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Chapter 2

HAPPY DAYS

“If we look straight and deep into a chimpanzee’s eyes, an intelligent, self-assured personality looks back at us. If they are animals, what must we be?” ¹⁶

FRANS DE WAAL

BILLY AND REIDUN Glad’s two sons, twelve-year-old Carl Christian and ten-year-old Øystein, were still awake when their father and Edvard Moseid parked the car outside the house and stormed into the living room with a baby chimpanzee in their arms. Outside it was cold and dark, snowy and blustery. Julius stared at the two boys with wide, terrified eyes. Edvard placed Julius on the kitchen table and Billy snipped off the torn tendon protruding from his fingertip, rinsed and bandaged the wound, affixed the damaged finger to two other fingers and gave Julius pain killers. Then he cleaned the chimp’s entire body with a cloth and dressed him in a wool shirt. Reidun went down to the cellar and found an old nursing bottle from her own sons’ infant days. She filled it with warm milk, thinned out somewhat with water and gave Julius a few small sips at a time. She held him on her lap as she fed him and Julius began to relax.¹⁷ Later that evening he was fed again, this time with a bit of penicillin mixed in. They put him in a banana box in the bathroom, the warmest room in the house. He made a few small whimpering sounds and fell asleep. Only hours before, he had been a member of a community of captive chimpanzees, and while neglected by his mother, he was nonetheless surrounded by his own kind. Now here he was, asleep in a human’s bathroom.

Edvard had recently moved to a new house in Vennesla, a community neighboring Kristiansand, and he had two small daughters aged two and four. They therefore agreed that Julius would live with the Glads for the first weeks. The Glad children were older; Reidun was a stay-at-home mom with a nursing background. Billy was a medical doctor—not a veterinarian—but had nonetheless assumed responsibility for the medical needs of the zoo’s chimpanzees, considering it an intriguing challenge.

The Glads decided not to let Julius sleep alone for the first night in his new quarters. Reidun dragged a mattress into the bathroom and put it on the floor beside him. Her night was sleepless and full of wonder; Julius slept surprisingly deeply. He woke up hungry once and she gave him a new bottle of milk. After that, he burped in satisfaction before falling back asleep. In his sleep, he sucked on his left thumb.¹⁸

When he woke up in the morning, Julius appeared to have a high temperature. At first, Billy worried that the chimp had a fever but he soon realized that the floor heaters in the bathroom had been too turned up too high. Julius was healthy and content. He drank more, urinated as he should and appeared altogether safe. He quickly formed a bond with Reidun as his mother and preferred to snuggle in her arms at all times, while she patted and stroked his fur.

Chimpanzee and other primate infants have an intense yearning for bodily contact. To show this, the American psychologist, Harry Harlow, conducted a heart-wrenching experiment in the 1950s. Harlow removed rhesus monkeys from their mothers directly following childbirth and instead placed them with artificial surrogates devised from steel wire and made to resemble their mothers. He put two different “surrogate mothers” into each cage: one mother was nothing but a steel wire contraption holding a bottle of formula milk, not reminiscent of any kind of animal, and the other mother did not have any formula to offer but was covered with soft fabric that looked like a stuffed monkey. The theory was that the monkey babies would prioritize the “mother” with the milk, proving that they only required nourishment and not connection. The results, however, showed that all of the babies prioritized the soft “mother,” the one who had nothing more to offer than her own plush. Harlow tried to correct the findings by fastening an electric bulb to the doll with the formula so that she would be at least as warm as the soft alternative, but the babies continued to favor the downy mother. They would drink what they needed from the hard “mother” and then return to spend most of their time with the soft doll.¹⁹ In other words, they craved emotional bonds as much as milk. They needed love as much as they needed food. Now Reidun had become a surrogate mother for Julius. The same human source offered him both milk and touch. He could recline comfortably in her lap and receive all of the physical contact, care and attention that had been absent for him amongst the chimpanzees.

