Lucy The Chimpanzee

     Chimpanzees are known to be our closest living relative. But what does that mean? It means that we share over 90% of our genes with chimpanzees. Is that enough for them to be raised as humans? That is what Maurice Temerlin and his wife Jane wanted to find out.
     After acquiring Lucy when she was just a day old Maurice and Jane raised her as a human. She learned how to hold a bottle and eventually how to eat using silverware. Lucy learned how to dress herself and how to talk using sign language. Eventually though Lucy became too strong and began destroying everything. Maurice and Jane made the decision to send Lucy back to the wild. They sent Lucy to Gambia where she was admitted into a rehabilitation center. She did not do well there so Janis Carter  took Lucy and the other chimpanzees to a deserted island in hopes that they will adjust better there. While the other chimps adjusted and soon left Janis alone, Lucy refused to leave Janis. Whenever Lucy saw that Janis was looking in her direction she would sign "hurt" as in her feeling were hurt.
      Janis stayed for many years trying to get Lucy to adjust. Lucy finally began to act more like a chimp and Janis finally was able to leave the island. Janis did not stop foot on the island until a year later when could no longer resist checking up on the chimps. When she arrived on the island Lucy came up and gave her a hug, but soon left with the other chimps, without looking back, a sign that she no longer needed Janis to survive. A year later Janis came back and found Lucy's decomposed skeleton with the head and hands detached, they assumed that Lucy was poached.
     Lucy taught me that chimpanzees, when raised as a human, can be very human-like in most aspects. Lucy taught me that being human is not just about our DNA or the way we look, it is also how we are raised. For years I have known that chimpanzees are our closest living relative but I never realized how close they actually were until I heard about Lucy, now I know that being our closest living relative does mean something. To me the experiment was worthwhile, it gave us a better understanding of Chimps, but that does not mean there was a downside. The downside was that since Lucy was so acclimated to humans and had never seen a reason to be afraid of them. This meant that when people came to the island Lucy would approach them without fear, somebody probably took advantage of this and decided to poach her. To me that is the greatest reminder of why it is best for wild animals to not be near us without caution or fear.