Professional background
Roger and Deborah Fouts were co-directors and co-founders of the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute.
Roger S. Fouts is a retired American primate researcher. He was co-founder and co-director of the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute (CHCI) in Washington, and a professor of psychology at the Central Washington University. He is best known for his role in teaching Washoe the chimpanzee to communicate using a set of signs taken from American sign language.
The Foutses have been a part of Project Washoe since 1967. Project Washoe is the first and longest running project of its kind. Washoe was the very first nonhuman animal to acquire the rudiments of an otherwise fully complex human language, American Sign Language for the Deaf (ASL). The project later focused on the signing of its four sign language using chimpanzees who lived together as a social group: Washoe, Tatu, Dar and Loulis. The chimpanzees used some of the signs of ASL in their interactions with humans and with each other, to comment on their environment, but mostly to make requests, and sometimes answer questions and describe activities and objects. Loulis acquired a total of about five signs from his adoptive mother Washoe and the other chimpanzees, becoming the first chimpanzee to acquire five signs of a human language from chimpanzees thus demonstrating the ability of the chimpanzee to culturally transmit five signs of a language across generations.
Together the Foutses have more than 100 articles published in scientific journals and books. In 1981 they founded Friends of Washoe a non-profit organization dedicated to the welfare of chimpanzees. They have resided in Ellensburg since 1980; and, with hundreds of students, they have conducted their research and enriched the lives of the chimpanzees at Central Washington University. In 1992 they founded at CWU the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute (CHCI), a sanctuary for chimpanzees. CHCI is dedicated to the protection of chimpanzees, the education of students and public alike. Recent research at CHCI focused on the private signing of the chimpanzees, imaginary play and signing, chimpanzee to chimpanzee conversations, conversation repair, representational drawing, and the symbolic representation of spatial relations with ASL signs as well as a comparison of gestural dialects in this population of captive chimpanzees and three populations of free-living chimpanzees. Before retirement, the Foutses began a new research direction, studying four different free-living communities of chimpanzees in Africa to record and analyze their behavior for gestural dialects.
Central Washington University (CWU) is a public university in Ellensburg, Washington. Founded in 1891, the university consists of four divisions: the President' Division, Business and Financial Affairs, Operations, and Academic and Student Life (ASL). Within ASL are four colleges: the College of Arts and Humanities, the College of Business, the College of Education and Professional Studies, and College of the Sciences.
The Foutses were very active in their efforts to improve the living conditions and treatment of chimpanzees in captivity by developing and promoting humane care techniques and programs. In addition, they were active in efforts to protect the free-living chimpanzees in Africa. The Foutses played a role in the U. S. Fish and Wildlife, raising chimpanzees in Africa from "Threatened" to "Endangered" species status (see Endangered Species Act). The Foutses were very active in the Sanctuary movement to provide for chimpanzees used in and retired from the Air Force Space program and other biomedical research (see Animal Testing). They were active as well in promoting basic rights for Great Apes, as founding members of, and signatory contributors to, the Great Ape Project.
The Great Ape Project (GAP), founded in 1993, is an international organization of primatologists, anthropologists, ethicists, and others who advocate a United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Great Apes that would confer basic legal rights on non-human great apes: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans.
In 1997, Roger Fouts wrote Next of Kin a memoir of their lives with Washoe. It was selected by The Los Angeles Times as one of top 100 books of 1997.
Awards
The 1989 Recognition and Appreciation Award presented by the Progressive Animal Welfare Society, Seattle, Washington, March 1989.
The 1992 Award of Recognition presented by the Performing Animals Welfare Society, Sacramento, California, May 1992.
Associated Students of Central Washington University “Prominent Figure Award”, for outstanding service to Central Washington Univ., 1991-92.
The 1996 Humane Achievement Award, presented by the Performing Animals Welfare Society, Los Angeles, California, November 1996.
National Association of Biology Teachers Distinguished Service Award 2000, Orlando, Florida.
