Notes from the Pens

Nature & Nurture: Beauty and Strength

2022-07-18T11:10:00.006-07:00

My mother often asks me: "Has Bow said anything clever lately?" She is used to the frequent anecdotes from an earlier era, when Bow had just had his breakthrough, and there were daily stories of something new and unexpected that he had said.

As Bow arrived in his late teens, stories like that became few and far between, and now that Bow is in his twenties, he has become quite laconic. But today was an exception.

At lunch, a Jordan Peterson conversation with Frans de Waal popped up on my feed. I guess YouTube knew I would be interested. They were discussing the nature/nurture contribution to gender differences as well as what it takes to socialize males to show deference to females.

Bow, sated from his main course, made occasional grumbling agreement sounds to concur with what Peterson and de Waal were saying. From his own experience, he knew girls are less into rough and tumble play than boys are. After all, he'd had to go easy on his older sister, Sword, to get her to play with him at all.

The discussion between Peterson and de Waal, which centered on the statistical backdrop to gender stereotypes, reminded me of the playful interactions between Sword and Bow depicted in the video clip embedded above. Bow, too, enjoyed the nostalgic view of days gone by. He watched the clip twice. Then he took my hand and spelled:

"חרב יפה. זה טוב. רק קשת חזק."

"Sword is beautiful. That is good. Only Bow is strong."

So now I have another anecdote to share with my mother when we talk on the phone tomorrow.

Bow Turns Twenty

2022-02-17T08:17:00.005-08:00

Yesterday, Bow turned twenty. We celebrated with a cake which Bow's grandmother bought, a card from Bow's friend Charla, and a gift from me: a back pack stuffed toy.

Bow always gets excited every time the birthday song is sung, whether in Hebrew or English. He loves the can of Crush that he is served with his birthday cheesecake. He chose the plain cheesecake to eat this time. He had great fun opening his birthday card. The birthday backpack was also a big hit!

He took it with him to bed when the day was over.

But he also enjoyed trying it on.

In fact, he tried it on in more than one way.

Bow used to have big parties attended by many guests. But the cozy, snug and private parties are the safest during a pandemic. And Bow still knows that many people all over the world are wishing him well on his birthday.

For now, this is good enough, and we are happy.

Low Tech Communication Aids

2021-06-10T09:26:00.004-07:00

The latest development on my YouTube channel is Memberships. In order to support my research, you can join the channel as a Donor, a Patron or a Benefactor. Here is a link:

https://www.youtube.com/c/AyaKatz/membership

Among the perks available to members are previews of videos about Bow's writing, literacy and other intellectual pursuits at a time when these are not yet available to the general public. Since revenue from viral videos comes primarily from people who are not subscribed to my channel and could not care less about ape language research, this seems like a fair allocation of our resources. The general public gets to view grooming videos right away, but more recent advances in ape language studies are shared first and foremost with our Donors, Patrons and Benefactors.

Since the inception of Project Bow, I have found that low tech methods work better and are more cost effective when working with a strong but intellectual chimpanzee such as Bow. A talking machine was quickly replaced by laminated menus, self-flushing toilet by a plastic potty chair and a touch screen computer by an old fashioned notebook and pen.

The problem that the touch screen computer was meant to solve was Bow's reliance on caretakers' hands to point at letters on the glass. This is a problem of proof, not of communication. It looks to outsiders as if Bow is being manipulated by his interlocutors to point at the letters. But it certainly does not look to us that way, and it does not explain why Bow can tell us things we did not know and share information available only to him. So it was suggested that the intercession of a non-manipulable computer could solve this PR problem for us.

In order to motivate Bow to use a computer to communicate, certain ape language researchers suggested pairing the touch screen computer with a food dispenser, so that Bow would essentially be typing for a food reward. "Machines can't be manipulated, so he would have to say what the machine wanted him to say," I was told.

I don't want Bow to have to say anything. I want him to be able to say what he wants to say. Here is an example of something ordinary, but totally unexpected, that Bow recently said to his caretaker while I was away: "Go sit outside." She was confused, "You want me to sit outside? How do you mean, like on the porch?" He answered: "Yes."

There is nothing extraordinary about this exchange, but it could not have happened with a touch screen computer tied to a food dispenser. Bow could not tell the dispenser anything. He would be totally subject to its mechanical limitations.

Recently, Bow and I watched a video of an Israeli young man who lost his voice while serving in the army. Bow identified with the voiceless man. He watched as the young man talked to a reporter by writing in an ordinary old fashioned notebook by putting pen to paper. "You could do that, too," I told Bow. "You could talk to people by writing in a notebook."

Bow was moved to try. His attempt looks like letters, though hard to tell what he wanted to say. You can contrast his attempt to write letters with his drawing on this other page in the same notebook, in which a month earlier he had tried to draw a face. (The face Bow drew is only in black ink. The other bigger face in blue was one I tried to draw.)

If you want to see the videos of Bow writing and drawing, you can join as a member of my channel. Eventually, these videos will all be released to the public, but you will see them in advance, and you can know that you helped finance my research.

Thank you!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMFOFKeAjwLWAlNrCvQVxvQ

Should We Have to Give Up Freedom For Companionship?

2021-01-27T09:30:00.005-08:00

Twenty twenty was the year of social isolation. I skipped that year in posting to this blog. But Bow and I continued our life in social isolation as if nothing remarkable had happened. Social isolation by now had become our way of life. We were resigned to it. We did not really understand why so many people found it unbearable.

Man is a social animal. Chimpanzees are social animals. Everybody craves companionship and interaction. The regular people flocked to Zoom, making it impossible for Julia and me to livestream there, so we had to turn to a new service: StreamYard.

The Bow fans on my successful YouTube channel berated me for forcing them to watch painting videos, because all they wanted to do was watch Bow groom me. Since the algorithm also punished me for this by reducing our income, I had to find a way to separate painting from grooming.

So now, if you want to watch a grooming video, you can find it on my main channel.

And if you want to watch a painting video, it can be found on my secondary channel.

But what about language? What about Bow's use of words? Why wasn't I mentioning that, writing about it or even publishing? Had Bow stopped using words to communicate?

No, not exactly, but Bow is a grown chimpanzee man now, and grown men very rarely communicate to their mothers about what it is they are thinking about. So we talked about what we would have for breakfast, lunch and dinner, of course. And we talked about if we were going outside or we needed a blanket. But nothing very memorable was said, and I did not feel the need to record any of that.