“IT IS AN ANIMAL”

The Glad family quickly grew accustomed to the new situation. Billy was impressed by the ability of his sons to adapt to the new reality. Firstly, they managed to keep the fact that they were housing a baby chimpanzee at home under wraps, even though their hearts were nearly bursting at the seams with the world’s biggest secret. Secondly, they accepted the unknown. Their parents told them repeatedly that Julius was only an animal, that he might have to be put down eventually and that, in any case, he would certainly not remain in their home long-term, like a baby brother.²⁰ And thirdly, they were good with Julius. The two boys passed time sprawled out on the floor with Julius, trying to communicate with him as their father had instructed them to do. They would make soft “oo-oo” noises and receive squeaking communication attempts back from Julius. Just as human children, young chimpanzees play at taking turns when learning to communicate. The baby chimps and the adult chimpanzees alternate at making noises and listening. In this way, the young are able to learn the basic methods for communicating.²¹ The Glad brothers were simultaneously playing with Julius and imparting him with vital communication skills.

Reidun bought human breast milk formula so that Julius would no longer have to drink watered-down milk. And they decided to dress him in disposable diapers so they wouldn’t have to keep cleaning up his messes. In general, they wanted to raise him as much as possible like a chimpanzee but on this one important point they simply had to compromise. Julius slept often and peacefully in his cardboard box, preferring to lie on his stomach with his legs pulled up beneath his body and his head turned to the side. After a few days, he became more animated, and it was easier to interact with him. He began to try out more noises and every now and then stretched his toothless mouth wide open. He was able to sit partway up in the box on his own and to follow sounds with his eyes. Chimpanzees’ sensory apparatus is much like our own. They have a similar sensitivity to light and the ability to distinguish between different wavelengths. Chimps have color vision, though humans appear to be more sensitive to the yellow-red end of the spectrum. In general, chimpanzees have a better sense of sound than we do and are better equipped to hear high frequency noises. They also possess a much better sense of smell.²² Julius watched and listened to the humans around him and could sense strong, strange and unfamiliar smells: the smell of humans, of clothing and furniture, milk and human food.

Though his general condition improved, beneath the bandages his finger smelled of infection. Billy changed the bandages every day, rinsed the wound and administered antibiotics through shots in Julius’s leg, but still his finger refused to heal. For this reason, on February 21, after nine days at the Glad family house, chief physician Helge Svendsen from the West Agder Central Hospital arrived with his operating equipment. With nurse Reidun Glad assisting, Julius was given 2 milligrams of Rohypnol blended in milk and a local anesthetic before his fingertip was amputated on the Glad family kitchen counter.²³

Though the surgery was a success, Julius remained completely limp after the operation. It was difficult to rouse and feed him. Four days passed before he became his usual self again. He began to eat and make noises, responding happily if provoked by someone. He now weighed 7 pounds, had built up muscles on his back and body and was able to sit up in his box by holding onto the sides. Over the next few days, his development picked up speed. If the Glad family held his hands, he was able to pull himself to stand.

Naturally, the entire Glad family grew dangerously fond of Julius. For Reidun, who was at home with him during the day while the others were at work or school, the situation reminded her a little too much of the earlier period of her life when she was the mother of two small children. It was the way she held Julius and fed him his bottle, or changed his diapers, as well as the way in which he lovingly responded to her care. The last time she had carried out such tasks, her activities had been accompanied by an intense motherly love. Now she was required to go through the same motions while all the time reminding herself that Julius was only an animal in her arms, and not a human being. Billy struggled as well: “It is an animal. His time with us is limited,” he lectured himself.²⁴

On February 28, zoo director Edvard Moseid arrived to take Julius to his own house in Vennesla. They wanted to see how Julius would react to a change of environment, and they also wanted to prevent him from forming strong attachments to a single family. But as Edvard carried Julius out to his car, the chimp began to howl. He howled all the way from Kristiansand to Vennesla. He was then apathetic for the entire first day in Vennesla, but when he began to understand that he was just as safe among these new humans as he had been with the Glad family, he started adapting to his new surroundings.

The Moseid family was definitely animal friendly. Before moving to Vennesla, Edvard and Marit Moseid and their two young daughters, Ane and Siv, had lived on a small farm in Lillesand where they had had a standing agreement with the agricultural authorities that their farm could function as a quarantine zone for animals imported to the zoo. The family thus had a history of caring for snakes, crocodiles, hippos and lizards and even a fully grown sea lion.²⁵ Julius, however, was something else entirely. He was like a tiny infant and the Moseid girls were warned that they had to be very careful when handling him. They whispered when they were around Julius and gently petted his coat. Just like a human child, he loved to be rubbed on the chest or tickled under his arms and neck. A baby chimpanzee reacts to tickling in almost the same manner that a human child does—he laughs with an open mouth when he is tickled, displaying the same ambivalence as a human child, appearing as though it likes and doesn’t like tickling at the same time, and can even start laughing if one merely points at a sensitive area.²⁶

