Everybody knows Cheeta, the beer drinking and cigarette smoking Hollywood chimp superstar who allegedly stared alongside Johnny Weissmueller in the famous Tarzan&Jane Movies of the sixties (it turned out however that there were numerous Cheetas and that the one that celebrated his supposedly 77th birthday a couple of years ago in his animal sanctuary home in Palm Springs never played a role in even one of the numerous movies he has been connected with), but what about Nim Chimsky, a male chimpanzee that partook in a long-term animal language acquisition study in the 1970s? James Marsh has crafted a movie called "Project Nim", based on Elisabeth Hess' "Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human", which premiered early in July this year, reintroducing its subject to a broader public. It is a documentary, and it depicts the altogether tragical life of a chimpanzee who was born in captivity, raised and nurtured like a human child in the course of a four-year language study conducted by behavioral psychologist Herbert Terrace in the 70s, celebrated like a star during his New York time, and who, after "much trial and tribulation" (Nicolas Rapold, New York Times) died at age 26 of a heart attack in a Texas animal sanctuary. Nim's story is heart-touching. He was taken away from his mother Carolyn when he was only ten days old, to enter the household of Stefanie Lafarge and her family on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. There, he got six siblings, learned to fancy pizza, peach ice cream, and riding fast in cars; he clung to his new mother all day long, was even breast-fed by her and later occasionally smoked pot with Stefanie and friends from the psychological department who would come for dinner to enjoy the company of the charming chimp who would communicate with them in sign language. Time went by, Nim continued to get instructions in American Sign Language, and at the end of the experiment he arguably would know 125 different signs. When he was almost five years old, the LaFarges couldn't handle him anymore and Nim moved to a 21-room mansion near the Hudson River, sponsored by Colombia University. He now had his own suite and own rose garden. He cooked and washed the dishes with Laura-Ann Petitto, one of the numerable new handlers that now took care of him and taught him ASL. Nim loved to play jokes on his caretakers, had toys and cigarettes available, enjoyed language lessons, but he apparently missed his old family, the LaFarges, terribly. Soon, he started to bite his new caretakers that would constantly come and go. When he severely injured one of the handlers biting him in the face, Terrace quit the experiment and shipped the chimpanzee back to the place where he had come from: the Institute for Primate Studies at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. After almost five years, he ended the project that he had started so optimistically with the assumption that he'd be able to disprove Noam Chomsky's thesis ("Nim Chimsky" is a pun on the famous linguist's name) that language was inherent to humans only. Terrace argued that he had collected enough material to now prove just the opposite of his initial hypothesis: Nim had not acquired any language skills but was merely mimicking the communication of his teachers. "Project Nim", in his eyes, was a failure.  For Nim, the turn of events proved disastrous. For the first time in his life, he had to live with other chimpanzees, and, as it appeared, he didn't like it at all. Hour after hour he would stand in front of the glass panneling of his confinement and sign frantically. Using sign language, he pleaded to get some pot, cigarettes, alcohol, to be let out- nobody would understand him or care much for that matter. When the research lab ran out of money, he eventually seemed doomed to share the fate of so many Cheetas and other chimps used in the research or entertainment business: he was sold to a New York based medical laboratory that conducted animal experiments, infecting their subjects with HIV, Hepatitis, and other fatal agents . In the end, only his celeb status and his ability to make himself understood spared Nim Chimpsky the fate that numerous of his primate fellows continue to endure today: a life in captivity, great distress and unmeasurable physical and psychological pain that inevitably go together with the laboratory environment. He was acquired by a Texas animal sanctuary where his life ended in 2000 after almost twenty years of farm confinement. 
But what do we learn from this story? Nim was obviously a tragic character, but, as ever so often, the experiment ("Project Nim") tells us much more about the ones who conducted it than about the subject itself. “One of the first things you learn about with chimpanzees," film director Marsh said, " is they have a very precise power structure within a group. The males are constantly seeking dominance. Then in the human world you have this given power structure of the experiment. The professor is very much at the top, and underneath him are women — younger, less experienced women.” Another insight provided by one of the film's protagonists, Bob Ingersoll, one of the few true friends Nim had during his lifetime,  is quite revealing: "If I taught him language, I could control him." Language, not as a means of communication, but one of control. Elizabeth Hess finally sums it up in an interview published on timesunion.com, July 7, 2011: "This story is really about captivity. (...) I guess my feeling in the end is that all captive animals, especially chimpanzees, because they are so like us, are tragic figures.” With many billions of animals held in captivity for food production, testing, and entertainment purposes, this should give us one more thing to think about.