And then today Bow suddenly spoke up again. It was a snowy day.

After breakfast, I was watching a Yaron Brook video in which he compared Ayn Rand's take on romantic love with the opinions of Jordan Peterson. Bow is usually not interested in videos with talking heads about abstract topics.

I had not gotten very far into the video. Yaron was talking about how happiness and not reproduction is the real goal of romantic love. Bow summoned me to his side of the pen. He told me the he wanted me to let him look at the guy. I was confused: Which guy? It turned out he wanted me to bring the iPhone in so he could listen to Yaron Brook and watch the video. But he had not listened to much, when he started to get agitated, and he took my hand and spelled out: תני לי דודה לאהוב "Give me a lady to love."

I asked him: "Do you want her to come to you? Or do you want to go to her?"

He said: שתבוא אלי "Come to me."

So here is the problem: If Bow were to go to the lady chimp, he could never return. Why on earth should his need for companionship force him to give up his freedom?

In today's age of social isolation, many people are being told that they are allowed to mingle with people from the same household, but they should not meet with strangers. Maybe now the public will understand what it is like to trapped in a holding cell "for your own kind."

Of course, Bow should be allowed to meet with other chimps and to form relationships. But nobody wants to be trapped in a concentration camp, a reservation or an institution "for their own kind." Children want to meet other children, but they also want to be able to go home to their parents, who are not their own age. Elders may enjoy the companionship of other people their age, but they do not want to be told they cannot meet with their grandchildren. People in one neighborhood want to visit friends in another neighborhood and return home at the end of the day.

If the price for companionship were never being able to leave a community, would you not prefer social isolation, too? Stone walls do not a prison make. Not being able to control movements into your own space is what makes it a prison.

Bow and Art

2019-11-10T08:25:00.000-08:00

Last year, I got involved in Inktober, a month-long, non-competitive art event open to anyone. During Inktober, people use ink to create a sketch from a verbal prompt consisting of a single word. Each day in October we get a new prompt, and we have to complete a sketch that day. My favorite drawing that came out of Inktober 2018 is a portrait of baby Bow.

Unfortunately, I got sick that year and was not able to complete Inktober. This year I was finally able to do one drawing each day in October, and many of my drawings have been of Bow.

While I drew on my own, I also encouraged Bow to draw, too. He didn't always want to, and when he did he would not tell me what he was drawing. By looking at older art from other family members, including myself as a child and Sword in her preschool years, I have noticed a distinct difference between the sorts of art that Bow makes and the art of children I have known. Human children do not strive for realism early on, but they do make representational art that is largely symbolic. Body parts are given symbolic representation and part/whole relations are very important. When Bow draws, he may be representing things, but not so much by symbolism, and quite possibly by a direct attempt at realism.The video linked below demonstrates more fully what I mean.

Here is a picture of the etching that we discovered on the floor of the inner pen in 2008. It had not been there before.

Do you see a head of an ape when you look at it? Do you think this is an artwork by Bow?

RELATED

http://notesfromthepens.blogspot.com/2013/07/interpreting-inkblots-or-looking-at-art.html

http://notesfromthepens.blogspot.com/2014/06/where-is-sunshine.html

Grooming Videos Save the Day

2018-12-29T12:11:00.002-08:00

You may have noticed that I have been writing in my blog here less and posting more and more videos on YouTube. There's a very simple reason for that: YouTube pays. This blog does not. But there are some things that you can say in a blog post that are harder to say in a video. I am primarily a writer, not a performer. So I will continue to blog, albeit not as often.

After I came home from my brief illness, I kept posting more and more videos on my main YouTube channel, and within a month, as I recovered my strength and stamina, I also regained my YouTube income. Here is the video I posted at the time I learned that monetization had been restored.

In February of 2018, with the advent of the new YouTube rules, I lost my monetization, because I did not have a thousand subscribers. I had many more than the required views and minutes watched, but I had not asked people to subscribe. I had no interest in my viewers, was not counting how many there were, and I was perfectly happy with the extra pocket money I was earning to pay for Bow's bananas. But when they took all that away, I was really put out. I did not understand why I needed subscribers, when subscribers did not pay a subscription fee, and people can see exactly the same videos when they do not subscribe. But if that is what YouTube wanted, I figured I could probably get most of the people who were already watching to subscribe, if I asked them nicely. They would be doing it as a favor to me, because it's not as if they would be cut off from the videos if they didn't subscribe. This is why it felt like a slightly non-commercial transaction between me and my viewers. They were doing me a favor when they subscribed, because this was information they were handing over to Google, when they could just as easily watch incognito. For all I know, some of my most ardent viewers may still be unsubscribed.

After nine months of asking people to subscribe, I gained the required one thousand subscribers and got my monetization back. Now my channel is bringing in about fifteen times what it had brought in before. And right now, as I write this blog post, I have 4,582 subscribers. I got 3,126 of them in the last 28 days. Most of these subscribers like to watch "grooming videos". Most of them will never read a novel by me, much less a scientific article about ape language studies. For them, it is all just stimulus and response, grooming and ASMR. But luckily for me, I believe in the free market, and I feel no compunction about exploiting their interests, so that I can be free to pursue mine.

Thanks to my new subscribers, I was able to get Bow a new hammock and a new sleeping bag for Christmas, not to speak of a number of other items for Leo, Summer and the cockatiels.

Things are looking up. Julia Hanna and I have expanded our interview show to include important researchers, scientists and academics. We had a whole series with Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh.

Last night, we interviewed a linguist and author in Iran.

I feel very lucky to have as much freedom as I do to live as I want, despite the fact that many liberties have already disappeared from the American way of life. Though I do not understand YouTube or the reasons for its rules, I am happy right now with the deal they have offered me. In the coming year, I plan to continue working with Bow, while posting more and more interviews with leading thinkers, writers, scientists and academics.

As for Bow, he is always happy as long as there is someone there to read him a story.

Bow has Personality!

2018-11-01T06:39:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was Halloween. Bow and I celebrated in our own way. You can watch our Halloween special right here.

Watching this video, you might be asking yourself: is this really a chimpanzee who can spell out words? Is he really sixteen going on seventeen? Is he really an intelligent being? There are those who when they see too much playfulness or behavior that in a human we might associate with a lower IQ become even more skeptical about my claims about Bow's literacy.