The Chimfunshi Chimpanzee Sanctuary “PAL” Award for Chimpanzee Conservation and Awareness, 2000, Johannesburg, South Africa
Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage is a sanctuary for chimpanzees, located in Zambia's Copperbelt Province. Chimfunshi started as a family-run wildlife orphanage, and today Chimfunshi is managed by a board of trustees to ensure the long-term sustainability of the sanctuary. Chimfunshi was founded in 1983 when a game ranger brought a badly wounded infant chimpanzee to the cattle ranch of David and Sheila Siddle. The Siddles nursed that chimp – named "Pal" – back to health, thereby establishing a tradition of care and respect that forms the legacy of the sanctuary. Once word of Pal’s recovery spread, the Siddles were inundated with orphaned chimpanzees. Although many of the chimpanzees were confiscated from poachers who attempted to smuggle the infants into Zambia for sale as pets, an equally large number were rescued from dilapidated zoos and circuses from all over Africa, Asia, Europe and South America. With 120 chimpanzees, Chimfunshi is now one of the largest chimpanzee sanctuaries in the world.
Selected publications since 1998
Fouts, R. S. & Fouts, D. H. (1998). Chimpanzees. In M. Bekoff & C. Meaney (Eds.) Encyclopedia of animal rights and animal welfare. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., 105-107.
Fouts, R. S. & Fouts, D. H. (1999). My brother’s keeper. In M. Rowe (Ed.) The way of compassion. New York: Stealth Technologies, 192-194
Fouts, R. S. & Fouts, D. H. (1999). Chimpanzee sign language research. In P. Dolhinow & A. Fuentes (Eds.) The nonhuman primates. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Co., 252-256.
Fouts, D. H. & Fouts, R. S. (2000) Our emotional kin. In M. Bekoff (Ed.) The smile of a dolphin. New York: Discovery Books/ Random House, pp. 204–207.
Jensvold, M. L., Sanz, C., Fouts, R. S., & Fouts, D. H. (2001) Effect of enclosure size and complexity of the behaviors of captive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Journal of Applied Animal Welfare, 4(1), 53-69.
Fouts, R. S., Fouts, D. H. and Waters, G. (2002). The ethics and efficacy of chimpanzees in HIV research. In A. Fuentes and L. Wolfe (Eds.). Conservation Implications of Human and Nonhuman Primate Interconnections. Cambridge University Press, pp. 45–60.
Fouts, R.S., Jensvold, M.L.A. & Fouts, D.H. (2002). Chimpanzee signing: Darwinian realities and Cartesian delusions. In M. Bekoff, C. Allen & G. Burghardt (Eds.) The cognitive animal: Empirical and theoretical perspectives in animal cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 654–672.
Fouts, R. & Fouts, D. (2005). Captive chimpanzees. In Andrew Linzey (Ed.) The international animal world. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fouts, R.S., Fouts, D.H. & Waters, G. (2003) Wrist-walking: A candidate for a culturally transmitted communicative gesture). International Primatological Society Bulletin, 29(2), 9.
Fouts, R. & Fouts, D. (2003) Chimpanzees. In The great ape project census: Recognition for the uncounted. Portland, OR: GAP Books, pp. 31–34
Jensvold, M. L., Fouts, R. S., & Fouts, D. H. (2004). Assessment of species typical behaviours in captive chimpanzees. Animal Welfare, 13, S243.
Fouts, R. Jensvold, M.L., & Fouts, D. (2004) Talking chimpanzees. In M. Bekoff (Ed.) Encyclopedia of animal behavior. Greenwood Publishing Group.
Fouts, R., Jensvold, M.L., & Fouts, D. ( In press). Taking chimpanzees on their own terms: Thirty-five years of non-invasive research. In D. Herzing (Ed). Crossing interspecies boundaries. Temple University Press.
Fouts, R. S. & Fouts, D. H. (2004). Primate language. In R. Gregory (Ed.), The Oxford companion to the mind. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Dame Jane Morris Goodall,, formerly Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall, is an English primatologist and anthropologist. Considered to be the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees, Goodall is best known for her over 55-year study of social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees since she first went to Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania in 1960. She is the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and the Roots & Shoots programme, and she has worked extensively on conservation and animal welfare issues. She has served on the board of the Nonhuman Rights Project since its founding in 1996. In April 2002, she was named a UN Messenger of Peace. Dr. Goodall is also honorary member of the World Future Council.
Nim Chimpsky was a chimpanzee and the subject of an extended study of animal language acquisition at Columbia University. The project was led by Herbert S. Terrace with the linguistic analysis headed up by psycholinguist Thomas Bever. Chimpsky was given his name as a pun on Noam Chomsky, a leading theorist on human language structure and generative grammar, who holds that humans are "wired" to develop language. Though usually called Nim Chimpsky, his full name was Neam Chimpsky, or Nim for short.