Julius began to bond with Marit as a second surrogate mother. When she returned Julius to Reidun after one week in Vennesla, Julius again became confused and apathetic. But after just one day back in the Glad home, he returned to his usual behavior. Billy had doubted whether Julius would manage the shift but became more optimistic after seeing how the chimpanzee was able to flip-flop between the two families. Eventually, Moseid and Glad hoped to incorporate the zoo-keeper Grete Svendsen into the rotation, since she was the person who would take over responsibility for Julius’s daily supervision when—or if—he was returned to his chimpanzee community at the zoo.

SKINNY’S “MURDER”

The big question on everyone’s mind was how to proceed with integrating Julius back into the chimpanzee community. Edvard and Billy knew they needed help. They had seen the fallout resulting from a previous miscommunication between a new chimp and the community. A small chimpanzee, Skinny, who had been imported from Denmark together with Bølla in 1977, was murdered by the group in Kristiansand. Skinny and Bølla had been the only two chimpanzees in the Danish zoo. They had thus never learned how to interact and communicate with other chimpanzees.²⁷ On top of that, Skinny had been captured in the wild and must have lived with humans for a period before arriving in a zoo. She had never learned the proper chimpanzee language and behaviors and instead used simple gestures and movements that she had picked up from humans, gestures that her fellow chimpanzees in Kristiansand interpreted as aggressive challenges. Lotta was particularly angry at Skinny and once bit off two of her toes. The toes were not completely severed but remained hanging from her foot. The veterinarian Gudbrand Hval and Billy Glad decided to operate. They brought Skinny home to one of the keeper’s apartments and put her under anesthesia by placing a cloth with trichloroethylene over her mouth. Using pliers from the zoo’s janitor, which they boiled in water on the stove and disinfected with alcohol, Billy Glad was able to perform a successful operation. In order to protect Skinny in the future, the keepers created a small shutter door leading away from the common chimp enclosure into an individual pen where Skinny could retreat to safety whenever she felt threatened. However, a keeper had forgotten to leave the shutter door open one evening, and when the staff arrived back at work the next day, June 30, 1978, Skinny was dead. “Presumed killed in the group,” stated the note in the formal annual animal review issued to the Ministry of Agriculture.²⁸ In fact, Dennis had hoisted her up and slammed her against the cement wall. The autopsy report revealed a fracture on her skull and profuse bleeding in Skinny’s brain.

Being killed was one possible fate that might await Julius upon his return to the group. One step out of line, and he wouldn’t stand a chance. Glad and Moseid pored over international studies on chimpanzees and contacted other European zoos requesting assistance. In 1980, they went on a whirlwind research trip to Switzerland and the Netherlands to speak with some of the leading experts in the field. They visited zoos in Zurich and Basel in Switzerland and the Royal Burgers’ Zoo in Arnhem in the Netherlands. Basel housed around twenty to thirty chimpanzees, and the park had recently completed a successful reintegration of what Glad and Moseid later learned to call a “hand-raised” chimpanzee. The Arnhem zoo in the Netherlands had forty chimpanzees and a wealth of experience reintegrating chimpanzees that had formerly been outcasts. This zoo also boasted practical and scientific facilities that boggled the minds of the two Norwegians. There were examination rooms, operating rooms, individual sick rooms, quarantine rooms, a lab and two full-time biologists. In addition, the thirty-one-year-old, soon to be world-renowned zoologist, Frans de Waal, was at the park every day.

At the time of their visit, de Waal was in the middle of writing what would later be one of the most widely-read chimpanzee books of all time, Chimpanzee Politics.²⁹ Frans de Waal studied the social structures within the Arnhem community, sitting on a stool for thousands of hours while observing and taking notes. Inspired by the political theories of Italian Renaissance philosopher, Niccolò Machiavelli, de Waal analyzed the intricate power play between the chimpanzees, interactions that he dubbed “chimpanzee politics.” One example from the book portrays a fight, which occurred in the summer of 1976. It began when a chimpanzee named Luit challenged the alpha male, Yeroen, by taking sexual matters into his own hands and openly mating with one of the female chimps without permission from Yeroen. After this, Luit began challenging the alpha male using a variety of subtle tactics aimed more at winning over Yeroen’s previous allies to his own side than in seeking a physical confrontation. Luit suddenly began to spend much more time together with the females who had previously supported Yeroen. He cuddled with them, groomed their fur and began playing with their young—not unlike a U.S. presidential candidate kissing babies on the campaign trail. Luit taught himself to climb one of the enclosure’s more difficult trees where he was able to pick fresh leaves that were popular among the chimpanzees. He would then distribute these coveted leaves magnanimously amongst his “supporters.” The decisive strategic turning point came when Luit won approval from the most important male chimp, Nikkie, a sort of second in command or vice president. On the seventy-second day after Luit had initiated his challenge, Yeroen admitted defeat. He greeted Luit submissively for the first time, thereby installing Luit as the new leader of the chimpanzee community.³⁰