However, language ability does not necessarily imply overall high IQ in humans. Literacy can also exist in the form of hyperlexia, implying excellence in decoding letters into sounds and patterns into words, without a high level of comprehension. Many humans I know who are perfectly normal use their language skills just to express their feelings or interact socially with others, without ever having to encode new information. They keep talking and talking, but all they are really communicating with all that hot air is how they feel at the moment or how they want to relate to another person. They can go their whole lives without expressing an original thought or comprehending an original thought expressed by someone else. That is all normal behavior for humans, and chimpanzees like Bow are not all that different.

Recently I was sick and was away from Bow for two days. He was in good hands, and people were taking care of him in my absence. When I got back, he was very gentle with me, grooming. He did not say anything at all about my illness. But one time, totally spontaneously, after a couple of days of my being back, he took my hand and spelled: שתי דודות שמרו עלי "Two ladies watched over me."

I think he just wanted me to know he had been well taken care of in my absence. There is nothing super deep about that, but it did touch my heart.

This morning, I noticed Bow had not yet used the potty. So I asked him if he needed to pee.

?אתה צריך לעשות פיפי

His answer tickled me: רק קצת "Just a little."

This is not a deep interspecies communication moment. But that is how Bow uses language to express his personality. He is not a needy person. He only needs to pee "just a little."

Bow Can Talk

2018-08-16T08:59:00.001-07:00

Bow prefers carbs

I haven't been blogging as much lately. Sometimes it seems as if everything that could possibly be said has already been said. I don't want to repeat myself. But then something happens that opens up a whole new reserve of the as-yet-unsaid. This morning I got a comment on one of my videos that did just that. "If only Bow could talk, I wonder what he would say." It was an innocent comment made on one of my more popular grooming videos. Ten thousand three hundred and twenty-four views. But none of them know Bow can talk.

I wanted to shout out the truth. But instead I had to be polite. So I answered: "Bow does talk. He spells out words. You should definitely check out the information about this in the Project Bow DVD playlist. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvKl93VPL_oNJtFvdQcpSC3WEy4bDCCpZ

You might also want to subscribe to my blog. http://notesfromthepens.blogspot.com/."

Project Bow was an ape language research project that I began in 2002. In 2007, when Bow was five years old, we had our big breakthrough. Bow began to spell out words to express what he wanted and what he was thinking. The Project Bow DVD playlist chronicles all of that. It takes about two hours to sit through it, but if you want to know about Bow's history and his language ability, then it is well worth your while. Although those of us working directly with Bow knew that he was spelling and expressing himself -- in both Hebrew and English -- we could not prove it to the satisfaction of the scientific community. If you would like to understand why, here is an article you can read.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267568830_Standards_of_Proof_in_Ape_Language_Studies_The_Case_of_Bow_and_Literacy

As my funding was cut, I remained with Bow twelve hours a day, but I could not afford interns and caretakers. In some ways, the past ten years have been very difficult. It's not because of Bow. Bow is a sweetheart. But just not having the help I needed meant that I often had to miss some of my daughter's functions at school and reduce my social interactions with other people. Bow and I became increasingly isolated.

I did have a chimp sitter named Lawrence for most of those years. Bow spelled in English to tell Lawrence what he wanted. He spelled in Hebrew to communicate with me. During those first years, Bow would tell me a lot of things. He gossiped about the neighbors. He made up tall tales. But then gradually, as he went through puberty, he became less talkative. He was more silent and subdued. He still told me what he wanted to eat and when he wanted his blanket and made an occasional sardonic comment about the mutability of things ("everyone dies"), but mostly he kept his thoughts to himself.

Part of it was just our extreme isolation. Nothing new ever seemed to happen, and with nothing to talk about, there was a lot more silence. Then one day, about a year ago, Lawrence had to move. His wife had died, and he was starting a new family, and he let me know he could no longer sit with Bow. So that made things even harder. For a whole year, I went without a sitter, only going out at night when Bow was asleep. I missed my daughter's move-in day to college, and recently I missed one of her choir concerts, because it was held during the day. Thankfully for technology, Bow and I were able to attend the concert via a livestream on my iPhone.

And then this summer my mother, who lives in a different state, said she was feeling weak and asked me to come visit her. At first I did not know what to do. In this current age of Animal Rights activists, and with Jane Goodall getting US Fish &Wildlife to declare domesticated chimpanzees an endangered species, thereby activating the Endangered Species Act to allow strangers to bring lawsuits against chimp owners, I knew I could not just advertise for a chimp sitter and take a complete stranger into my home. A friend of mine who had had a stranger volunteer to help her has gotten into all sorts of trouble with PETA, because the volunteer was a mole. I would rather stay put than risk putting myself and Bow in that position.

And so I spoke on the phone several times about taking a risk on a new caretaker, and I guess that Bow must have overheard me, and he must have been concerned about that risk.

Finally, I dared to ask a friend of Bow's who has been visiting with him once a week through the grid if she would be willing to train to sit for Bow. Bow liked her, and she liked Bow, and she does not believe in Animal Rights, only Animal Welfare, so she was a very good fit. Still, it was a risk I was taking. I must have reiterated that on the phone talking to my friends in English. Bow overheard.

The thing about Bow is he files everything away in his mind, and he never forgets. He may not say much, but he knows what he hears.

The new chimp sitter is named Jessica. Bow loves her. I trained her for a week. At first she went in for only an hour. Then two hours. Then three. Until we worked up to a whole day. Bow was well behaved with her, but at first he was reluctant to speak to her. She had to coax him to spell to her. But eventually, he told her what he wanted to eat, and when he wanted to go outside, and other very mundane things. And also, he spelled "she". "What do you mean Bow?" Jessica asked him. Bow did not answer. But later when I asked him what he had meant by repeatedly spelling "she", he answered in Hebrew that he had meant אמא -- "Mommy."

So the day came when I had to leave for my mother's house. Bow knew I'd be gone for a week, and he seemed okay with it. Jessica kept in text and telephone contact with me, and Bow and I Facetimed a couple of times during the visit. Bow was doing well. He was asking for what he wanted. But every once in a while, for no particular reason, he spelled "risk." "What do you mean by risk, Bow?" Jessica would ask. But Bow never explained. He would just go back to his usual routine, only to spell "risk" again the next day.

