The Tragedy—and Urgent Warning—Behind Lucy, the Chimp Raised to Be Human
HBO MaxLucy the Chimpanzee’s story is an animal rights nightmare. As told in the new documentary Lucy the Human Chimp, psychologist Maurice Temerlin and his wife, Jane, bought the fuzzy primate from a roadside zoo in Florida that trained chimps to box human opponents when she was only two days old. (The zoo drugged Lucy’s mother by spiking a Coca-Cola with a tranquilizer.) From then on, the Temerlins raised their new “daughter” as human, teaching her to dress herself and use silverware. She even knew how to make her own gin and tonics.The Temerlins’ famous experiment, in which they raised a chimpanzee as human to study that age-old question of “nature versus nurture,” sounds barbaric now, but in its time it received heaps of publicity. Lucy learned around 120 signs, and seemed to flourish in the Temerlins’ home—that is, until she reached sexual maturity.Lucy the Human Chimp, which debuts HBO Max Thursday, focuses on what happened after Lucy left the spotlight—when caretaker Janis Carter stepped in to feed and clean up after the largely cage-bound animal after the Temerlins had deemed her unmanageable and dangerous. She would ultimately spend more than six years of her life living with Lucy and other rescued chimps in Gambia, first at a nature reserve and then on an uninhabited island. Read more at The Daily Beast.
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