Chantek

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Chantek

Chantek (born December 17, 1977, at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia) is a male orangutan who has mastered the use of a number of intellectual skills, including sign language, taught by anthropologist Dr. Lyn Miles. In Malay and Indonesian, cantik (pronounced chantik) means lovely or "beautiful". Rather than confinement in a zoo exhibit, Chantek has been kept captive in a habitat a short ride from the main zoo grounds of Zoo Atlanta, ever since the Yerkes Center gave him to the zoo in 1997.

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[edit] An intellectual primate

Chantek has a vocabulary of several hundred signs, and understands both spoken English and American Sign Language. Chantek makes and uses tools, creates paintings, necklaces, crafts and music, and is one of only a handful of signing primates scattered across the United States. Washoe, a 40-year-old female chimpanzee, is the first of the signing apes and one of the most famous. She now lives in Ellensburg, Washington. Koko, a signing gorilla, lives in Woodside, California.

Orangutans comprise an exceedingly intelligent great ape genus native to Malaysia and Indonesia, who have long arms and reddish, sometimes brown, hair. The term "orangutan" is derived from the Malay phrase orang hutan, meaning "man of the forest". Males have characteristic cheekpads, which only grow with sufficient testosterone levels, and use a deeply resonant voice to make resounding 'long calls', and tend to spend months alone in the wild without significant interaction with other orangutans.

[edit] Early life

From the age of nine months, Dr. Miles raised Chantek as a signing infant, rearing him as much as possible as a human child on the campus of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Miles toilet-trained Chantek, and gave him chores and an allowance, using steel washers as money. His favorite way to spend it was on fast food.

Born at Yerkes, Chantek was transferred to the university when he was nine months old to learn from Dr. Miles. He returned to Yerkes for a short time, and then spent about nine years living in a trailer at Dr. Miles' home near the university. His current habitat at Zoo Atlanta is an enclosure that affords him private space and is expansive with plenty of trees for swinging from branch to branch (brachiation).

[edit] Chantek as a person

Like children, Chantek prefers to use names rather than pronouns - as the reference is fixed - even when talking to a person. He even invents signs of his own (e.g., 'eye-drink' for contact lens solution, and 'Dave missing finger' for a special friend). He developed referential ability as early as most human children, and points to and shows objects just like humans do. Chantek uses adjectives to specify attributes, such as "red bird", and "white cheese food eat", yet he overgeneralizes in interesting ways, too. For example, he uses the sign 'Lyn' for all caregivers, but never for strangers.

Chantek also demonstrates self-awareness, by grooming himself in a mirror and by using signs in mental planning and deception. Rather than simply exhibiting conditioned responses, as critics of primate intellect contend, Chantek has learned roles - and role reversals - in games like 'Simon Says'. Like many other orangutans who have demonstrated phenomenal problem solving skills, Chantek exhibits certain intutitive and thinking character traits comparable to the rationality used in human engineering. His intellectual and linguistic abilities make some scientists, including Dr. Miles, regard him as possessing personhood.

[edit] Effects of captivity

As a captive allowed to indulge in his fondness for fast food, Chantek's weight threatened to become a lifelong problem. Raised in a human setting, Chantek became very fat, about five hundred pounds. Concerned scientists prescribed a strict diet for him, but as a result, five hundred pounds of contentment transformed into four hundred pounds of inspired rationality. Determined to find food while on his diet, and true to the clever spirit imbued in the DNA of his pedigree, Chantek pulled off an entirely predictable escape -- orangutans frequently escape confinement, often despite elaborate precautions taken by their captors. Chantek was later found, gorging himself from an up-ended food barrel.

Thus, in 1986, when Chantek was eight, the University shipped Chantek back to Yerkes, allowing Miles only limited visits for a few years. For a while, Yerkes even refused to allow Miles merely to see Chantek.

[edit] Orangutan 'personhood' and conservation efforts

Miles would prefer freedom for Chantek, even going so far as to advocate personhood for Chantek and other great apes. The term personhood is often ascribed by experts to animals who demonstrate conscious awareness, language, and acculturation. Miles and like-minded advocates seek to expand personhood to great apes, to the extent that - eventually - legal rights of personhood would be conferred under the law.

To further her objectives, Miles created 'Project Chantek', seeking to better understand the mind of an orangutan. Miles hopes her findings will help ascertain how human symbolic systems may have evolved and developed. Uniquely, her project emphasizes development of cultural models and processes in Chantek’s upbringing. Her work is supported by the Chantek Foundation, whose mission is to develop greater scientific understanding of orangutans, to support cultural and language research with orangutans, to promote orangutan conservation and establish culture-based great ape sanctuaries, and to foster education programs that will facilitate understanding of great apes as persons, thereby building a bridge between humans and great apes.

The Chantek Foundation is a member of ApeNet, founded by musician Peter Gabriel to link great apes through the internet, creating the first interspecies internet communication.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  • H.L. Miles (1990) "The cognitive foundations for reference in a signing orangutan" in S.T. Parker and K.R. Gibson (eds.) Language" and intelligence in monkeys and apes: Comparative Developmental Perspectives, Cambridge University Press, pp 511-539

[edit] External links

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