foreign so I've been collecting notes on topics for a good couple years according to Google Docs I've been collecting notes on Coco since 2018 but have only recently started making videos for YouTube so when adjusted the script off to double check it I'd found out that Michael Hobbs and Sarah Marshall already did a Coco episode on their excellent podcast you're wrong about and uh well without spoiling anything they talk about the same stuff that I wanted to so if this video sounds similar to their podcast it's it's because it is um we're all drawing from the same world but I've been collecting notes on things for too long to show off this project now Coco the gorilla couldn't talk wait what what do you mean Coco couldn't foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] okay so I talked to my cat I'll give her love and affections and I'll narrate tasks to her and I'll scold her when she leaves a plate of chicken that I cooked for even though it's crispy on the outside and soft in the middle which is exactly how she likes it but why do I talk to my cat more broadly why do we talk to animals even more broadly why do we give human treats to animals eagles look like this and will say that bird looks angry but that's just its facial structure it doesn't look angry and what about objects I don't like the look of you you can trust me Bob Eva what about your friend he looks really scary I'm gonna cut you nah it doesn't feel weird to anthropomorphize inanimate objects why and why is that such a common thing to do why is talking to animals or objects I think humans do independently of one another across space and time and culture is it a deep need to be social if my cat can't understand me that my home's been opened up to an animal that I don't know that doesn't pay rent and just pisses up the side of the fridge because she can no no no no no no it's more than that I might assign human characteristics to things that aren't human but anthropomorphizing animals implies that the communication between humans and animals is one way and if you've ever owned a pet you know that's not true it's hard to say that dogs understand their owners but MRI scans of dog brains have revealed that they can register words they can process meaningful ones and they can distinguish between tone and body language and with enough repetition dogs can learn to correlate certain words with certain actions call your dog for walkies often enough eventually the dog will associate the word with the activity German studies on a border collie are called Rico found Rico could fetch objects he wasn't familiar with when instructed about 70 of the time using a kind of inductive reasoning and a follow-up study on a border collie called Chaser found she could do the same thing show awareness that certain words map to certain objects and she could learn what those object word Maps were and it's not just dogs that possess these sorts of abilities in a raccoon study raccoons learned that they could use rocks to raise the water level in a tube to get a treat and one raccoon just knocked the tube over foreign cows can recognize individual faces they might even have friends and enemies crows too can recognize faces and they can also spot patterns in traffic make tools and they even show some evidence of collective learning it turns out animals might have far more complex in a world than we ever would have guessed but there's never gonna be a cat-based civilization I don't know maybe because they sleep 20 hours a day what or maybe because animal intelligence seems to have developed for that specific ecological niche it's needed cows and sheep put points into Charisma because they're herd animals their focus is on social intelligence and remembering faces whereas squirrels put points into perception like remembering where they bury food neither of those things on its own could produce anything like culture or organized Society there has to be something unique about humans so what is it in some religions what defines humans as unique is being made in the image of God and that's how humans have defined themselves as special Evolution puts a spanner in that idea because Evolution says that well we're not special in any Cosmic sense we're just one branch in a sprawling tree of life so we've redefined ourselves by something else intelligence from an evolutionary perspective we invested heavily in intelligence and we invested very broadly social spatial abstract lateral existential dread which it turns out isn't uniquely human and if other traits of intelligence aren't uniquely human that could include what feels like the most human of intelligence is language foreign [Music] there are two big ideas in linguistics regarding how we develop language behaviorists and The Gnome Chomsky School the behavior school goes a bit like this remember our dog example from earlier when you say walkies the dog learns to associate the word walkies with the activity and it's reinforced over time that when the word wargis is said it means they'll go for a walk language works the same way children are like a chimp at a typewriter tapping out nonsense and eventually they'll hit a word it might be Mama it might be dada but it will be a word and their parents will reward them with some sort of social affection the child will learn like the dog that they will be rewarded for saying words and thousands upon