A couple bought Lucy when she was two days old and raised her as their own. Eventually she learned to stand and walk like human children, and then even began to pick out her own clothes. She learned to make tea and many other chores. But this didn't mean anything, did it? Many animals can be trained to do things and surely a chimp is no different? To be sure the couple found a man to teach Lucy sign language. The chimp learned fifty different signs and then was able to use them to carry on conversations. At one point, she found an old, rotten radish and decided to eat it. After one bit, she spit it out. When she was asked what it was, she signed all on her own, "cry, hurt food." On another occasion she even lied. She had had an accident on the floor, and when she was asked who had done it, she signed, "Sussy," the name of a grad student who came to the house sometimes. She had mentally become completely human. However this became a problem, when she grew too strong and destructive to keep and the couple decided to release her into a nature reserve in Africa. She was too human to be a chimp and her health quickly began to deteriorate, allow with the heaths of other humanized chimps at the reserve. In an attempt to make these chimps be chimps, they were moved to an island in a river, Sussy the grad student then moved into a cage on the island to keep an eye on them. Eventually the apes left due to hunger, all accept Lucy. For the next three years, she stayed with the cage, only surviving, because Sussy fed her. But eventually she did learn to be a chip and went to join the others, but she kept her deep rooted trust in humans, and this would lead to her demise. Two years later, her skeleton was found, without any fur and with hands and feet missing. She was thought to have just wandered up to a poacher who then shot and killed her. Thus was the end to Lucy's confused life.
Questions
1. She showed us exactly how human and smart chimpanzees are.
2. She taught us that you don't need to be a human to be human. The lines between people and animals are not so thickly drawn.
3. It makes me see just how humanlike and smart chimps are. A 2% difference in DNA is not that much.
4. The experiment, while beneficial, was not worth the cost. Knowledge is not worth the life of an animal, especially one as human like as Lucy. The experiment caused her demise, and so it was not worth it.
5. Lucy's end was an indirect result of the experiment and it saddened me how such a human-like creature could die as collateral damage. It angered me that someone would kill Lucy as she had apparently trusted her killer entirely. To betray such trust by killing that animal is sick. It angers me extremely.