Moseid and Glad listened attentively to all that de Waal and the Arnhem zookeepers told them, particularly their knowledge about the reintegration of outcast chimpanzee babies. A deaf female chimp in Arnhem was constantly giving birth to new chimpanzees, but she was unable to care for them as a result of her handicap. Infant chimpanzees communicate verbally from birth, making small, nearly silent whimpering noises. The deaf chimpanzee was unable to react to these signals and prompts from her young.³¹ Still, the zoo administrators had chosen not to give her a contraceptive implant and instead allowed her to become pregnant multiple times. Each time she gave birth, however, the infant would die within weeks. Eventually, they had decided to remove the babies right after birth and attempt various strategies for introducing them back into the community. In 1979, the same year of Julius’s birth, they had succeeded in teaching another female chimp how to take over caring for a baby and feeding it milk from a bottle. The surrogate mother had first received training in her cage on how to handle the nursing bottle and was rewarded whenever she did it correctly. When the baby was two weeks old, she assumed responsibility for its well-being and proved to be a caring foster mother. She fed the young chimpanzee calmly and lovingly with the bottle and even acted in clever ways they had not taught her, such as lifting the baby upright, allowing him to gulp if he had trouble drinking. After a week with the nursing bottle, the adoptive mother began producing her own supply of breast milk and could soon offer the baby half of its required nourishment. On another occasion, when they were forced to raise another newborn chimp among humans for a few weeks, they reintegrated the infant by employing a female chimp whose baby had died shortly after birth. They rushed to the zoo with the human-raised chimp baby and placed it in the arms of the mourning mother, who immediately began to care for the baby.³²

Kristiansand Zoo, unfortunately, did not have any of these options for Julius. None of the adult chimpanzees had been trained to feed with a bottle and there were no new mothers who had recently lost their young. As it was, Lotta had her hands full with her own son, Billy. Julius’s mother Sanne apparently did not want anything to do with him and Bølla was too young. Julius would therefore have to remain among humans until he was safe and strong enough to be able to return and care for himself. Safety thus became the highest priority for the coming phase. In the spring of 1980, his keepers would try to provide for his welfare through three different groups: the Glad group, the Moseid group and what might be called the Zoo group, with keeper Grete Svendsen as the key group member. The idea was to get Julius used to spending time with Svendsen at the zoo and eventually moving him into his own cage from where he would be able to watch and hear the other chimpanzees. It was essential that he learn proper chimpanzee behavior firsthand. It was also important for Julius to establish regular eye and sound contact with the other chimpanzee community members. His keepers would have to allow for a sufficient period of time to pass between establishing first visual contact and the moment when Julius would finally be allowed to come into physical contact with another chimpanzee. How long this waiting period might be was anyone’s guess. Glad and Moseid were offered mixed advice on the topic: In Basel, someone recommended they begin establishing first contact when Julius was only six months old. In Arnhem, the advice was to wait until Julius was two years old.³³

A VISIT TO THE ZOO

When Billy Glad first returned home from Arnhem, Julius treated him like a stranger. Billy had only been absent for a few days, but Julius now acted afraid of him and clung to Reidun. After a while, Julius again recognized Billy as familiar and became as confident and trusting as he had been before. Julius was developing well both psychologically and physically. At only two months old, he had made his first attempts to crawl and had taught himself to balance on all four legs. By three months of age, he was able to crawl around on the slippery bathroom tiles. And he had even started to walk around on his hind legs. He grew teeth and tried them out on books and furniture, door frames and cupboard doors, acquiring an especially fond taste for the Glad family’s charity receipts from the Norwegian Rescue Mission.³⁴ In March he began eating solid foods and was offered baby food, which he hated with a passion. It took heaps of patience and spilled mush before Julius finally got used to the human fare.

