Roger Fouts
What Chimpanzees can Teach us About Who We Are

At the heart of this moving and vibrant book is Fouts' magical, 30-year friendship with Washoe--the chimp whom Fouts has taught American Sign Language--whose dialogues with the author have opened a window into chimpanzee consciousness.

A heartwarming true story from the real Dr. Doolittle. Comparative psychologist Dr. Roger Fouts takes us through the remarkable 30-year odyssey of his personal and professional relationship with Washoe P. Satyrus, a baby chimp he adopted from the American Space Program. One of those rare works of nonfiction that touches our hearts, opens our minds and challenges our sensibilities, this book will forever change our view of our closest relatives--and how we see ourselves.

Fouts started teaching chimps American Sign Language (ASL), in hopes of being able to speak directly with them. He was under no illusion that he was teaching chimps the art of communication: They had been communicating in the wild for millennia, with gestures, the dialects of hand movement, facial expressions, and body language. Nonetheless, Fouts was astounded by the speed at which his charges took to ASL and their talents for wordplay and grammar. His research allowed him to put in perspective theories of animal intelligence and language acquisition, from Descartes and Darwin to Skinner and Chomsky, and to formulate his own notions of the remarkable similarity between chimp and human biology and intelligence, of grammar as a complex form of rule-following behavior, and how ASL helped him bridge the sundered audiovisual links experienced by autistics. But clearly the most important thing Fouts feels he learned is that these creatures don't belong in cages, and no matter how much compassion and respect are given the research subjects, morally and ethically, keeping them in captivity is wrong. To drive that point home, he details the barbaric conditions in which lab animals are kept, the excruciating tests they are put through, in powerfully soulful language.

What Fouts has learned that other animals do have minds. That argument isn't new, but in Next of Kin, it is based on an unparalleled depth of understanding and on a uniquely personal involvement in the battles over congressional legislation and laboratory management.

About the Author
Roger Fouts is a professor of psychology at Central Washington University and co-director with his wife, Deborah Fouts, of the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute. His extraordinary accomplishments with Washoe and her chimpanzee family over the past three decades have generated international publicity in magazines and newspapers and on television. He is a frequent speaker on chimpanzee behavior and on behalf of improved conditions for captive chimpanzees in biomedical research.

Book Description
For 30 years Roger Fouts has pioneered communication with chimpanzees through sign language--beginning with a mischievous baby chimp named Washoe. This remarkable book describes Fout's odyssey from novice researcher to celebrity scientist to impassioned crusader for the rights of animals. Living and conversing with these sensitive creatures has given him a profound appreciation of what they can teach us about ourselves. It has also made Fouts an outspoken opponent of biomedical experimentation on chimpanzees. A voyage of scientific discovery and interspecies communication, this is a stirring tale of friendship, courage, and compassion that will change forever the way we view our biological--and spritual--next of kin.

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