“There wasn’t any nicety in her greeting with me,” Carter recalls in the film. From the beginning, the couple told her that physical contact with Lucy would not be permitted, given the decent chance that she could lose at least a finger or two from an encounter gone awry. That said, Carter’s narration does at least largely avoid anthropomorphizing Lucy or romanticizing her story.Ĭarter first began working for the Temerlins in 1976 as a 25-year-old graduate student of the University of Oklahoma focused on primate studies. Much like My Octopus Teacher, which won best documentary at Sunday’s Oscars, Lucy the Human Chimp works better as a personal narrative than it does as a documentary. Parkinson does not engage, for instance, with the argument that Lucy was not a suitable rehabilitation candidate, and that efforts to prepare and release her into the wild actually hurt her. Still, the film struggles to establish much critical distance from its human subject. (She now serves as director of the Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Project in Gambia.) ![]() “I learned a lot more about families living with the chimps than I did with my own human family,” Carter says at one point. ![]() The most effective moments come during interviews with Carter, when she reflects on the profound bond she formed with her chimp charges. 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.ĭirector Alex Parkinson tells Lucy and Carter’s stories with empathy, leaving space for both humor and tragedy. 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. Lucy learned around 120 signs, and seemed to flourish in the Temerlins’ home-that is, until she reached sexual maturity. 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. She even knew how to make her own gin and tonics. ![]() (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. 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. Lucy the Chimpanzee’s story is an animal rights nightmare.
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