Julius began to live more and more frequently with the Moseid family, and Edvard Moseid often brought Julius to the zoo so that he could spend time alone with Grete Svendsen. She fed him milk from a bottle without any resistance. Julius seemed to be accepting of everything that they wanted him to accept. Their devised system of the three “family groups” appeared to have worked. The only problem was that Julius had become more and more dependent on human attention. He no longer wanted to be put down after his feeding but insisted on playing and being entertained. This exhausted his human keepers, particularly Edvard, who had more than enough to do already as the father of two small children and a zoo director. The zoo now had more than 200,000 visitors per year and hosted a wide variety of species, from brown bears to kangaroos. It had turned into a complex logistical operation involving the production and the importation of various types of feed, organizing and caring for all of the different species, ensuring safety procedures for the employees and humane conditions for the animals, marketing and planning for the future. Moseid’s mind was constantly brimming with new ideas. He dreamed of establishing a zoo hotel complete with a swim hall and solarium.³⁵ On top of everything else, he was mourning the loss of a cousin in the tragic oil platform accident of March 27, 1980, when the Alexander Kielland capsized in the Ekofisk oil field in the North Sea, killing 123 people on board. In the midst of all of this, he was now responsible for the care of a baby chimpanzee at home.

Reidun also began to feel the strain of looking after Julius. During the weeks when Julius lived with the Glads, she couldn’t let him out of her sight. If she tried to accomplish any other task while he was awake, he would howl loudly for her attention. “It’s high time he moved out,” Billy noted on April 14, 1980.³⁶

At the end of April, the Glad and Moseid families, plus Grete Svendsen, met at the zoo to introduce Julius to the chimpanzee community for the first time. Julius was now four months old and had been separated from the other chimps for two and a half months. A cot had been set up for Julius near the window of the private sleeping quarters, and the other chimpanzees would be able to see Julius through a window. It was the first small step on a long road back. They put Julius down on his cot, opened the flap between the common enclosure and the sleeping quarters and waited. His mother Sanne was the first to come in. Julius whimpered and Sanne made a trumpet shape with her mouth and a sound they had not heard before. But she was otherwise uninterested, though she did not appear upset. The other chimpanzees arrived shortly after, gathering at the window and staring wide-eyed at their prodigal community member through the glass. They huddled around the window, except for Dennis, who performed his ritual laps in the background in order to make an impression, as an alpha male leader must do in the chimpanzee world. Julius seemed unafraid as he sat gazing at his chimp family for twenty minutes. Edvard and Billy were entranced by the session, which had gone much better than they had predicted.³⁷

TALKING CHIMPANZEES

Back at Moseid’s house in Vennesla, Julius was becoming a worthy playmate for the two girls. He slept at night in a cardboard box, which was sometimes kept in the bathroom and sometimes on the floor of Edvard and Marit Moseid’s bedroom. As soon as he woke up, however, Julius would dart into the girls’ room to play. He was physically smaller than his “sisters,” but much more advanced in his motor skills. He climbed the curtains in spite of their efforts to deter him. In truth, he needed all of the climbing practice he could get in advance of the day when he would be returned to the chimpanzee group. He enjoyed wrestling and play-fighting, playing tag and racing with Ane and Siv. If they raced, he made absolutely certain no one cheated. He stood on the start line swaying back and forth while waiting for the start signal. Together with Ane—and only with her—he developed his own game: one of them would sit with a stick or piece of grass sticking out of their mouth while the other tried to grab it with their lips. If the stick happened to slip out of Julius’s mouth or if he lost the game, he would get very sour-tempered. The girls also taught him how to draw and paint. He was allowed to lie on their beds for hours on end, though always with the rule that he was not permitted to get used to sleeping in a bed or sitting at a table. For the girls, mealtimes were heart-wrenching, as Julius, the family’s uncontested center of attention, would be banned from their company only because it was time to eat. Sweets were also against the rules for Julius but he was quick to learn the art of flattery. When the two girls sat on the sofa, watching children’s TV with their snacks, he would squeeze between them, place one arm around each and kiss them on the cheeks, melting their hearts and undoing their parents’ principles. Somehow, a piece of candy would “fall” onto the floor or a third straw would just happen to appear in the bottle of soda.³⁸

It was inevitable; Julius began adopting more and more human behaviors each day. He learned to recognize verbal messages such as “time to eat” or “we’re going outside now.” He understood their meaning without difficulty and reacted just like any other child. Unlike other children, however, Julius never gave the impression that he was planning to try speaking up for himself. No single word ever passed his lips.