thousands of tiny reinforcements later we develop words grammar sentence structure language there's nothing intrinsically special about humans language acquisition according to the behaviorists is just the result of one giant society-sized Skinner box Chomsky disagreed he argue that there were elements of language consistent across cultures even with languages that developed Roots entirely independent of each other there are billions of words with near infinite combinations and there are all these rules and idiosyncrasies within language it can't develop via behavioral reinforcement there's just too much stuff if children are like the proverbial chimp with the typewriter they'd be bashing forever there's something about the human brain predisposed to language language is unmistakably human if Chomsky was correct then no non-human could ever acquire anything like language at best they could learn a handful of words and associations if Skinner was correct language could be taught to non-human species all it would take for an animal to acquire language would be the correct procedure now we have tried to teach animals we considered Near human intelligence to speak like dolphins and chimps but it didn't work one chimp Vicky was taught how to say a handful of words in the late 19 40s do you see what this is but Vicky's grasp of spoken language was well below what we see in children what we learned through these experiments is that humans have very specific vocal structures that allow us to say and make certain noises that can form the basis of language we can guess how long sentences will be and modulate our breathing accordingly and we'll do it automatically physiologically apes and dolphins couldn't learn spoken word and into this void stepped sign language you can't teach a dolphin to sign not with those flippers conversing with dolphins is still a way off but Apes Apes have dexterous hands and they will use them to make gestures in the wild researchers into intra-species communication thought they'd probably have more success teaching chimps to communicate on human terms if they use sign language in 1966 a couple at the University of Reno started to teach a chimp called will show sign language instead of spoken word and it paid off they managed to teach her a vocabulary of about 132 signs and one day will show does something thing very interesting The Story Goes that when Michelle was out with her trainer she saw a swan and signed the word Waterbird Washoe was taking two disparate things water and bird and mushing them together to describe a third entity the SWAT this is how we develop language this is how kids describe the world around them this is how they learn sentence structure and a chimp just did it well show provided behaviorists with a prime counter to the Chomsky school we can teach Apes to do these things we can teach Apes language we'll show was the Catalyst to a whole host of psychological research trying to prove Chomsky wrong and with that Preamble out of the way we can finally talk about Coco foreign tologists were trying to get their hands on various Apes to teach them sign language one of these Apes was called Coco okay well actually she was called hanabiko meaning fireworks chart because she was born on the 4th of July but anyway Coco was born at San Francisco Zoo in 1971. at the age of one Coco was taken from her mother to be treated for a life-threatening illness and it's here that she meets 24 year old graduate student Penny Patterson they start caring for Coco and while caring for her Patterson starts to teach Coco sign language Patterson describes Coco's language acquisition in her 1978 paper the gestures of a gorilla language acquisition in another pongid and a follow-up paper in 1990 called language acquisition by alolan Gorilla Coco's first 10 years of vocabulary development after 10 months of teaching her sign language Coco had learned about a hundred signs and like humans Coco has a language growth spurt between the ages of two and four where Coco acquires new words very quickly like with show Coco was combining words to communicate other things she famously signed finger bracelet to communicate the word ring and stuck metal to communicate the word magnet Coco didn't just sign utterances for food and Cuddles either she discussed her relationships to people she'd Express parts and aspects of her personality Coco would even lie according to Patterson my assistant Kate man was with Coco then tipping the scales at 90 pounds when the gorilla plumped down on the kitchen sink in the trailer and it separated from its frame and dropped out of the alignment later when I asked Coco if she broke the sink she signed Kate there bad pointing to the sink Coco wouldn't know of course that I would never accept the idea that Kate would go around breaking sinks Coco would make art and she had a thing for poetry this is a self-titled picture that Coco painted called pink pink stink nice drink and she also named her kit in a rhyme or ball oh yeah Coco had a cat she couldn't get pregnant but she really wanted to be a mom so Dr Patterson got her a kitten instead Coco had a sense of time and she could remember past events like how she bit Penny when they first met this was taken from an article that Patterson wrote in National Geographic documenting coca's recollection of their first meeting with an interviewer what did you do to