The chimp lady

Mornings are Deborah Fouts’ favorite time of day. That’s when she spends time with Dar, Tatu and Loulis, serving their breakfast, putting away blankets and asking how their morning is going.

She has worked with the three chimpanzees for decades now, and they are family.

The three apes at the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute at Central Washington University are the last to come out of an experiment that began with a young chimp named Washoe more than 40 years ago.

Raised by humans who wanted to know if an infant chimpanzee raised as a human baby could learn to communicate through American Sign Language, Washoe was the first nonhuman to acquire a human language. Deborah and her husband, Roger, joined Project Washoe in 1967, and Washoe remained a part of their family until her death in late 2007 at age 42.

“Our lives were changed forever more,” Fouts says of meeting Washoe. “She was a very engaging young person; she was a chimpanzee-person. We were interested in learning all we could about her because she was so similar to our children.”

Fouts jokes that her son has been compared to Washoe his entire life.

Another chimpanzee, Loulis, joined the family in 1979 when the Foutses and Washoe were working at the University of Oklahoma.

In 1980, the dean of CWU invited Roger and Deborah to come to the university, and the chimps came, too.

Dar and Tatu, who were rescued from biomedical labs as infants, and like Washoe were raised as human children who learned signing from their human parents, joined the family at CHCI in the early ’80s. Along with Loulis, they are the only chimps in the world who still communicate with American Sign Language.

Friends of Washoe, the nonprofit organization that protects the chimpanzees, was founded in 1981 as a way to protect the animals. CHCI was founded in 1992.

 All donations to the nonprofit go directly to the care of the chimpanzee family.

“We’re very careful. I don’t like owning another being. … You never want to have any state entity owning any nonhuman,” Deborah says. “It’s just not a safe thing.”

The institute is a place for humans to learn more about the chimpanzees, but it is also a sanctuary that protects them from exploitation, Fouts says.

Not everyone who wants to work or volunteer at CHCI is a good fit. In much the same way as middle school and high school students test new teachers, chimpanzees test their caregivers for their Achilles’ heel, Fouts says. The best caregivers are those who are self-confident and unflappable.

“You need to be the kind of person who cannot show it — and they read nonverbal amazingly well, probably better than anything. So if you flinch, or if you’re serving and your hand is far away from the enclosure, they see that.”

Loulis, Fouts says, is the “young man” most likely to try to test new people.

“If you go in thinking that you have this cute little outfit on and the chimpanzees read that, Loulis might spit a little water on you.”

When the chimpanzees first moved to CWU, they lived indoors and were unable to go outside. Fouts was thrilled when the current facility opened.

“My very best day was when they got to move from the third floor of the psychology building into this building where they had outside access, and the first day that Washoe asked to go outside and she got to go outside and touch grass for the first time in 13 years,” she says.

While Project Washoe set out to prove that chimpanzees really could use the signs of ASL, not just with humans but with other chimpanzees (and even to themselves when they are alone), the goal of Friends of Washoe goes beyond the three chimpanzees who live there now.

The Foutses and others who work at CHCI want to protect all chimpanzees, from the ones who live free in Africa and those who are still in biomedical labs or other captive situations.

“Unfortunately, the visual chimpanzees are in entertainment. They’re not well cared for; they’re taken away from their mothers at a very young age,” Fouts says.

Helping humans understand the importance of protecting chimps has been the most important aspect of her work, Fouts says. These days, her job is largely administrative, limiting the amount of time she gets to spend with the chimpanzees.

“Some days it’s a couple of hours, some days it’s three or four. Every day is a different day,” she says. “They’ve been a part of my family for over 40 years, so we’re dear friends and I miss them when I’m away and when I’m not with them.”

Because the program is largely self-supporting, Fouts spends time writing grant proposals and working to get the word out about the work done at CHCI.

She also oversees the training of the graduate students and community liaisons who work with the chimpanzees and lead the “chimposiums” at CHCI from March through November of each year.

The weekend chimposiums, which are the only way the public can come and see the chimpanzees, not only introduce humans to Dar, Tatu and Loulis, but also explain the use of chimpanzees in biomedical labs and entertainment.

“The fact that we have demonstrated over and over and over again with many, many research papers that the chimpanzees use the signs of ASL, that gives people a window into their minds,” Fouts says. “And people that understand and are compassionate, they know that a thinking, feeling being, a feeling person — they’re chimpanzee-persons — should not be subjected to the biomedical research. They shouldn’t be in captivity. They should have basic rights that we have and they haven’t achieved that yet.

“I think that’s one of the most important lessons that we’ve learned. People go away saying, ‘My life has changed.’”