In 1947, a decisive study was conducted to find out whether it was possible to teach chimpanzees to speak. The psychologist Keith Hayes and his wife, Cathy Hayes, adopted a one-month-old chimpanzee infant named Viki and raised her as a human child with intensive language training. When Viki died at six years of age, she had only learned to say and use four words: “papa,” “mama,” “cup” and “up.” Later studies determined that due to differences in tongue motor skills, it is impossible for chimpanzees to create many of the sounds required for human speech. In 1966, however, the researcher couple, Allen and Beatrice Gardner, was able to teach the chimp Washoe, who lived with them, to communicate using several gestures taken from ASL, or American Sign Language. By the time Washoe left the couple in 1970 to become a part of Roger Fouts’s research at the Institute for Primate Studies in Oklahoma, she had mastered 130 different signs.³⁹ The experiment was hugely significant, suddenly allowing for a relatively advanced method of communication between humans and chimpanzees. Washoe was observed teaching the signs to an adopted chimpanzee son. The following year, inspired by the Gardners’ breakthrough, several other chimpanzees were taught ASL. Research with these chimps showed that they were able to group differing objects under the same concept, for example grouping various types of dogs under the term “dog” and various insects under the term “insect.” They could transfer signs that they had learned correctly in one context into other contexts. For instance, Washoe had learned the sign for “to open” in the context of a door, but could apply it herself to other situations, such as when she wished to open a crate. And chimps were able to combine different signs into meaningful combinations. Washoe signed the gestures for “water” and “bird” when she saw a swan for the first time. Another chimpanzee combined the signs for “cry” and “fruit” when explaining the concept of an onion.⁴⁰

Although these experiments were well known by the time Julius was born, and though it was apparent that he was able to comprehend quite a lot, there was no point in teaching him sign language communication. On the contrary, the goal for Julius was that he would come to understand and remember that he was a chimpanzee and not a human. Of course, psychologically and commercially it may have been an intriguing idea to raise him the opposite way in order to see just how human-like he could possibly become. Such experiments had been carried out many times in the past. In 1931, the renowned American psychologist Winthrop Niles Kellogg adopted Gua, a seven-month-old chimpanzee, and raised him together with his own ten-month-old son, Donald—in principle providing both youngsters with an identical upbringing. The experiment was called off after only nine months due to Kellogg’s disappointment over the chimp’s lack of verbal development, but also because he and his wife had begun to realize the danger and unpredictability of certain situations for their human son. A more stalwart couple, Jane and Maurice Temerlin, raised the female chimpanzee Lucy in their home from 1964 until 1976, from the time the chimp was a single day old until she reached the age of twelve. She slept in a crib at their bedside, was fed human formula from a bottle and received care and bodily contact around the clock. At the age of one, she ate meals with the couple at the table, using silverware and a glass just like a human. She often accompanied her mother to work. She never got used to using the toilet, however, nor did she develop the taboo relationship that most humans have to their own feces. At the age of three, she was so difficult to have in the house that the couple was forced to create a separate room for her where she could play without destroying things while unattended. Still, the Termerlins continued their human childrearing. Lucy learned how to dress herself, though she preferred to dress up in other people’s clothes rather than her own. She also learned to handle a range of instruments and appliances, from keys and pencils to vacuum cleaners and lighters. She was trained in ASL, and the Temerlins were able to communicate with her in a meaningful way. Lucy loved leafing through newspapers with her own cup of coffee, alongside her parents in the morning. Her coffee was, of course, nothing but warm milk mixed with a teaspoon of coffee to give it color. At only three years of age, she tasted her first sip of alcohol when, by chance, she suddenly grabbed a whiskey glass from a guest who was visiting and chugged it down. When they later discovered Lucy’s penchant for boozing in the garden with rotten apples, her liberal foster parents decided it was time to allow her an indulgent drink every now and then. She was thereafter permitted to have a drink or two before dinner, a gin and tonic in the summer and a whiskey sour or Jack Daniels with 7-Up in the winter.⁴¹ Lucy relished those evenings curled up on the sofa with her parents, sipping her drink and flipping through magazines before dinnertime. When she reached puberty, they gave her a copy of Playgirl, which she seemed to enjoy very much. She taught herself to masturbate shamelessly, quite creatively, with the family vacuum cleaner.