A text exchange between me and Jessica

Bow liked Jessica a lot. He wanted to be on good terms with her. He used the potty regularly. and he even took the trouble to inform her when he had peed when she was out of the room. (He never bothers to tell me!) But he was also concerned about "risk". He understood that he and I were taking a risk by trusting Jessica. But he did not really know how to explain it to her. So he just kept spelling risk.

And that problem he had spelling "peed" correctly? That's a perfectly normal language phenomenon for someone who is bilingual. When he refers to that in Hebrew, he says פיפי. In English, that would transliterate to /pipi/. So naturally, he thought "I pid" would be a good way to spell "I peed." This is not proof that Bow can't spell, so much as that he has language, and he uses it dynamically.

If Bow could talk, what would he say? Well, he would talk about "risk" and "peeing". Like anyone, Bow has a wide range of things to talk about. Some subjects are mundane and others are very abstract.

Bow and Jessica

My mother turned out to be fine, and we had a nice visit. And now that I am back, Bow is a little more talkative. It helps to mix things up sometimes. You don't want to get stuck in a rut!

To support Project Bow, buy this book

Bow and Conservation

2018-07-16T14:59:00.000-07:00

Bow is an avid reader of the Missouri Conservationist.

He enjoys leafing through the entire magazine, but this time, he indicated clearly that his favorite part was a photo of a little girl who looked a little like Ping in Ping & the Snirkelly People and of a Monarch butterfly right in front of her face.

In the little yellow rectangle, an entire conservation strategy is outlined to help preserve the Monarch butterfly.

Why such an "aggressive goal"? And what do Monarchs have to do with pollination?

A Monarch caterpillar on my transplanted common milkweed

My own experience with the Monarch caterpillars this season have been a little disappointing. I did see several different caterpillars in different stages of their growth. But what I never got to see is any of those caterpillars turning into a chrysalis. And having missed that stage, I never saw a Monarch butterfly emerge.

As the caterpillars proceeded with their work and the purple milkweed flowers died and the leaves were left full of holes, I began to wonder about the great effort to reestablish milkweed so as to help the Monarch butterfly, and the total disregard for the wellbeing of the milkweed plant itself.

Purple milkweed does not seem to produce very many seed pods. Last year mine produced no seed pods at all because somebody -- I don't know who -- ate all the flowers long before anything interesting could happen. This year, a single flower survived long enough to start growing one tiny seed pod.

But the seed pod did not arrive at maturity, because ants attacked it.

Both my milkweed and my Monarchs seem to be productive in the early stages of the procreative process -- flowers, caterpillars -- but not so productive in the later stages -- seed pod, chrysalis. Is this what is happening worldwide? Maybe not.

I have been following the blog of Anurag Agrawal, and he recently a posted an article of his about the decline of the Monarch population that came out in Science. You can look at the article here:

http://www.eeb.cornell.edu/agrawal/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/agrawal-and-inamine-2018-science.pdf

"Mechanisms behind the Monarch's Decline" refers to two independent sources of information about the Monarch population in North America.

One is a census of Monarchs that overwinter in Mexico.

http://www.wwf.org.mx/?uNewsID=324152

And the other is the statistics kept by the North American Butterfly Association.

What Agrawal has found is that there is a mismatch between these two ways of counting total butterflies. Sometimes there is a resurgence of Monarchs in Canada and the United States, but by the time they get down to their over-wintering site in Mexico, the population is greatly reduced.

Loss of habitat for a migratory butterfly can happen anywhere along its migration. But Agrawal has stated that it is the migration, not the butterfly, that is currently endangered. Planting more milkweed in the United States and Canada is not going to help, if the forests in Mexico are being cut down. On the other hand, there are Monarchs in warm places like parts of California that have a more local migration, and they are fine. And there are Monarchs in Mexico that seem to be active all year round, without overwintering anywhere. Does the Monarch butterfly need our intervention on its behalf? And if so, why?

Tussock Moth Milkweed Caterpillar

It's not because they are pollinators. They're not. It is not for the sake of fruit orchards. It is not because of any unique contribution that the Monarch makes to our ecology that some other butterfly does not. It's because, for some reason, the Monarch has great PR, and there are people lobbying on its behalf.

Would anybody care about milkweed if not for Monarchs? There are other caterpillars that depend on milkweed, like the tussock moth
caterpillar, but nobody seems to care much about them. So why the Monarch and why are state and Federal governments intervening on its behalf at taxpayer expense?

Ever since I first read Agrawal's book, Monarchs andMilkweed, I have been noticing some of the less popular milkweed eating insects.

Red Milkweed Beetle (Tetraopes Tetropthalmus)

The red milkweed beetle feeding on a defunct purple milkweed seed pod is so cute. Why doesn't it have a lobbyist in Washington?

Or how about the seed eating milkweed bugs? Why aren't there entire conservation movements built around them?

Milkweed Bug on Butterfly Milkweed

If we look at all this from the point of view of the milkweed plants, their survival strategy seems to be something like this:

Make yourself inedible by emitting a poison and a nasty latex.
Some bright insects will breach your defenses and make you their sole source of food in order to thwart predators.
When farmers start to eradicate you, because you are not good for cattle to feed on, get one of the insects that has managed to breach your defenses and can eat only you to be the poster child for pollinators, even though it's actually not a pollinator.
Get civic organizations to plant you profusely and governments to assure you acres and acres of protected growth.
If the poster child butterfly is still being decimated by its cross country migration, just use this to get even more protection for the propagation of yourself.
If, as a result of being artificially boosted, you lose the ability to propagate naturally through the spread of seeds from seed pods, keep yourself procreating artificially as a domesticated plant.

Two identical butterflies on butterfly milkweed

The truth is that in this age of huge human populations, only those beings protected by us get to thrive. Domestication has a bad name, but if you insist that one plant -- rather than another-- has the right to exist, and that one species, rather than another, will be protected in a given environment, then you are in fact domesticating those species that you protect. Once natural selection ceases to be the main factor in their future adaptations, you will have to act as a cultivator to keep them alive. And when you do that, you are not advocating natural balance. You will tend to create, instead, a sharp drop in diversity. Monocultures are what humans are famous for.

I love the many species of milkweed that I find growing wild on my land, and the many and varied butterflies that feed on their nectar delight me. But I would hate to think that these are not wildflowers at all, but part of a widespread plot to keep some species alive at taxpayer expense, while others die out.

