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 American anthropologists Lyn Miles and Ann Southcombe. In Malay and Indonesian, cantik (pronounced chanteek) means "lovely" or "beautiful".

An intellectual primate

Chantek has a vocabulary of several hundred modified ESL signs, and he also understands spoken English. Chantek makes and uses tools and even understands the concepts of money and work-exchange. He possesses the spatial comprehension to direct a driving-route from UTC (the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga) to the closest Dairy Queen, and the mental comprehension to refer to events that happened years ago. He enjoys creative projects and makes paintings, necklaces, crafts and music.

Early life

Born at Yerkes, Chantek was transferred to UTC when he was nine months old. Miles was the director of a research project to study apes, and she raised him as a signing infant, rearing him as much as possible as a human child. Miles toilet-trained Chantek, and gave him chores and an allowance, using steel washers as money.

After years of loving service, she hired a full-time assistant to give Chantek all the benefits of early education. As Miles taught anthropology at UTC, she also gathered a group of dedicated student volunteers to help with the project. For years, the entire campus was captivated by Chantek's presence.

Chantek spent almost nine years living under constant supervision in a specially-adapted trailer on the UTC campus. He went to classes regularly and was so beloved by the academic community that his photo was included in the school yearbooks. However, as his size increased, and as containing him in his compound became a problem, the administration feared an accident/lawsuit, and they returned him to Yerkes following an incident in which he escaped from his compound and caught a female student by surprise. For the next eleven years of his life, he was confined to a tiny cage, where he entered a depression and put on weight due to his inactive lifestyle at Yerkes. When his caretakers were permitted to visit, he continually signed for them to get car keys and take him home. Finally, in 1997 the Zoo Atlanta offered him sanctuary in a nice enclosure with trees for swinging from branch to branch (brachiation).

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 problem solving skills, Chantek exhibits certain intuitive and thinking character traits comparable to the rationality used in human engineering. His intellectual and linguistic abilities make some scientists, including Miles and Dawn Prince-Hughes, regard him as possessing personhood.[1]

Effects of captivity

At the age of nine, he was transferred to a small, solitary cage where he would be held for the next 11 years of his life. Chantek's weight ballooned to 500 pounds during this time. When the Zoo Atlanta staff offered to him sanctuary in 1997, they had to restrict his diet to help regain his health and bring his weight back to 245 pounds.

Orangutan 'personhood' and conservation efforts

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 accomplish this goal, Miles created 'Project Chantek', to further study the orangutan's mind. She hopes her research will help ascertain how human symbolic systems 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, thereby building a bridge of understanding 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.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Prince-Hughes, Dawn (1987). Songs of the Gorilla Nation. Harmony. p. 136. ISBN 1400050588.

External links