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By Root 2465 0

the results. What he called his data were measured by things like how many signs Clever had made on his own, with no instructional prompting, and whether or not he was making the signs in appropriate contexts. Such data were deeply vulnerable to subjective interpretation and often too amoebic and vague to measure; ergo, the data were difficult to gather in any way that conformed to acceptable scientific methodology. Clever learned hundreds of signs, but never used them in any way that met the experimenters’ definition of language. He never acquired anything that could be called syntax, never had anything resembling grammar. Although young Clever’s cuteness made him a darling of the public—he was featured on TV talk shows and so on (maybe even because of this public interest in his cuteness)—within the scientific community the Clever Hands experiment fell under deep scrutiny, then doubt, then outward hostility, until Troutwine lost his funding and the experiment went under. Troutwine shut down the project, closed the facilities, and washed his hands of it all. Then, to save face, he decided to join the opposition, and denounced the project as a failure in a paper he published in Science in 1979. In the paper, he lay down his arms and supplicated the forgiveness of the scientific community, declaring that language was an innately human capability, the Cartesian break between man and beast was all true, and any future animal language experiments were a foolish waste of time. Troutwine voluntarily agreed to abjure, curse, and detest his previous opinions on the matter, and he did not mutter “it still moves.” His penance paid, the true church of science absolved Henry Troutwine and welcomed him back into the fold, and it was henceforth decreed that all animal language experiments were sheer bunkum.

Meanwhile, Clever himself was abandoned. He was removed from his home in Princeton and for lack of a place to put him was shipped back to Bill Lemon’s farm in Oklahoma, where—for the first time in his life—he had to interact with other chimps. A lifetime of human pampering had made Clever shy, neurasthenic, and poorly socialized, and he had trouble getting along with other chimps. Four years later, Lemon also ran completely out of money, and began to sell off his chimps. He sold most of them to biomedical research facilities. Clever himself was sold to the Alamogordo Primate Research Facility on Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. He was never experimented on, though. When it leaked to the public that Clever Hands, the famous and adorable sign language chimp, sat languishing in a three-by-five-foot wooden box in the desert, waiting to be injected with hepatitis in order to be tested with experimental drugs, a small public outcry arose among animal rights activists. Eventually Clever wound up on a wildlife preserve in Texas. The wildlife preserve had no other chimps, and he spent several more years living in solitary confinement, until the Lawrences bought him and retired him to their ranch in southwestern Colorado, where he has been living ever since.

Clever had probably enjoyed a happier life than either Hilarious Larry or Lily. Larry’s and Lily’s minds had been reared only in dens of iniquity: noisy, smoke-filled tents resonant with squabbling and shouting voices and caterwauling children, where they would be treated to beatings, whippings, shocks and scourges if they did not clamber onstage to dance, to mock and humiliate themselves, to ride tricycles and remove their garments before the eyes of strangers. Hilarious Larry and Hilarious Lily were both broken, rattled, traumatized spirits; the ranch was as friendly a convalescent home as any for these two damaged souls to while away their days unto the ends of their haunted existences—but as content as their retirement may have been, they would clearly never be well again. But Clever was a somewhat different story: he had, in his way, been loved. He had been treated with respect by his handlers. Some of them, in any case. Of course their failure to “teach” him sign language was