The Lives of Animals

Ruth Orkin, from Psychology, is telling his mother about an experiment with a young chimpanzee reared as human. Asked to sort photographs into piles, the chimpanzee insisted on putting a picture of herself with the pictures of humans rather than with the pictures of other apes. “One is so tempted to give the story a straightforward reading,” says Orkin—“namely, that she wanted to be thought of as one of us. Yet as a scientist one has to be cautious.”