Why does this matter to me? Because current efforts are afoot to end all breeding of chimpanzees in the United States. This is being done in the name of conservation. It's being done, because conservationists want to maintain only wild chimpanzees, and to eradicate all chimpanzees which have been domesticated.

But wild chimpanzees in Africa will not remain wild if they are protected. Once their natural predators are eliminated and their existence assured, they will change their ways of being. And domesticated chimpanzees here in the US, which are privately owned, will never have a chance to live free, outside of zoos and sanctuaries. Generations of Americans will grow up without the opportunity to meet a chimpanzee in a safe and mutually respectful environment.

When Sword Met Bow

Meeting the Monarch Caterpillar

2018-06-04T07:40:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a red letter day. I finally saw a monarch caterpillar with my very own eyes. My iPhone summarized the day in a short video.

For the majority of my YouTube following, it is the cozy moments with Bow that matter the most. Grooming together out in the sun is certainly a pleasant experience.

But because that is an everyday occurrence for me, I suppose I underplay it, whereas it is those rare glimpses of a butterfly or a moth that have me all a-flutter. For instance, on June 2nd, I spotted what seemed like a leaf, but it was moving in a way that made it seem alive

I drew closer, and it turned out to be a very damaged polyphemus moth.

It was so fragile, so damaged and yet so beautiful!

So I posted the video on YouTube, because I thought it was exciting and poignant and rare, and I got eight views. Eight views! But my last grooming video got over a thousand views. And for a moment I kind of felt as if my viewers were shallow. But then I realized: I'm lucky to have a personal relationship with Bow, and so I take it for granted. And there are so many people out there who are starving for contact with nonhuman apes. So it makes sense that for them Bow grooming me is the rare and wonderful thing. And I do value the contact with Bow, too. It's just that I am also amazed by the wildlife all around me. That's another gift that Project Bow has given me. I never saw so many butterflies until I was trapped here, with no hope of escape, just the way Bow is. It's when you can't go anywhere else that the true story all around you starts to unfold.

And then there is the saga of the milkweed plants and the monarch butterflies. Last year I watched one milkweed plant as it went from closed buds to full bloom, and the next day it was gone. It took so very long to bloom, but I never saw a butterfly on it. Not once! And it was probably a deer that ate it.

This year, everything has happened much faster. The first floret opened on June 2nd, and I almost did not notice it, because it was hidden under a leaf.

That evening there was a violent rainstorm. I went out the next morning to look at the purple milkweed, not knowing what I would find. And there it was!

They're supposed to be eating the leaves, not the flowers. But I would recognize it anywhere, even though I had never seen one in person before. It was a monarch caterpillar! A creature out of mythic past -- from a book I had read in first grade, when my reading ability exceeded my grasp of English!

Earlier this year I rediscovered the book, The Travels of Monarch X, and I read it to Bow.

Bow wasn't very interested, but that's okay, because when I first read that book, I wasn't very interested, either. I wanted to grow up to be a giant gorilla, and I didn't care much about invertebrates. The story of how I learned English by total immersion in first grade is fictionalized in my children's book, Ping and the Snirkelly People. It is coming out at the end of the month on Audible, read by Evelyn Adams.

Order it now

Anyway, I was so excited yesterday to see my first monarch caterpillar that I took many photos of it.

But by the time I got back to the purple milkweed patch that afternoon, the caterpillar was long gone. I did see a beautiful eastern tailed-blue on the half open blossoms of another of the purple milkweed plants.

I incorporated both the butterfly and the caterpillar in a video that featured plenty of grooming, because you have to give the people what they want.

It's not that I don't enjoy being groomed, mind you. It always feels nice.

It's just that there are also other pleasures in life. And I enjoy sharing those as well.

The Merry Month of May

2018-05-30T07:02:00.000-07:00

May has been merry. I can't point to any big achievements, but things are moving in a good direction, and we are gaining momentum slowly.

As the weather grew warmer, Bow and I spent more and more time out of doors.

More time outdoors meant more grooming and more mowing the lawn.

While mowing the lawn, I discover butterflies hidden in the grass.

Other things come to my attention, like the common milkweed that I found growing in the lawn.

There were three such plants, and on the day the mowers came, I was going to ask them to transplant them to the flower garden by the lagoon. But when the mowers came, two of the plants were gone, roots and all! At first I was a little paranoid. Had someone followed me and stolen my milkweed before I had a chance to transplant it myself? But my gardener explained to me that it was probably an inside job, performed by moles who ate the milkweed root first, starting deep in the ground and working their way up to the leaves. Only the smallest milkweed plant remained, and after it was transplanted, it wilted and fainted all the way to ground.

The prognosis did not loo good, but I kept watering it. Meanwhile, I discovered a purple milkweed patch growing by some dogbane in the pasture.

This will be a great way to compare the growth and habits of dogbane and milkweed, I thought. But it wasn't only the plants that were starting to propagate. On Mother's Day, I discovered a new nest.

These were not robins' eggs, like the one I had seen in years past. These were brown and white, marbled.

I was looking forward to watching them hatch and seeing what sorts of birds they turned out to be, but the next day, the nest was empty. Is there somebody following me around and taking whatever I find? I wondered. But probably not. Probably it is just part of the grand scheme of things, where not every living being that sprouts or is conceived gets to make it past the very earliest stages. Being culled out is part of the system. Redundancy and wasted life are part of the grand design. There are so many, because not all are expected to make it. And still, despite it all, some do survive! I am glad of that.

I was very grateful to have Sword home for Mother's Day, and Bow enjoyed the gifts she brought, too.

How they both have grown! Soon a new Audible and Kindle version of When Sword Met Bow will be coming out, read by Kelly Clear. My time for raising babies is done, but this book can help the families that are just starting out to introduce a new baby to older siblings. .

When Sword Met Bow -- Order Here

My other children's book, Ping and the Snirkelly People will also soon be out, read by Evelyn Adams. It describes the process of acquiring a second language by total immersion.

Ping and the Snirkelly People -- Order Here

However, on most days right here in and around the pens, life unfolds more like my third children's book, In Case There's a Fox. Through daily walks I encounter various animals, and they don't always tell me what they are up to. I can ask the rabbits to let me now what the turtles are doing, but until I look down and notice the turtles, the rabbits will keep mum.

On May 15, I spotted a couple of rabbits behind the garage and moved in closer to take a look.

