstone on the Upper West Side. And wait—it gets weirder.

Herb Terrace... given to using his authority to have sex with his students—at one point to the detriment, almost certainly, of the project. Laura-Ann Petitto, the most important and involved of Nim’s teachers and caregivers, left the project after Terrace abruptly broke off an affair with her (Petitto was eighteen when she began working on the project). https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-sad-story-of-nim-chimpsky

Terrace and his former partner, Stephanie LaFarge, dressed Nim in human clothes, fed him human food, taught him sign language and encouraged him to "explore" Ms LaFarge's naked body.

Nim was even allowed to smoke cannabis. The ape soon captured the imagination of the public, and made appearances on Sesame Street and the cover of New York magazine.But then things went wrong. Nim went to live with another woman, and he lashed out after catching her in bed with Terrace. Nim swooped down on her from a 7.5m high window and banged her head against the floor. The experiment was a dangerous failure and Nim was returned to the primate centre. It was said he made the sign for "hugs" as the carers walked away - but even that wasn't right. Tests later showed Nim had simply learned to beg by copying signs, and wasn't communicating at all. Sadly, Nim died in 2000 after suffering a heart attack, aged just 26 - well short of the 60 years most chimps in captivity live for. http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/movies/nim-chimpsky-the-chimpanzee-raised-as-a-human-now-the-subject-of-a-film-project-nim/news-story/01e92b98387e37d1f05bfd93da2a151c

Terrace’s own experiment was forged in a spirit of heated debate about language and behaviour that was raging through academia in the 1960s and 70s. A disciple of the behaviourist BF Skinner, Terrace wanted to disprove the theory of Skinner’s great rival, the linguist Noam Chomsky, that humans are uniquely 'hard-wired’ to develop language. Even the choice of his chimp’s name, Nim Chimpsky, was designed to cock a snook at Chomsky.

In search of a surrogate mother for his chimp, Terrace turned to one of his former graduate psychology students – and a former lover – Stephanie LaFarge. 'Herb wanted to do something equivalent to Galileo and Freud in creating a paradigm shift for human beings,’ LaFarge says. 'That’s who he is: very arrogant and very ambitious.’...

The LaFarges ran a bohemian household. The large living-room was furnished with a water bed and cushions where at the end of the day, in the communal spirit of the times, the adults would pass joints around. Nim would delight in joining in, and two more words were added to his vocabulary, 'stone’ and 'smoke’. 'He was on a different species trajectory,’ LaFarge says. 'We did not have to treat him as a child.’

He was also intensely possessive of Stephanie. 'Young chimpanzees are terrified and they attach to your body,’ she says. 'You don’t have to carry them, which is a big advantage over a baby. But it did interfere with Wer’s contact with me.’ Most nights Nim slept between Stephanie and Wer. Love-making became a problem. 'For people to have an animal in the room while they’re having sex is not that unusual,’ she says. 'It just happened that this animal was hostile.’

In 1977 Terrace abandoned the project. Like a rowdy adolescent, Nim had become unmanageable, his habit of biting increasingly dangerous. Terrace also believed he had all the data he needed. Having been raised as a human for the first four years of his life, with his own accommodation in a brownstone and then a mansion, Nim was returned to the IPS in Oklahoma and put in a cage....

[Bob] Ingersoll became Nim’s primary carer and companion...An avid Grateful Dead fan, Ingersoll would bring along a portable stereo and they would sit in the fields smoking a joint together and listening to Dark Star. 'I think he enjoyed it,’ Ingersoll says. 'But it wasn’t as if he was signing, “Let’s break out that Dead tape”; it was a lot more, “Stone, smoke, now”.’..

At Ingersoll’s instigation, Cleveland Amory acquired another chimp, Sally, as a companion to Nim. Sally had belonged to a circus trainer and could dance on her toes and rollerskate. The two chimps became inseparable. When Sally died of a stroke in 1997, Nim sat on her bed, inconsolable, refusing to eat or move. Three years later he died of a heart attack at the age of 26. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/8681237/Project-Nim-the-chimp-who-was-brought-up-like-a-child.html

While Nim did learn 125 signs, Terrace concluded that he had not acquired anything the researchers were prepared to designate worthy of the name "language" (as defined by Noam Chomsky) although he had learned to repeat his trainers' signs in appropriate contexts.^[2] Language is defined as a "doubly articulated" system, in which signs are formed for objects and states and then combined syntactically, in ways that determine how their meanings will be understood. For example, "man bites dog" and "dog bites man" use the same set of words but because of their ordering will be understood by speakers of English as denoting very different meanings.

One of Terrace's colleagues, Laura-Ann Petitto, estimated that with more standard criteria, Nim's true vocabulary count was closer to 25 than 125. However, other students who cared for Nim longer than Petitto disagreed with her and with the way that Terrace conducted his experiment. Critics assert that Terrace used his analysis to destroy the movement of ape-language research. Terrace argued that none of the chimps were using language, because they could learn signs but could not form them syntactically as language, as described above.

Terrace and his colleagues concluded that the chimpanzee did not show any meaningful sequential behavior that rivaled human grammar. Nim's use of language was strictly pragmatic, as a means of obtaining an outcome, unlike a human child's, which can serve to generate or express meanings, thoughts or ideas. There was nothing Nim could be taught that could not equally well be taught to a pigeon using the principles of operant conditioning. The researchers therefore questioned claims made on behalf of Washoe, and argued that the apparently impressive results may have amounted to nothing more than a "Clever Hans" effect, not to mention a relatively informal experimental approach.

Critics of primate linguistic studies include Thomas Sebeok, American semiotician and investigator of nonhuman communication systems, who wrote:

In my opinion, the alleged language experiments with apes divide into three groups: one, outright fraud; two, self-deception; three, those conducted by Terrace. The largest class by far is the middle one.^[5]

Sebeok also made pointed comparisons of Washoe with Clever Hans. Some evolutionary psychologists, in effect agreeing with Chomsky, argue that the apparent impossibility of teaching language to animals is indicative that the ability to use language is an innately human development.^[6]

Project Nim, a documentary film by James Marsh about the Nim study, explores the story (and the wealth of archival footage) to consider ethical issues, the emotional experiences of the trainers and the chimpanzee, and the deeper issues the experiment raised. This documentary (produced by BBC Films, Red Box Films, and Passion Films) opened the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.^[7] The film was released in theaters on July 8, 2011 by Roadside Attractions,^[8] and was released on DVD on 7 February 2012.^[9]

Worse details here: http://www.salon.com/2011/07/08/project_nim/

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