Enthralling. Disturbing. Up-lifting.
Yes, somehow author Charles Siebert manages a hat trick.
The central narrative in the book The Wauchula Woods Accord, is the surprising connection, i.e. relationship that spontaneously happens between the author and Roger, a “humanzee”: a chimpanzee that has spent his entire life living with humans, now being forced to retire in the company of other chimps. Roger must somehow find his inner chimp relinquishing his humanity. But is that even possible? Can his human/chimp psyche even be stretched that far? Isn’t it too much to ask of him emotionally? And just where is the line between humanity and "chimpanity"?
Even though Roger’s great ape retirement village is idyllic, he sits alone, plagued by insomnia, self-isolated from the other members of his species.
As the book progresses, Siebert dismantles the notion of anthropomorphism: the projection of human behaviors and emotions onto animals. He writes about other very “human-like” qualities found in mammals—great apes, elephants, whales, dolphins—completely dispelling the myth that only people have personalities, emotions, remembrances.
Siebert writes, “And yet it makes no difference any longer that we can’t, as the standard warning against anthropomorphizing goes, possibly know what Roger is thinking. Or what a Roger day is like, or a whale’s, or an elephant’s, or a parrot’s.
“That is one of the peculiar things about this moment we’ve arrived at with the animals. We’ve come to know enough now about the shared biological underpinnings of so many of those brains in Dr. Hof’s cooler that somehow the question of what Roger’s or another animal’s day might be like has become wholly incidental to the fact that they clearly have days, too, and deeply wounded ones.
“Science has obviated anthropomorphism—the crime of projecting our stories upon the animals—by, of all things, repeatedly pointing out to us just how uncomfortably close to our stories so many aspects of theirs actually are."
Along the way, many of Siebert’s side trips are disturbing as he details some of the anguish our kind has wrought upon the world of their kind, but in the final pages he restores our humanity, or at least the sense that it IS possible to heal a wounded psyche. And in the end we come to realize that our species is not alone, only disturbingly self-isolated like Roger.
This book is profound; its implications far-reaching. Why look to outer space for other intelligent life when it surrounds us here on earth.
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