Penny bite you admit sorry bite scratch at this point I showed Coco the mark on my hand it really did look like a scratch wrong bite why bite because mad why mad don't know Coco was a media sensation she apparently shared quite a close one with Robin Williams and she became a big part of his stand-up routine on Broadway and she goes what does that mean she wants you to lift your shirt I left my shirt she reaches out and grabs both my nipples and when an 800 pound gorillas got you by the tits you listen and then a fun thing happened because my balls went somebody wants to play should we go to phase two no do not go to phase two when he died The Story Goes Coco mourned his passing 13 years after meeting him Coco not only remembered him she understood the finality of his death and she grieved for him at the height of Coco's Fame she'd learned nearly 2 000 signs she was on Mr Rogers she'd gotten two Nat geobiographies one of her taking a selfie in a mirror and the other with her kitten the last message that Coco signed was an appeal to humanity hmm foreign and this is where most accounts of Coco the gorilla stop but I wouldn't have called this video why Coco couldn't talk if that was the end of the story so strap in [Music] so if Apes really could acquire language to the level that Coco did why did all of the research into ape communication and ape language acquisition stop to answer that question and to understand why Coco couldn't talk we have to talk about a chimp called Nim chimsky who was adopted by herb Terrace professor of psychology and Psychiatry at Columbia University up until this point while the debate around the nature of language had been very intense and had opened up a lot of discussions about what the actual Hallmarks of a language are no one was questioning the value of the data being collected when Tara sat down to watch back the recordings of nim he was looking for some sort of pattern is Nim creating Word orders has he acquired a concept of grammar does he follow linguistic rules like syntax does he follow socially learned linguistic rules like not interrupting at random intervals and does Nim use private speech as in does he talk to himself that kind of thing Terrace published his findings in a 1979 paper called Canon ape create a sentence to which he answers no going over the Nim footage almost all of the signing that game does follows prompts from the communicators Nim doesn't initiate conversation he interrupts at random he doesn't follow typical language structure of listen and respond he doesn't use the signs to think in private moments and all of these are things that you would observe in kids kids will initiate conversation they will follow listen respond listen structures they'll talk to themselves Nim's most frequent three-word utterances are things like play me Nim eat me Nim eating him eat in fact all of Nim's most frequent utterances are quite pragmatic feed me play with me tickle me and who use the words interchangeably like e Nim and Nim e to mean the same thing there's no concept of grammar there a child would understand the difference between e Nim and Nim e the longest sentence that Nim signs at 16 words is give orange meat give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you what you'll notice about this sentence is its repetitiveness a kid wouldn't say something this devoid of meaning or structure children will elaborate on their utterances and they'll add complexity with time their sentences will get longer and convey more information as they acquire more language Nims terrorists noticed degraded with time the words Nim signed were the equivalent of mashing the middle predictive text key in your phone to spell something out Nim is trying to brute force a response to get food or some kind of social interaction the paper can enable Creator sentence was a hand grenade to ape Communications research it all but admitted that Noam Chomsky was right that there was something innate to humans that gives us the gift of the gab in fact Terrors published a book in 2019 with more or less that title in an interview Chomsky was very very Vindicated by this in 1982 Terrace published a follow-up paper called why Coco can't talk and it's here where the cracks in the Coco Story start to become noticeable if you're deranged enough to work your way through the backlog of scientific Publications from Penny Patterson and the gorilla Foundation then you'll find that most of the data for Guerrilla language skills come from unpublished internal use video created by Patterson as well as unpublished lists of Coco sign lexicon their 1978 paper recording gestures in gorillas is a descriptive paper where Patterson describes Coco's earlier signs but it's just that a description the 1990 study like the 1978 one is also descriptive Patterson does provide an appendix and supplementary data but its threadbare information it's a list of words and the order that Coco learned them Patterson fails to provide any transcribed utterances she relies on individual examples to support her interpretations without any sort of Corpus of utterances we can't glean anything useful from them like finding the emergence of abstract rules Patterson has never released any raw data or raw footage of her and Coco which is an immediate red flag it's claimed Coco has learned more than 2 000 signs and could make sentence structures but the there's