As I drew closer, one of the rabbits ran away, but I kept my focus on the other rabbit, still oblivious of the indistinct rock-like thing in the grass by the fence.

Would you believe that, even at this distance, I was so focused on the rabbit that I had no ideas there were turtles in the picture? The rabbit stood very still. I wonder what it was thinking. I'm guessing it knew all about the turtles in plain sight.

I kept coming in closer to get a better look at the rabbit, and it kept holding its ground, until the moment when it ran off. Then I noticed there were two turtles at my feet!

I've never seen anything quite like it. But it's not going into any children's book.

My friend, Pam Keyes. who is an expert on turtles, told me that the female of the pair is at least sixty years old. Male turtles prefer older females to mate with, because their offspring have a better chance to survive. We recognize this particular female by the BB gun hole in her shell.. I have decided to call her Beebee.

Later that day, I saw Beebee just outside the fence. I thought maybe she was scouting locations to lay her eggs. But it was a bit early for that yet.

The sagas of box turtles in love and rabbits keeping their secrets are mostly for my own amusement. For the regular viewers of my channel, Bow is the only star attraction. Our most popular video for this month was the one from May 18 of Bow grooming me, but stopping short of picking my nose, when I asked.

In the Missouri Ozarks, May is part of the rainy season. It rains day after day sometimes, and the lush vegetation is richer for it. It's not such a bad way of life. But Bow prefers that it never rain, so he can go sunbathing in the outer pen. Lately, though, he has been taking the weather mostly in his stride.

For several days it rained, with brief periods of respite in between The video above is from May 19, when Bow went out between rainstorms and displayed at the wind -- without setting foot on the wet floor of the pen! After the rain, there was a bit of flooding, and small rivulets of water crossed the internal road on my property to get to the other side.

Beebee the turtle found a conveniently wet spot to dig a nest for her eggs. And the armadillos came out to play. There were so many bugs for them to feast on!

Although I wanted to immediately sit down and to report on Beebee the box turtle, seeing all those armadillos that very same day over and over again kept me distracted.

But the armadillos disappeared, after putting in a full day of appearance on the May 21st, and by Memorial Day they were long forgotten. We did have a nice encounter with several butterflies, instead.

The best part of May is hanging out in the great outdoors. And Bow, more than anyone else, knows how to hang out. He has it mastered!

The End of April

2018-04-30T19:20:00.001-07:00

Intruders on the Property

2018-04-13T09:06:00.001-07:00

On April 11, Bow enjoyed the nice weather. He went outside and gave his swing in the outer pen some use.

As the grass has started to grow, I was also out there mowing with my trusty reel mower.

After I finish mowing, the grass does not seem particularly well mown to the average person, but believe me, if I did not mow, it would get impossibly unmanageable.

After mowing, I relaxed a little by the pen, too. And then it was time for lunch. After lunch, I usually take a walk. But as I went out the door, I noticed that we had intruders on the property.

A big red truck was blocking my driveway in as spot I never even allow honored guests to occupy. Its motor was running, and it was very loud, but there was no one in the vehicle. I went all round the truck, trying to figure out why it was there, and where the people were who came in it.

Eventually I located them by the power pole, where they were attempting -- unsuccessfully, I might add -- to change the meter.

The process too a very long time, and we could hear Bow inside vocalizing in frustration. When I checked later, I saw that he had made a mess. However, at the time I felt it was best for me to stand guard over the intruders and to see them safely off when they were down.

I was polite, but I did let them know that the next time they need to work on my property, they should notify me that they are coming. This is, after all, a rural property. I could have had a guard dog loose or I could have been engaged in target practice, and there are any number of hazardous activities they might have stumbled upon that would have been dangerous to them. They can't just assume that it is all right to come here without first giving notice.

I am grateful for the electricity, and I understand that the power company needs access to the meter, but I think there is still some expectation of privacy even when there is an electric pole on my property. If I ever built that island for Bow, I would need to know that power company people would not wander onto the property without permission. Bow is very good natured, but he wants to know who is coming over and when.

Things that Happened Around Easter

2018-04-09T08:36:00.001-07:00

The cockatiel eggs did not hatch. One of them even broke, and it did not look as if it had been fertilized. Nevertheless, there were plenty of other kinds of eggs around Easter time.

While the annual Easter egg hunt for Bow had to be cut short due to chain saws in the woods behind our house and later rain, a few days later, Bow found another egg that he had overlooked on April 1.

It was a nice, sunny day for a change, and Bow enjoyed his find.

After sniffing the candy, he determined it to be good.

While the sunshine lasted. Bow and Leo made the most of it in the back yard.

But the sun-soaked days did not last long.

Soon it was snowing again.

RELATED: An Interview with Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh.

Three Cockatiel Eggs

2018-03-09T12:47:00.003-08:00

For a long time, it seemed the cockatiels would end their season with only a single egg. And they also seemed quite neglectful of that one egg, going off to do other things together, such as eating, grooming and mating. I thought that probably nothing would come of it, but I kept the nest there, and every now and then Queen seemed to have the nesting urge.

Actually, she sat there the longest, looking tired and irritable and a little stricken, when she was trying to lay another egg. I only understood that in retrospect.

It took a very long time for that second egg to finally emerge.

The third egg arrived promptly soon thereafter. It was only just last night.

Both cockatiels are taking turns sitting on the eggs now, with Queen taking her shift in the evening and King coming on duty in the morning, when the coffee is a-brewing. They both look identical to me. The only way I can tell the difference is by the way they behave. Queen is shy and nervous. King is outgoing and talkative. I think he actually takes pride in showing me the eggs, before he gently pushes them into place underneath him with his halfway open beak.

Julia Hanna and I are doing livestreams every Friday night at around 8:00pm Central Standard Time on both our channels. For notifications, please make sure that you are subscribed to my channel. Click on the link below, and if you are not yet subscribed, it will give you a chance to do so.

Aya Katz Channel Confirmation Link.

Parental Controls and a Nesting Box

2018-02-25T07:02:00.002-08:00

The next thing I did after Bow discovered rap music was to get him a cheap tablet at Wal*Mart. I wanted it to be something that I could leave with him, and if he did break it, it would not be an economic disaster.

But I also wanted to make sure he did not do anything too extreme, while surfing the internet, so I set him up with a Google account as my son, allowing me to control it under Family Link. There was just one problem. As a sixteen year old, he was deemed too old for parental controls.