For twelve years Lucy’s lived like this, but thereafter, things were no longer manageable. It became impossible to have her in the house. Although the chimpanzee is a human’s closest genetic relative, it is nonetheless an animal we have never been able to fully tame. Even a chimpanzee hand-raised among humans with familiar, close and emotional bonds will, at some point in time, transform from a tame and predictable animal to a dangerous one. To tame an animal, the species must be systematically bred with particular care to their unique abilities. Modern animal keepers have found it challenging enough to get chimpanzees to breed in captivity; they haven’t yet reached the conclusive ability of taming them. Most of the animals that humans have successfully tamed, such as dogs, sheep, goats, pigs, cows and horses, were domesticated over 6,000 years ago.⁴²

The Temerlins had put themselves—and Lucy—into an impossible bind. Maurice Temerlin was a psychology professor and the adoption had been part of a larger research project led by the psychologist, Bill Lemmon, in which different types of animals were raised among humans. But the experiment was poorly thought out, morally dubious and completely lacking in a long term plan for the next phase of Lucy’s life.⁴³ The couple didn’t want to euthanize her or send her to a zoo or research laboratory, and so the twelve-year-old chimpanzee accompanied researcher Janis Carter to a rehabilitation center for chimpanzees in the Gambia. Carter hoped to persuade Lucy to adapt to a life in the wild. But Lucy was incapable of interacting with other chimpanzees, for example, only becoming sexually aroused by humans. She displayed many of the classic signs of depression, refused to eat for long periods and constantly signed the ASL sign for “pain.” After many years of training and acclimation, she was nevertheless set free into the wild. Her skeleton was found two years later, missing its hands and with its head torn off from the rest of the body.⁴⁴

Julius was going to avoid this fate. He was not ever going to sit sipping a gin and tonic with a newspaper in one hand. He was to understand, at all times, his place as a chimpanzee. He was going to be returned to his community.

MOSEID IS PUNISHED

During the summer holiday of 1980, Julius accompanied the Glad family on vacation to Skjern Island outside of Mandal. He was allowed to roam freely around the island, though he never wandered far from Reidun’s sight. He preferred sitting on a lounge chair or holding her legs as she worked in the potato patch, playing in the grass with the boys, greeting the neighbor farmer and his sheep, going to the lighthouse in Ryvingen and taking boat trips to the southern rock island archipelagos. People were astonished to see a chimpanzee on a boat. It’s hard not to be smitten by a clothed chimp going fishing, and the regional newspaper, Fædrelandsvennen, picked up the story. On August 9, 1980, an article was included in the newspaper, written by journalist Trygve Bj. Klingsheim with accompanying photographs by Arild Jakobsen. This article was the first hint at the media storm that Julius would soon unleash. Klingsheim interviewed the four “foster parents,” Edvard and Marit Moseid and Billy and Reidun Glad, focusing, among other things, on how the two couples were going to miss him when he was finally returned to his community. The men acted tough and the women were honest.

“It will be a fantastic victory for me. That is when we will know that we were successful,” said Edvard Moseid.

“I feel confident that I will be emotionally strong enough to handle it. He is an animal,” said Billy Glad.

“I try not to think about it. No, I don’t think that I will ever be able to distance myself from him emotionally,” admitted Reidun Glad.⁴⁵

Edvard Moseid was often in touch with Elisabeth Nergaard from the TV station NRK, which had filmed several school programs at the zoo. Moseid realized the media potential for the story and told her about Julius. With her interest piqued, she decided to create a television program about the chimp. NRK traveled south with a camera crew to follow the unique, everyday life of Julius. They filmed his participation in the Moseid family chores and captured him on camera dangling from the vacuum handle and splashing in a bucket of suds. This made for good TV, even if it wasn’t exactly representative of everyday life in the Moseid home.