very little in the way of raw data to actually prove this which is an issue endemic in a lot of ape Communications research it's near impossible to verify the claims that eights have learned the number of signs that are being claimed it's impossible to verify if Coco talks to herself or babbles or does any of the things that we observe in children there's no hours and hours of raw film to sift through to take from Professor Robert supplies lecture on human language and one problem with that point was there were no actual data that had ever been published by Patterson all there were were some several heartwarming films of Coco Coco and global warming and Coco and the trade deficit and Coco and this or that and there were no data scientists couldn't make any sense of it because there were no numbers there was no anything you can actually analyze and the available films aren't much better Terrace has argued like Nim Coco's longer utterances are completely devoid of meaning things like mess red thirsty mouth thirsty and please milk please me like Apple bottle one of the few Clips actually released by Patterson and Coco will involve things like this for sign language how do you state ment how to say love thank you love what that flower she's asking you about your cufflink is that a flower that's a sun and my grandfather gave me those [Music] it looks like a flower though it does look like can we talk can we talk a little bit about love Throne oh honey come on yeah I love you visit love Coco is brute forcing signs until she gets it right so she can get a treat and Penny is either prompting coco or she's rationalizing away Coco's wrong answers West is like thirsty what it's like gosh what if I can do that oh did I forget something black [Music] your play when you spotted this over interpreting and rationalizing Away wrong answers starts appearing everywhere here's a chunk of the transcript from the AOL inter-species chat session of which Coco was a path what are the names of your kittens and dogs candy give me okay see give me what's the name of your kitty kitty's name and dog's name foot foot isn't the name of your kitty here lip oh she wants to hear the lady on the phone maybe you can ask her that question Coco what's the name of your cat no do you like to chat with other people fine nipple yes that was her answer nipple rhymes with people okay she doesn't sign people per se so she may be trying to do a sounds like which she indicated was fine [Music] Terrace's articles kicked off a series of well shall we say less than polite letters between him and Patterson Terrace argued that Patterson isn't providing any raw data for scientists to analyze hashtag release the Patterson cut and Patterson's argument revolve around Terrors being bitter about the failure of Project Nim she argues caregivers have to form close bonds with their Apes so they can feel comfortable communicating and them just cycled through teachers there was no closeness between Terrace and Nim there wasn't one figure for him there were 25 maybe that came and went it's so difficult because it's based on relationships it's not just based on you know open the cage new person feed ask question it's a they want to talk with someone they like but the closeness Patterson says is necessary means that the caregiver is the only person able to translate for the ape which means there's a lot of interpreting being done by the translators how much of it is the ape communicating and how much of it is the human interpreting it like what show signing water bird to mean Swan that's us interpreting what was show is signing was she signing Swan she could have just as easily been signing the words water and bird it could just be basic object recognition rather than making compound words to produce something new Terrace actually went over some of the show's raw data and he included film traces in study in the longest film of the show's language drills teaching sign language to the chimpanzee will show the show makes 155 utterances of which 120 were single signs and they occurred mainly in vocabulary testing sessions will show simply wasn't using sign language to communicate some counter that Apes in research respond to human commands and even if they are just mimicking signs mimicry is a part of how we acquire language to start but that's just it the mimicking in human children gives way to language and non-mimmicking behaviors Apes never stop mimicking is training apes or Birds to understand commands and mimic superficial aspects of language the same thing as language because you can teach a dog to follow human commands sit lie down roll over does that mean dogs understand English are Apes doing anything more complicated than what your dog does when you call it for walkies I'm not sure even the more saccharine stories of Coco get cast in a new light here like fix Earth being Coco's last words like what does Does Coco have an understanding of climate change did she School strike for climate did Penny read her ipcc assessment reports climate change and the environmental movements are things that matter to us they motivate humans to action is it just a coincidence that one of the most pressing issues of our time also happened to be the last words of a gorilla who we are expected to believe managed to comprehend the connection between Human Action and climate change no says Snopes because it was