Sales Tax for Loulis
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The biologist Vincent Sarich has pointed out that from the standpoint of immunology, humans and chimpanzees are as similar as "'two subspecies of gophers living on opposite sides of the Colorado River." Rachel Weiss, a young Yerkes "care-tech" who watched Nathan being injected with Jerom's dirty blood and saw Jerom himself waste away and die, wrote about what she had seen. During the time she cared for the chimpanzees of the Yerkes Chimpanzee Infectious Disease Building, Rachel learned firsthand that chimpanzees possess "passions" and "'feelings" that, if not human, are certainly humanlike. It made them no less "difficult to handle simply as property." She stopped thinking of them as "property" and resigned from Yerkes shortly after Jerom's death.

Seventeen years before Jerom's death, the primatologist Roger Fouts encountered Loulis staring at him through the bars of another Yerkes cage. Loulis's mother was huddled in a corner. Four metal bolts jutted from her head. Fouts doubted that the brain research she had endured allowed her even to know that Loulis was her son. He plucked up the ten- month-old, signed the necessary loan papers, then drove Loulis halfway across the United States to his adopted mother.

Washoe was a signing chimpanzee who lived on an island in a pond at the Institute for Primate Studies in Norman, Oklahoma. Loulis did not want to sleep in Washoe's arms that first night and curled up instead on a metal bench. At four o'clock in the morning, Washoe suddenly awakened and loudly signed "Come, baby." The sound jerked Loulis awake, and he jumped into Washoe's arms.' Within eight days, he had learned his first sign. Eight weeks later, he was signing to humans and to the other chimpanzees in Washoe's family. In five months, Loulis, by now an accepted family member, was using combinations of signs. At the end of five years, he was regularly using fifty-one signs; he had initiated thousands of chimpanzee conversations and had participated in thousands more. He had learned everything he knew from the other chimpanzees, for no human ever signed to him.

As years passed, Fouts realized that Yerkes could call in its loan and put Loulis to the knife, as his mother had been. When Loulis was seventeen years old, Fouts sought to buy him outright. Yerkes agreed to sell for $10,000, which Fouts didn't have. After strenuous efforts, he raised that amount. But at the last second, a hitch developed. Ten thousand dollars was Loulis's purchase price. As if Yerkes were selling Fouts a desk or chair, Fouts was charged another 7.5 percent in Georgia sales tax.

The scientists who injected Jerom and Nathan kept the baker's dozen chimps imprisoned in a dungeon, and invaded the brain of Loulis's mother and the administrators who collected sales tax for Loulis believed that chimpanzees are things. But they didn't know why. Rachel Weiss and Roger Fouts show that we can come to, believe-as they do-that chimpanzees are persons and not just things.

 

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