Ask Roger and Debbi Fouts about their family, and you’ll not only hear about their children, Josh, Rachel and Hillary, but also about Washoe, Dar, Moja, Loulis and Tatu, five chimpanzees to whom they also have devoted their lives.
While Josh, Rachel and Hillary are now grown and on their own, the Foutses continue their lifelong work caring for, communicating with and studying humankind’s closest evolutionary kin at the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute at Central Washington University.
Along the way, they have waged a tireless effort to educate the scientific community and the public about the need to improve captive conditions for chimpanzees and to save chimpanzees in the wild.
The Foutses, both 54, did not set out to work with animals. Nor did they ever expect they would one day be “parents” to five foster chimpanzee children with whom they could communicate using American Sign Language.
Roger Fouts had wanted to be a child clinical psychologist. Debbi Fouts had wanted to work with children in special education. All they wanted in their careers was to help children.
“It looks like we got our wish, but we didn’t realize at the time that it would be these kids: Washoe, Dar, Loulis, Moja and Tatu,” says Roger Fouts.
The course of their lives changed forever in 1967 when Washoe, the first non-human to acquire a human language, literally jumped into Roger Fouts’ arms.
“My future was mapped out in clear bold lines,” Roger Fouts recalls in his new book, “Next of Kin: What Chimpanzees Have Taught Me About Who We Are.” “I was going to pursue an exciting career in psychology working with children.
“But then Washoe began talking. She took me on an amazing journey to a world where animals can think and feel–and can communicate those thoughts and feelings through language,” he writes.
In talking with the Foutses in their offices on the Ellensburg campus, where they are co-directors of the institute and Roger Fouts is a professor of psychology, it is clear that they feel a moral and ethical responsibility to care for the chimps in their charge. Chimpanzees in captivity can live to be over 60 years of age.
“Chimpanzees in this country are like displaced persons,” Roger Fouts says. “It’s just not where they belong. But they can’t go home again.”
The Foutses are aghast at the idea that educational or research facilities that can no longer care for their chimps would consider letting the primates be used in biomedical research for everything from AIDS and hepatitis testing to experiments with lethal pesticides.
“It’s like saying to people with a Down’s syndrome child who they can’t physically take care of anymore, `Well, how about AIDS research?’ That’s not acceptable. It’s an abomination.”
At the institute, Washoe and her family come first, and research and the researchers come second. Roger Fouts relates in his book an oft-repeated speech given to institute volunteers:
“This laboratory is Washoe’s home. You are guests in her house. Conduct yourself as you would expect your own guests to behave. You do not have the right to discipline her child, threaten any member of her family, or even to touch them if they have not asked to be touched. In this house, the chimpanzees’ welfare comes first, the research comes second and your needs come last. You are free to walk out of here anytime you like, but Washoe’s family can never leave. They are prisoners in their own home. Your job is simple: to make their lives as pleasant, as social, and as interesting as possible.”
“Our philosophy,” Debbi Fouts adds, “is that the chimps did not apply for immigration status. They were, and still are, incarcerated against their wills. . . . We, as researchers and more importantly as friends and caring human beings, must do as much as possible to better the lives of chimpanzees.”
World-renowned primatologist Jane Goodall praises Roger Fouts for always keeping the welfare of the chimpanzees uppermost in his mind.
In a phone interview from her mother’s house in England, Goodall says Fouts did more than just conduct research with “beings as complex as chimpanzees who have feelings” and who are “capable of rational thought.
“Roger listened,” she says. “He listened to what the chimps were telling him about themselves, or to what his research was telling him about the chimpanzees’ relationship to himself.”
The Foutses designed the institute for the animals, not the students who come to study them. The outdoor chimp area consists of 5,400 square feet covered with grass and vegetation. There is vertical climbing space, capped by a three-story-high open-air mesh roof “that the chimps can swing across just as they would swing across a rain forest canopy in the wild,” Roger Fouts notes.
Inside the building are two 600-square-foot, three-story-high exercise areas filled with climbing structures, hanging tractor tires and fire hoses. No one is allowed inside the enclosures with the chimpanzees.
It’s not unusual to see Moja parading around in shoes, a shirt or other attire. Dar might be sitting in the grass looking at pictures in a magazine, while Loulis tries to engage him in a game of “chase.” Tatu might be signing to a student what she wants to eat for lunch. Meantime, Washoe, one of the original NASA space chimps and now matriarch of the clan, watches over the proceedings.
Roger Fouts began working with Project Washoe one year after it began in 1966 at the University of Nevada. It was there that Allen and Beatrix Gardner raised baby Washoe as if she were a deaf child.
Fouts, then a graduate student, cared for and signed to Washoe as part of his assistantship. When he applied for the assistantship, he was sure he had blown his interview with Gardner. It was Washoe’s unexpected leap into Fouts’ arms that day in 1967 that apparently landed him the job.
“When I played with Washoe,” Fouts writes, “quite often I had to remind myself that this little chimpanzee girl was not a human being. But after a while, I realized this distinction had become meaningless to me.”
Over the next 30 years, the relationship deepened between Washoe, the other chimps who came along and the Foutses.
“From the first day I began working on Project Washoe, I had to break the first commandment of behavorial sciences: Thou shalt not love thy research subject,” he writes. “I was being paid to love my research subject so that she would learn language in a natural family setting. The Gardners had shown me that behavorial research could be conducted humanely and compassionately while still maintaining scientific objectivity. Unfortunately, nobody warned me that I was supposed to stop loving Washoe when the experiment was over. By the time I realized the depth of my own feelings for her, it was too late. I was attached.”
Today, the chimps sign with each other and with human observers. Washoe, the most accomplished signer, has a vocabulary of 240 signs. The chimps use the signs both singly and in combination, sometimes combining them to express something different, such as signing “drink fruit” to refer to watermelon.
Research into how the chimps acquire and use sign language has provided the Foutses and others with a better understanding of how humans learn languages. Their research has helped autistic and mentally impaired children to read and communicate using sign language.
Despite a life spent in animal research, the Foutses say they would like to see the institute closed.
“I believe that any research, including my own, that depends on captivity ought to be phased out,” Roger Fouts says.
As for the 1,500 chimpanzees in captivity in research labs nationwide, he and other scientists have proposed a National Chimpanzee Sanctuary System, “where chimpanzees who are no longer needed in research can live out their lives in social groups, with grass under their feet, room to climb and freedom to play.”
Roger Fouts says he wants to be judged not by what he has written in scientific journals about chimpanzees, “but by what I did for them.
“I readily admit that I am emotionally attached to Washoe and her family, but that alone is not what has driven me into the political arena. I feel I have no choice but to take action because of what I’ve learned from Washoe and other chimpanzees.
“Of all the people who visit Washoe’s family, deaf children are the first to recognize the chimpanzee as our next of kin. When deaf children look at Washoe, they don’t see an animal. They see a person. It is my fondest hope that, one day, every scientist will see as clearly.”
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A reception for Roger Fouts will be held at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Harold Washington Library. A lecture, question-and-answer session and book signing will begin at 6 p.m. For more information, call 312-747-4010. Information about the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute is available at http://www.cwu.edu/cwuchci or by writing to the institute at Central Washington University, 400 E. 8th Ave., Ellensburg, Wash. 98926-7573.