a doctored tape and you can tell it is it's filmed in Jump cutter Vision the press release that actually accompanied the video says it was edited together from a number of other takes and there's no transparency around how the video was made regarding what her signers were signing to her or other cues Coco could have been given because of course there isn't they don't release raw films hashtag release the Paterson cut unsurprisingly Terrace's paper caused the whole field of eight Communications to implode on itself there was a big conference in 1980 where two researchers sibok and Rosenthal effectively called the researchers in the field Liars cheats and frauds and actually called them Liars cheats and frauds at the post-conference press release word got out and the government bodies who funded This research understandably scared of the backlash to spending Millions on dead end research cut their funding almost immediately and now we enter the really dark time foreign [Music] language in many respects is a vital part of the human experience and language is interlinked with cognitive development in many important ways when children have structured language it helps them make sense of the world and this is true whether the kids are communicating verbally or whether they're using signs and gestures when deaf people have strokes it affects their ability to sign in the same way it affects a hearing person's speech when we give deaf kids language it massively helps their cognitive development because it gives them a language they can use to express themselves deaf kids will sign gibberish the same way that hearing kids will speak gibberish speaking to BBC News Professor Graham Turner of heroic watt University said these languages use the face body and hands in an integrated way exploiting their multi-dimensional spatial medium through the layering of simultaneous and extremely precise visual elements so Communication in ASL or any other sign language entails acquiring command of a far more complex system of linguistic expression I bring this up because sign language is a language in its own right and it needs to be treated as such language is about the transmission of information ASL has features that reflect the fact it's a visual language it has a different structure word order and grammar to spoken English for example what kind of cookies do you like would be arduous to sign so it's turned into cookie you like what kind and there's no universal sign language either across the English-speaking world you have ASL in the United States and Canada BSL in the UK ISO in Ireland auslan in Australia and nzsl in New Zealand ASL and ISL are more closely related to French sign than British sign so ASL and BSL have radically different structural components word orders plurals Rhymes and innuendos and within sign languages you will get quite substantial Regional variations sign language has dialects that might surprise a lot of people but it shouldn't we expect spoken word to have these sorts of variations why not sign language associate professor of linguistics at the University of Birmingham Adam schembry says Coco didn't Master ASL she mastered modified ASL which Patterson's 1990 paper acknowledges human hands are way more dexterous than gorilla hands there are some signs that Coco physically can't make so she uses ASL but will switch to Guerrilla sign language GSL to sign certain words like bird the issue is that the researchers who worked with Coco and other Apes for that matter didn't know sign language according to the journalist Arden nicer who wrote the book The Other Side of Silence sign language in the deaf community in America researchers in Aid Communications didn't treat sign language as a language rather researchers learned floating tines that is to say individual words and then just assume that they could slap English on top of it and call it a day they imposed English oral features and English aural grammar onto ASL for example Patterson's papers on Coco state that Coco's two sign combinations are semantically equivalent to the two word utterances of a child her evidence for this is Coco using spoken word orders agent action attribute object ASL doesn't use spoken word orders another example Coco's Rhymes in ASL the principle of rhyming is that rhymes look similar they have visual Rhythm so high high swing arms cat whiskers fiddle is a rhyme in ASL because swing arms has a similar movement to fiddle so Coco's poem pink pink stink nice drink pink stink and drink are words that rhyme in spoken English in ASL this is Pink and this is stink not very similar are they only slightly less amazing than Coco's ability to create Rhymes and to understand Pig Latin is her professed ability to substitute a sign for an English hominin of a word she does not know for example Patterson says that when Coco had difficulty articulating need she would occasionally use knee a sign that sounds like need but is made in sign language in an entirely different manner she also on occasion interchange signs for I I no no and 11 lemon these are mistakes a person learning spoken English might make but here are the American signs for I and I no no 11. lemon need knee it's the same with the AO into species chat nipple sounds like people sounds like in spoken English which Coco doesn't know this is the sign for nipple and this is the sign for people that is not a