I had to fudge before I was able to finish the process of enrolling Bow in family link. He now has YouTube for Kids on his tablet, and for the time being this satisfies him.

Meanwhile, Queen, the cockatiel, laid another egg. This time the egg was perfect and not cracked. I had set up a basket for a nest before she laid the second egg, but Queen did not choose to lay her egg in the basket.

When I moved the egg to the basket nest, Queen did not choose to follow the egg there.

I read up on it and found that some cockatiels like more shallow nesting boxes, so I used a tea box that I got from Charla with the bananas, and I padded it with newspaper and put it in the corner where Queen had been trying to nest. I put the egg inside the box. Eventually Queen went back to nest on the egg.

Queen is kind of anxious and leaves the nest frequently, especially when I am looking at her, so I am trying to stay away to give her a chance to do her thing. She may be too old to be a mother, but however old she is, she lacks experience and needs some space to try to figure out what to do.

Bow Discovers Rap Music

2018-02-23T08:29:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was a big and eventful day. Bow discovered rap music.

It started out like any other day. We have been having icy mornings, with everything covered in sheet of transparent frozen water.

This is not Bow's kind of weather, and no amount of cajoling will get him to leave the warmth of the inner pen.

On days like this, Bow remains in the pen, lying on his blanket and I venture forth to see what is going on outside.

On my way to the front yard I said hello to the two cockatiels and Summer the Quaker parrot. I noticed that the female cockatiel, Queen, was trying to nest, but I did not think much of it. In our backyard, the old mourning dove nest had been covered in ice, like a nest made of diamonds.

In the front yard, every tree and bush and blade of grass was coated with ice.

By noon, however, all that ice was melting and crashing to the ground.

After lunch, I brought the iPhone into the pen with Bow, so he could see what I had seen outside. But he was having none of that. He swiftly located the YouTube app and started surfing for new videos to watch. In no time at all, he had located a rap song and began to groove to it.

It was nothing I had planned on. I was in shock! I could not stop him, and he would not give me back the iPhone until long after the spirit of the song had left him. Luckily, he had a firm grip on the iPhone the whole time he was dancing and swinging on his rope to the beat of the rap song.

Bow is growing up. He needs his own electronic device, I thought, as I was cleaning out the bird cages last night. And then I noticed something unusual in the cockatiel cage. It was an egg. But it was cracked. She must have laid it while on a high perch.

Somehow when I saw her trying to nest, I did not take Queen quite seriously enough. I thought she was just playing at being a mother. I had seen her and King mating the day before, but thought nothing of it. I mean, I considered filming it, but decided that YouTube would not approve, so I didn't. Now I was really sad that she had not had a good enough nest to protect this egg, which was undoubtedly fertilized.

In the two years that I have been taking care of the cockatiels since I took them over from Sword, I have never found an egg in the cage, even though the birds have been active as a couple. I wondered if this was a fluke, or it means that King and Queen are ready to start a family.

Last night I went to Wal*Mart with two things on my shopping list: a tablet for Bow and a nesting box for Queen.

The End of a Paystream

2018-02-20T05:30:00.000-08:00

Today is the day YouTube plans to cut me off. No more banana money for Bow.

After over nine years and and 1,968 video uploads, with 44,183 minutes that my videos were watched last month and monthly views of 30,424, I am going to lose my revenue stream for bananas, because I do not have one thousand subscribers. Today is the cutoff date.

They gave me a month, and I spent that month trying to get more subscribers. In the process, I seem to have alienated some of my most loyal viewers -- who are not now and never were subscribers!

Toward the end of last month, I was making around $40.00 per month. It has come down as I added commercials for myself and my channel to try to drum up subscribers. But my viewers are not my fans. They are not my friends. They are just people who like specific videos for reasons of their own. And if YouTube cared about its revenue as much as I care about mine, they would not have made this ridiculous rule about the thousand subscribers -- an impossible goal for someone who has a valuable product to sell, but is not herself popular.

Yes, my friends have subscribed. But I haven't got a thousand friends. And to tell you the truth, my subscribers do not watch my videos all that much. My own mother has better things to do than sit around all day watching my videos. My friends wish me well, but most of them have not seen most of my videos, because they have lives of their own. My real viewers are the nameless, faceless people who put food on our table, but will never, ever subscribe. My thanks go to them, even though I do not know who they are. And I understand why they do not wish to reveal their identity by subscribing.

Maybe someday YouTube will catch on.

Celebrating Bow's Sixteenth Birthday

2018-02-16T18:26:00.003-08:00

Bow turned sixteen today. We celebrated quietly, just the two of us.

We did all the usual things that we used to do when I would throw Bow a birthday party every year, minus the guests. This year, Lawrence is not available, anymore, and Sword is away at college, so Bow and I decided to celebrate alone. In some ways, I think Bow enjoyed this way of celebrating more.

He had less anxiety when the birthday song was sung, and he got the cake all to himself.

Usually, we blow out the candles together through the grille, before Bow selects which piece of cake he wants. But this time, as there were no others, I brought in the cake for him to blow out the candles by himself. Bow, however, did not take time to blow out the candles. He picked up a spoon and proceeded to devour as much as he could with the candles still burning.

I did eat one slice of the cake, one of the two that were dabbed with chocolate. Meanwhile, Bow had the rest all by himself, so I decided to call that lunch. The candles that were still burning did not bother him.

The six went out by itself, but the flame on the one was persistent, so eventually I blew it out.

In addition to the cake, Bow got a present from me, and a card addressed to him arrived in the mail from his friend Charla.

Bow is not very prompt with opening presents and cards. He puts it off and takes his own sweet time. For a long time he sat very still with his back to his present.

He took off the party hat he had on rather quickly, but he let me put it back on him again later and was even willing to pose.

By the time he tore open the card from Charla, Bow was almost too tired to open it fully to hear the beautiful birthday song it played But once the song began to play, he was moving to the music.

All in all, Bow had a great day. He could not have enjoyed it more if there had been more presents or cards, because he likes to take his time and not be rushed in the enjoyment of his big day.

Bow went to bed fully satisfied. And now he is sixteen.

Celebrating Valentine's Day

2018-02-15T09:19:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was Valentine's Day, and we celebrated accordingly. Some people think that this holiday is only for romantic couples, but we have always celebrated it at my house, in whichever way that suited us. Even though she is away in college, and currently has a boyfriend, my daughter did not forget me on Valentine's Day.

