Chimps breeding9/25/2023 Moncrief once locked a female student in with a chimpanzee for three hours to teach her a lesson. Guy and Moncrief are arrogant misogynists, and there are heavily drawn parallels between the manipulation of women in the story, and the treatment of the chimpanzees. Although knowing that research chimps at around 4-5 years were usually retired to breeding facilities or biomedical research labs, even Guy hopes Sam will be with them forever – or at least until Guy becomes famous. Sam is fed an appalling diet of pizza and burgers, he drinks wine and G&Ts, and smokes cigarettes and pot. The house has been turned into a fortress and has three dead bolts on the front door. Sam is a pathway to academic stardom for Guy, for Aimee Sam is a person.Īnd the “Id on wheels” who has just bitten a grad student on the face when Aimee first meets him, is smitten with her too: “He’s in love with you, haven’t you noticed?” Sam is kept on a ranch owned by the university. And after his appearance on the gameshow, Guy is intent on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, an appearance that would challenge Moncrief’s position as alpha male of chimp language research. Guy is a piece of work – Aimee replaces Guy’s wife Melanie, who walked out as she was doing all the work with Sam while Guy was getting all the credit. Guy is “overworked and overstressed” when he hires Aimee to mind Sam, a job which is soon one of dogsbody, live-in maid, and finally as someone “malleable, easy pickings, a girl he could ride and ride”. Scenes in the breeding facility are a montage of horrors recorded of the experiences of chimps in breeding facilities or being held for biomedical research. Azalel’s suicide seems to be based on that of a monkey in a Chester Zoo in 1932. Sam signing BLACK BUGS is based on Washoe’s opinion of her fellow chimps, and Guy imagining Alice signing to her infant once born, echoes Washoe teaching signs to her adopted son Loulis. Sam desperately signing KEY LOCK OUT echoes chimp Bruno at the LEMSIP facility in Tuxedo, New York. Many, if not all, of the chimp incidents are based on real incidents. The reader’s first encounter with Sam is traumatic – many of his chapters are set in Moncrief’s chimp breeding facility in Iowa, others are in more pleasant surroundings, but are from the point of view of a confused and disoriented psyche. And many will know that the experiments themselves were far from beneficial for the chimps. ‘Inevitably’ as most readers will know that the chimpanzees used in the cross-fostering language studies of the 1970s, did not end up part of their loving families for the rest of their lives. Talk to me tells the inevitably tragic story of Sam from differing points of view. Guy is the “golden boy” of Iowan university professor, Dr Donald Moncrief, who is the alpha male in the field of primate language studies – “the hottest thing going”. The academic is Guy Schermerhorn, ambitious, arrogant, lascivious. When Aimee sees Sam, an “adorable, big-eared doll come to life”, she is captivated. Aimee Villard is a misfit, a loner, an undergrad at a California university, when she sees an associate professor from the university on a TV gameshow, accompanied by Sam, a chimpanzee.
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