substitution you would make Coco might have been communicating even less than initially suggested and not just Coco either all Apes involved in Aid communication studies weren't really communicating at least not using sign language there was a catastrophic failure by the researchers in ape Communications to treat sign language as its own form of communication they took a very oralist approach to a non-oral language and it was an approach researchers weren't interested in correcting according to an interview nicer conducted with someone who worked on the Washoe project I wasn't there long there was a very high turnover among the deaf the gardeners wouldn't listen to anything the deaf people told them about ASL they thought we didn't know anything about it and we were just trying to make trouble there are three shifts in a day I'd go in wake up the chimp change the diapers and put clothes on set them in a chair and warm up milk just like for children I put a little bit of milk in the cup and I waited for the sign drink Thumb in mouth I made the drink sign waited when he made it I'd put a few drops in the cup and waited for the sign again he folded his hand and sat back waiting by this time the chimp was screaming even I could hear it I wasn't supposed to give any food until he made the eat sign I watched really carefully the chimp's hands are moving constantly maybe I missed something but I don't think so I just wasn't seeing any signs the hearing people were logging every movement the chimp made as a sign every time the chimp put his finger in his mouth they'd say oh he's making the sign for drink and he'd give him some milk for part of the day I was just supposed to sign to the chimp about things he knew things around the place that he knew were the signs of I signed my head off that's what I was being paid to do but mostly the chimp didn't seem to notice nicer also interviewed a woman called Lauren petito who worked on the Nim project she said Nim didn't do anything with the signs he only used them for requesting things and even that's too anthropomorphic a description he never used them in the deeper human sense of making a request it was an entirely different sort of transaction nimk could never quite understand he was communicating he never used the sign as a cognitive tool and I do not believe that he used them to think with he was never able to make certain connections we impose those connections of meaning and communication he had his own powerful deeply wired communicative devices what we added was insignificant it didn't really add a thing Dr Gerardo Ortega who specializes in the acquisition of sign language went one step further and said Coco never mastered sign language at most she ritualized the use of some signs about the here and now and used them only after her trainer prompted her to quote Professor Graham Turner again serious efforts to teach Apes some signing began in the 1960s with researchers attempting to teach individual signs derived from American Sign Language ASL and the Apes did learn to use some hand gestures in this way but it is a distortion to imply that coco or any other ape has ever learned to use a natural sign language like a human being although the Apes can use two or three signs in a sequence close inspection of the film data has repeatedly shown trainers prompting them and then questionably interpreting separate responses as signed sentences now some people will feel I'm being harsh here after all some people might have watched Coco and have been inspired to learn sign language to communicate with friends who were deaf in fact some people have learned ASL after being inspired by Coco so they could talk to their deaf friends and not to get on my high horse about it but why didn't your friend inspire you to learn cyan you know the person who was in your life and stood to directly benefit from you learning it why did it take teaching sign language to a species that couldn't possibly gain anything from knowing it to pique your interest why wasn't the basic human right to be understood and afforded language not a good enough reason for you to quote the other side of Silence sign language in the deaf community in America's chapter on ape communication during the Spring of 1979 I realized that I had been meeting a number of people hearing people who were very excited about ASL not because 500 000 deaf Americans use it every day but because they believe it might be taught to Apes foreign [Music] don't show them how the sausage is made well a lot of ape research could be summed up with the phrase don't get too attached to these creatures with the publication of Terrace's paper funds for ape Communications were withdrawn basically overnight and the whole research field just collapsed so imagine you're a researcher and one day all your ape money just goes and suddenly you're lumbered with a gajillion Apes to feed and house what do you do well the answer for many was to either have their Apes killed or sent to Tiger King zoos with little oversight in their day-to-day operations abusing these facilities is quite common one ape we haven't talked about was kanzi the bonobo who used lexagrams to express himself Sue Savage Rumba a researcher at yerks at the time oversaw kansi's training kansi quickly built up a lexicogram vocabulary of more than 400 symbols and was said to be able to form compound words lexograms