how ethics did and did not evolve

I’m sure you’re familiar with Koko the gorilla, but there are plenty more lesser-known gorillas that can understand sign language.

This is the true story of another one.

Andrew. The gorilla I worked with.

While Koko was said to have known over 1000 signs and understood 2000 spoken words, Andrew’s vocabulary dwarfed those numbers. Koko’s estimated IQ sat anywhere between  70-90, my best guess for Andrew was about 100. At times it seemed significantly higher.

The best part was that he didn’t seem to share Koko’s obsession with nipples. Not to go into too much detail, but I was relieved given the unusual size and shape of mine. My mother always used to say they were a sign I was special.

Enough said on that topic.

The problem started one day when I went into the lab to continue our training. Typically I began by giving Andrew a treat of some sort. A banana or apply usually. I believe it was an apple on the day in question. As he began to happily munch away, one of my assistants walked in and told me that Andrew had already been given his treat for the day.

The gorilla had misrepresented himself to me. He had behaved in a manner that led me to believe that he hadn’t been given his treat, acting all excited and signing “treat” over and over, when he knew that he had.

It was clear that I had 450 pounds of lying gorilla on my hands.

I felt a mixture of disappointment and outrage, and it was at that moment that I realized that I needed to pivot in what I was teaching him. To that point it had been mostly fine art stuff, but what this gorilla clearly needed was some in-depth exposure to ethics.

Andrew started in with his usual “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” and I cut him right off. “Not today Andy old boy” I signed and shouted. And that’s when I introduced him to Aristotle and Socrates.

Over the next few months we worked our way through John Locke, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche. Some days my arms ached from all the furious signing back and forth. There were highs and lows, of course, and numerous heated debates, but I felt I was making tangible progress. While at times he clung to the dogma of Marx and Jean-Paul Sartre, he also seemed to truly appreciate the musings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In short, he knew his Jean-Paul from his Jean-Jacques, that’s for sure. And not in the ol’ ‘Clever Hans’ way.

Clever Hans was a famous horse that was claimed to have performed arithmetic, but was in fact just trained to watch the reactions of his trainer to come up with the answer. A fraud. I felt on the other hand that Andrew sincerely believed every word he was saying throughout our time together.

And then one morning it all came crashing down. As he was happily munching away on the kumquat I’d just given him, one of my assistants strolled in and told me that Andrew had already been given his treat for the day.

The room spun and I clutched at my desk for support. All the hard work, all the long months… all for nothing.

… and then I saw it. Before the words “Bad Andrew!” had even left my lips.

A zipper.

A god damned zipper!

On the back of Andrew.

So it turns out I’d been working with a guy in a gorilla suit the whole time. Talk about feeling like a monkey’s uncle. Embarrassed as I was, I remember wishing that I could unzip and reveal myself as a gorilla.

I’d been the one being studied all along.

Which explains how I got the job to begin with I guess, given my previous employment consisted primarily of sweeping up at a pet store.

Still, in retrospect I spent a lot of days sitting in a smelly enclosure for no apparent reason. I wonder if the guy in the suit had to shit in there to sell me on the whole thing. To make it more realistic. Smelled like it. Imagine having to do that for a living. I just hope they learned something important from their so-called ‘research’, for both our sakes.

Apparently the more you learn about the dignity of the gorilla, the more you want to avoid people. Dian Fossey said that.