Great ape personhood is a movement to extend personhood and some legal protections to the non-human members of the Hominidae or great ape family: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans.
Yerkish is an artificial language developed for use by non-human primates. It employs a keyboard whose keys contain lexigrams, symbols corresponding to objects or ideas.
Animal languages are forms of non-human animal communication that show similarities to human language. Animals communicate by using a variety of signs such as sounds or movements. Such signing may be considered complex enough to be called a form of language if the inventory of signs is large, the signs are relatively arbitrary, and the animals seem to produce them with a degree of volition. In experimental tests, animal communication may also be evidenced through the use of lexigrams. While the term "animal language" is widely used, researchers agree that animal languages are not as complex or expressive as human language.
The evolutionary emergence of language in the human species has been a subject of speculation for several centuries. The topic is difficult to study because of the lack of direct evidence. Consequently, scholars wishing to study the origins of language must draw inferences from other kinds of evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, contemporary language diversity, studies of language acquisition, and comparisons between human language and systems of communication existing among animals. Many argue that the origins of language probably relate closely to the origins of modern human behavior, but there is little agreement about the implications and directionality of this connection.
Research into great ape language has involved teaching chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans to communicate with human beings and with each other using sign language, physical tokens, and lexigrams (Yerkish). Some primatologists argue that these primates' use of the communication tools indicates their ability to use "language", although this is not consistent with some definitions of that term.
Steven M. Wise is an American legal scholar who specializes in animal protection issues, primatology, and animal intelligence. He teaches animal rights law at Harvard Law School, Vermont Law School, John Marshall Law School, Lewis & Clark Law School, and Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine. He is a former president of the Animal Legal Defense Fund, and founder and president of the Nonhuman Rights Project. The Yale Law Journal has called him "one of the pistons of the animal rights movement."
The Mind of an Ape is a 1983 book by David Premack and his wife Ann James Premack. The authors argue that it is possible to teach language to (non-human) great apes. They write: "We now know that someone who comprehends speech must know language, even if he or she cannot produce it."
Loulis is a chimpanzee who has learned to communicate in American Sign Language.
Sue Savage-Rumbaugh is a psychologist and primatologist most known for her work with two bonobos, Kanzi and Panbanisha, investigating their linguistic and cognitive abilities using lexigrams and computer-based keyboards. Originally based at Georgia State University's Language Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia, she worked at the Iowa Primate Learning Sanctuary in Des Moines, Iowa from 2006 until her departure in November 2013. She currently sits on the Board of Directors of Bonobo Hope.
Mary Lee Jensvold is the Director of the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute (CHCI). CHCI is the home of the chimpanzee Washoe and three other chimpanzees who use the signs of American Sign Language to communicate with one another and their human caregivers.
Experiments involving non-human primates (NHPs) include toxicity testing for medical and non-medical substances; studies of infectious disease, such as HIV and hepatitis; neurological studies; behavior and cognition; reproduction; genetics; and xenotransplantation. Around 65,000 NHPs are used every year in the United States, and around 7,000 across the European Union. Most are purpose-bred, while some are caught in the wild.
Primate cognition is the study of the intellectual and behavioral skills of non-human primates, particularly in the fields of psychology, behavioral biology, primatology, and anthropology.
Panbanisha, also known by the lexigram , was a female bonobo that featured in studies on great ape language by Professor Sue Savage-Rumbaugh. She was born at Language Research Center at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. Panbanisha was the daughter of Matata, the adopted mother of the famous Kanzi, who also was an intelligent pygmy chimpanzee, and was the mother of two sons, Nyota and Nathen. She lived at the Great Ape Trust in Iowa, where ape behavior and intelligence is studied;. Panbanisha died of a respiratory disease at the Great Ape Trust on November 6, 2012. She was 26. She was able to express her sadness through Yerkish when her half-brother Kanzi had to leave. During the studies, Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh had recognized the ability of communication and understanding of the complex sentences.
Emil Wolfgang Menzel Jr. was a prominent primatologist and comparative psychologist.
In many ways, his pioneering observations and research laid the foundation and set the precedent for many contemporary research topics in psychology and primatology including nonverbal and gestural communication, theory of mind and behavioral economics.