tie specific symbols to words so it's less ambiguous than sign is for non-sign users and there's less room for interpretation from humans and lexograms can use grammar that researchers would be familiar with Kanza uses the lexogram and gets the right words nine times out of ten and he'll show things like if then sentence structures and Savage Rumba showed kansi could respond correctly to verbal commands without facial cues from her could you put some salt on your ball well that's a good job but again the vast majority of kansi's language use was asking for food or asking for toys and our border collies from the start of this video could use inductive reasoning to figure out what object or symbol was related to a particular word and command is that using language the way humans do I don't think it is when the research money went Savage Rumba set up a facility to house kansi called the great ape Trust I'm not gonna have it the great ape trust had its many many abuses documented in an employee open letter with supporting emails and documents there were cases of unauthorized pregnancies usually incest pregnancies and unsafe housing conditions for the seven bonobos in the trust's Care One bonobo Tico poured boiling water onto his stomach in another incident Tico ingested Head and Shoulders shampoo and he needed medical attention staff reported Tico was vomiting and had diarrhea and Dr Savage Rumba attributed that to eating non-organic baby food rather than Tico eating rotten foods and candle wax in one incident a student threw a bucket at a nap after its spat the organization was disbanded following this controversy and recreated as the ape cognition and conservation initiative to learn and do better than the abuses of the great ape trust and I might have believed them if they didn't use kansi to judge state food fairs after so Nim's life is also pretty bleak he spent a lot of his life being sent from place to place and from carer to carer the first family to take nimin lived on the upper west side of Manhattan in a giant Brownstone and the woman who lived there raised him like her other children I breastfed him for a couple of months uh when Nim started to show more aggressive behaviors like killing a poodle in a fit of rage he was moved to a primate facility on the grounds of the University of Oklahoma Nim would be taken to an empty bear classroom with no toys or climbing frames and was forced to do language drills there's a graph in Terrace's paper about Nim's language skills degrading with time when compared to that of a child as in his utterances get shorter and shorter and I can't help but think yeah of course they do Terrace The Chimps miserable we realized I think all of us that it was becoming increasingly difficult to pursue the experiment and then was scratching hard he was biting harder fighting more often fighting more people following the collapse of the research field Nim was eventually relocated to a sanctuary I mean it looked like a prison really Stark ugly dark dank prison and nimus screaming and holding under me very tightly and the only reason he like oh that's because he got snapped the electric [Music] terrorists came back a year later you could see that he was like holy I'm going back to New York it was like that like he was going to be rescued it's kind of sad herb never came back next morning he barely ate he just started to brighter penny has often described her bond with Coco like that of her mom and her child and given what we know about eight researcher separation it's probably good Coco and Penny weren't separated but that Revelation comes with a bitter pill Coco wasn't so much a gorilla she was a brand a brand worth 8 million dollars in 2013 and that brand had to be protected people who worked at the gorilla Foundation had to sign non-disclosure agreements which is never a good sign and in 2012 another open letter appeared from some of Coco's carers saying that Patterson's obsession with the gorilla prevented her from providing an adequate diet and Healthcare Coco was being fed a human diet including chocolates sweets non-alcoholic beers and Thanksgiving dinners the gorilla Foundation has not been secret about that according to what's been documented in the Coco pics blog a USDA investigation into other gorillas in the foundation's care has found multiple dimensions of neglect in the gorilla Foundation including gorillas being overweight and not being tested regularly for TB in lieu of an actual vet and to help make up for the deficiencies in Coco's diet Coco was fed vitamin supplements multiple former employees said that Coco's vitamin supplements were recommended by Gabby Rita a woman who on her website calls herself a certified naturopath and medical intuitive among other services Rita offers chakra alignments and the removal of toxins through 25-minute Power tune-ups over the phone which cost no joke eighty dollars you don't even talk to her you leave her a message and then she will email you in a day maybe to tell you what water you need to buy from her oh yeah Kelsea priest she's a homeopath and she put Coco on homeopathic medicine Stellar work Penny there is also the nipple court case real name Coco had a thing for nipples especially Robin Williams nipples in the AOL live chat the word nipple appears a lot and showing Coco your nipples was expected of employees at the gorilla Foundation two