Next of Kin: What Chimpanzees Tell Us About Who We Are

Roger Fouts

ISBN 10: 067157423X ISBN 13: 9780671574239

Publisher: Audioworks, 1997

Synopsis

Presents the author's groundbreaking work teaching chimpanzees--including Washoe--to communicate by using American Sign Language, and describes his outspoken advocacy for improved conditions for animals in research laboratories.

About this title

Review:

For three decades, primatologist Roger Fouts has been involved in language studies of the chimpanzee, the animal most closely related to human beings. Among his subjects was the renowned Washoe, who was "endowed with a powerful need to learn and communicate," and who developed an extraordinary vocabulary in American Sign Language. Another chimpanzee, Fouts writes, "never made a grammatical error," which turned a whole school of linguistic theory upside down. While reporting these successes, Fouts also notes that chimpanzees are regularly abused in laboratory settings and that in the wild their number has fallen from 5,000,000 to fewer than 175,000 in the last century.

About the Author:

Roger Fouts is a professor of psychology at Central Washington University and co-director with his wile, Deborah Fouts, of the Chimpanzee and Human Communications 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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Audioworks
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 067157423X
• ISBN 13: 9780671574239
• Binding: Audio Cassette