Marit Moseid studied during the day. The girls didn’t go to daycare but instead accompanied Julius each day to the zoo. This was as good a daycare as any for the girls, and for Julius, it was an essential reminder of his origins as well as his eventual destination. Julius loved the car ride from Vennesla to the zoo. He especially enjoyed holding onto the steering wheel and even managed to figure out that something or other had to be done with his right hand on the stick shift. Moseid had provided a hammock for Julius in his office, but he was allowed to run around as he wished. The girls often took him out around the park, and Edvard took him to see other animals whenever there was time. For the short period that he had been a part of the zoo’s chimpanzee community, Julius had only ever spent time in the indoor Tropical House. But in the summer, the chimpanzees were allowed to range freely across a hanging bridge of trees to a large, natural “Chimp Island” with pine trees and bilberry bushes. In his homemade human clothes, diapers and underwear, he crawled around with turtles and rabbits, and got to peer over at Chimp Island toward his parents and fellow species. Edvard noticed that Julius started to get anxious and afraid whenever they neared the island, sometimes putting his hands over Moseid’s eyes and grasping tightly onto his neck.⁴⁶ Julius’s reaction was worrisome. One day, one of the keepers ferried Julius on a small rowboat across the moat toward Chimp Island, while the other chimpanzees were kept inside. But he became so afraid that he wouldn’t let go of his keeper.

These distanced meetings with the other chimpanzees were intended to serve a dual purpose. Not only was Julius supposed to remember the other chimps, they also needed to remember him. Edvard Moseid often brought some of Julius’s diapers with him to the zoo in order to familiarize the community with the scent. Moseid would pass the diaper to Dennis through the fence, and Dennis would often sit solemnly sniffing his son’s feces before handing the diaper off to the other inquisitive chimps.

On Sunday, August 17, 1980, Edvard took Julius into the Tropical House to let the other chimps see him and smell his diaper. He intended to be quick about it because his daughters were waiting in the car. His daughters had asked him to go into the kitchen next to the chimpanzees and get them some fruit. He decided to use the opportunity to display Julius to the other chimps for a moment.

Edvard was behind the public viewing area, in the private sleeping quarters designated for the chimpanzees. The cages were open and he squatted down holding Julius toward the bars so the chimpanzees could see and smell him. Meanwhile, zookeeper Åse Gunn Mosvold was at work in the neighboring kitchen. Several of the chimpanzees had gathered near the bars of the cage. The alpha male Dennis was still outside in the common enclosure, but he suddenly stormed in, visibly agitated. He darted straight over to Moseid, grabbed hold of Julius through the bars, yanked him out of Moseid’s arms and pulled him toward the bars. Julius was too big to fit through the bars and so was being squeezed forcefully up against them. Dennis was set to kill his son until Edvard leaned inside the cage, and punched Dennis in the head with all his might. Dennis released Julius and he fell to the floor. In return, however, Dennis grabbed Moseid’s arm and now held it in a tight grip. “Get Julius! Get Julius!” Moseid screamed. Mosvold ran over to scoop up the terrified chimpanzee. Julius was safe, but now Dennis was refusing to release Moseid’s arm. Mosvold tried desperately to loosen his grip on Edvard, kicking the bars and Dennis’s hand. Edvard tried to hit Dennis with his free arm, but Dennis wouldn’t let go. Edvard was afraid the chimpanzee would tear his arm off, something he was physically capable of doing, but Dennis seemed to be most interested in his hand. Edvard clenched his fist as hard as he could, but it wasn’t difficult for Dennis to pry open the fist, finger by finger. Dennis took his time, like a torturer who knows that the waiting and fearful anticipation are more traumatic for the victim than any actual pain. The girls meanwhile were waiting outside in the car, wondering what could be taking their father so long. After Dennis had pried Edvard’s index finger open, he looked at it before sticking it into his mouth and biting it clean off with his razor sharp canine teeth. Edvard howled in shock and pain, Dennis released his hold, and both Moseid and Mosvold fell over backward onto the floor.⁴⁷

In the same way that Dennis, or possibly one of the other chimps, had bitten off one of Julius’s fingers earlier that year, Dennis had punished and humiliated Edvard according to chimpanzee etiquette, by biting off a finger. Mosvold saw the bone protruding straight out of Moseid’s skin. Edvard rushed around madly, looking for a piece of paper towel to wrap around his hand. Mosvold insisted that someone drive him to the hospital immediately, but Moseid refused, claiming it would be better to first drop his daughters off at their grandparents’ house before going to the doctor. Once in his car, however, the blood drained from his face and he felt dizzy. He finally gave in and allowed someone to drive him to the West Agder Central Hospital.

Julius and Edvard had each lost part of a finger. Like an ironic version of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, they could now point at one another with their bitten-off fingertips. They were now marked for life and forever bound together.