former employee employees sued the foundation because according to reporting by the San Francisco gate on at least two incidents in mid to late June 2004 Patterson intensely pressured Keller to expose herself to Coco while they were working outside where other employees could potentially view Keller's naked body on one such occasion Patterson said Coco you see my nipples all the time you're probably bored with my nipples you should see new nipples I will turn my back so Kendra can show you her nipples ah now our Spotlight on Coco here but there's a lot of Cloak and Dagger around the other gorillas in the foundation's care like Michael who was brought in to get Coco pregnant but was too young to actually do it when he came into the foundation's possession Patterson's account of events is that Michael's parents were eaten by natives in the Congo which is possible it's a thing that happens in that region of the world but Patterson then goes on to say that she bought Michael through the connections that she had with a filmmaker and those who study the black market trade for animals will say that what often happens is that adult gorillas are poached and then their children are kidnapped and sold so depending on who you believe Michael was either saved or trafficked to look back on the ape research of this nature feels like looking back on a tragedy Coco Nim kanzi raised in captivity forced to live human lives interact with humans perform parlor tricks for humans denied interaction with other chimps or gorillas in a wild setting and they deserved better [Music] foreign [Music] Keller was an American Author civil rights activist and Anarchist living in the United States at the turn of the 20th century she was also deaf-blind and she learned language through her teacher Anne Sullivan Keller would go on to learn how to read write and speak what made language click for killer was when Sullivan took her to an old pump house Sullivan put Helen's hand under the stream and began spelling water into her Palm first slowly and then more quickly in Keller's autobiography she writes about the moment that she first comprehended what Sullivan was trying to teach her this is when it clicked for Keller that the word being spelled into her hand was relating to the thing that she was feeling as the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water first slowly then rapidly I Stood Still my whole attention fixed upon the Motions of her fingers suddenly I felt a misty consciousness of something forgotten a thrill of returning thought and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me I knew then that w u-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand that Living Word awakened my soul gave it light hope Joy set it free there were barriers still it is true but barriers that could in time be swept away in pop culture that event is portrayed like this [Music] this utterance didn't happen it's a small change but it's a change that puts the impetus on the wha it's the spoken word it's privileging communication that is Meaningful to us and I find it interesting that for our Collective empathy to work we needed to give this person a voice we couldn't recognize the immense Joy Keller must have felt finally being able to make sense of a world she had been locked out of without this wear which got me thinking about one final question when we set out to learn if Apes could learn language was that even the right question why did we need animals to communicate on human terms why did Coco's validity rest on how human we could make her why is sentience our prerequisite for empathy rather than just acknowledging a creature's right to be when you come home from A Hard Day's Work and your dog Nestles next to you as human about your boss does that dog need to understand the words you're saying to Intuit something's bothering you when dogs swayed at the grave of an owner whose past or they waited a train station for their owner to come back from work does the dog need to understand the complexities of the Working World for that act of waiting to be meaningful when Nim became despondent after Terrors abandoned him does it matter that he never learned to talk when he shows a pain that we recognize it's been easy for science to sidestep these difficult questions about animal sentience and emotions but the more we peel back the curtain the more it seems that animals have deep inner worlds like we do I have no doubt Coco was an intelligent creature with depths and complexities that we never discovered now how much Apes really do resemble us in their emotional range and mental capacity is still a mystery when she first met her kitten she treated him with the same gentle loving nature we would and when her kitten was killed by a car Coco was destroyed when Penny says Coco felt pain that she could never be a mother I believe her am I anthropomorphizing her experiences yeah maybe we wanted to believe in Coco so we did I guess my question is why wasn't Coco enough [Music] courage honey you have courage you have courage you look very Korean okay good is there something I can do for you oh honey it's sad I know it's a sad scene oh and they're crying they are crying on the movie oh honey and there's truffles that trouble bad oh sweetie with the mother yes the sweet mother the one who adopted him she's so sweet well I know it's hard to watch that so you didn't want to