Likewise, I did not forget to celebrate with Bow.

In my house, our favorite flavor of ice cream is coffee. I prepared a treat for two consisting of coffee ice cream, topped with whipped cream and a Dove chocolate piece shaped like a heart.

I went in with both treats, and I told Bow that one of them was for me.

Bow took his treat and ate the chocolate heart on top, and then, seeing that I had left mine on the floor as I went to lock the door, he helped himself to my share, too. I scolded him and took his ice cream for myself, but by then Bow had already managed to eat both chocolate hearts.

Bow is gentle and well mannered, but he is not good at understanding the difference between "mine" and "yours". We often see this as a problem with "sharing" if a human toddler behaves in that way, but the issue is not sharing at all. It is about realizing that once something is given to another person, it's not yours to take. It's a lesson in property rights, not asset allocation.

Once he was finished with his ice cream, Bow handed me back the empty glass goblet.

Later in the afternoon, I had another surprise for Bow: a Valentine's Day Balloon.

The Innocence of Academics

2018-02-01T09:28:00.000-08:00

People in the ivory tower are sheltered from the everyday concerns of those outside. They are willing to publish their findings without pay, because they are already secure in the funding for their day to day life. People outside the academy need to find ways to make what they do every day provide them with income.

Every day, I work at documenting life with Bow, and I also work at earning money for Project Bow. I post about Bow on this blog, and I also post videos on YouTube. This was yesterday's video:

Videos of grooming do much better than videos about academic papers, such as this one:

They also do much better than videos about the history of Project Bow, such as:

Today, I was contacted by someone from Cornell asking if they could film Bow and me and place the video on their site or on their YouTube Channel. Now, I am familiar with Cornell's channel. Bow and I watched Anurag Agrawal on that channel. They currently have 98 subscribers! Why on earth should I give them my work product for free? They should be asking me for tips on how to improve their subscription rate.

I, too, need more subscribers for my channel. I will be happy to subscribe to their channel if they subscribe to mine. I will be happy for them to embed my videos on their site, so I can earn more money. I have already embedded one of their videos on my site.

There have been times when people have tried to shame me for wanting to be paid for what I do. But they get paid for what they do. YouTube videos have been paying for Bow's bananas. Until a better deal comes along, I am keeping that revenue to myself. In the meantime, if you have not yet subscribed to my channel, please do. It really does make a difference to Bow and me.

https://www.youtube.com/user/AyaKatz

Passing the Turing Test

2018-01-30T12:32:00.002-08:00

Bow uses smart technology all the time. He swipes to select photos.

He watches recorded livestreams to see what I and his friend Charla have been up to while away from the pens.

He is a big fan of Lady Gaga, who excites him. But he watches Julie Andrews respectfully and quietly while she delivers a speech on the history of musical theater.

Bow has logged countless hours watching YouTube videos -- countless because they cannot be counted by the internet bots, since Bow does not have his own account. They cannot tell if I am the one watching or Bow is. Because of this, they totally ignore the chimpanzee demographic when pitching ad space to advertisers. It seems sad that Bow's opinions and preferences should not be tallied along with everyone else's, but then I have to remind myself that there are plenty of humans who watch YouTube and whose opinions also do not count. Not everybody has a YouTube account. Many watch, but not only do they not subscribe -- there's no way that they could subscribe. And YouTube, trying to corner all the big spenders in Gen Z need to know exactly who you are in order to count your vote. Or so they think.

Livestram with Julia
https://youtu.be/KFUqOf_dmXQ
and
https://youtu.be/5Fv8UFCQGT8

But that's not really how the free market operates. The market does not need to know who paid for the bananas. It just counts how many bananas were sold, and what price they went for. Does it matter if the person watching is not human or not an adult or not a voter?

Back in the day, when I started Project Bow, I was hoping that one day, when Bow was literate and on the internet in total anonymity, he would pass the Turing test. I noted that we as humans had brains that are wired in a variety of different ways, and yet we use the same languages to communicate with one another.

We don't just anthropomorphize chimpanzees when we ascribe to them the thoughts and feelings we would have had under the same circumstances. We do the same to our fellow man. No two brains are alike. No two have the same wiring diagram for processing language.

When I wrote the article embedded above, I was attending a conference at Dartmouth, and Sword and Bow and I were staying in rented house in Canaan, New Hampshire.

With us was the first Project Bow intern, Samina Farooqi. Since then, Samina has gotten her Ph.D, Sword has graduated from high school and is a freshman in college, and Bow is about to turn sixteen. Bow is a member of Gen Z, computer literate and internet savvy. But his input doesn't count, because he is not a subscriber.

I liked it better when the anonymity of the internet gave everyone a chance at passing the Turing test no matter who they were, how they were wired or whether they had a Google account .

Out in the Snow

2018-01-18T11:42:00.001-08:00

We have been snow bound for several days now. I have gone for a walk each day, but Bow has not wanted to go out.

At first there was not much snow on the ground, but it was nice to take a walk down the path in the snow flurries.

On the second day, there was much more snow on the ground, though by afternoon when I took my walk, it was not snowing any longer.

On the third day, I saw deer bounding over the path. On the fourth day, it was so cold out that I cut my walk very short, and we concentrated on grooming.

And today, on the fifth day, Bow asked to go outside. I did not know whether to take the request seriously. Sometimes when he is bored, but it is too cold out, he will drag me all the way to the outer door, but never actually go out. But this afternoon he jumped out without hesitation. Naturally, his feet never touched the snow. He landed on the bench.

Bow shook his head at the cold, but did not ask to go back in. Instead, he lay on the rim of the bench's backrest and sunbathed for a good long time, before asking to go back inside.

A Place of No Return

2018-01-14T06:07:00.000-08:00

Do you remember the scene from Pinocchio where the bad guys are recruiting children to go into their Sanctuary? (Yes, I'm going to call it a sanctuary, because it's a place where children are liberated from adults.)

The real problem with the proposition from the fox and the cat was not just that it was a misrepresentation of Pleasure Island as a Sanctuary free from care. The real problem was that it was a Place of No Return."They never come back ... as boys."

I know of a lot of places with a hard sell, but no right of return. They include sanctuaries for chimpanzees and old folks homes. These places are advertised as Pleasure Island where the isolated chimpanzee or elderly person can find friends of his own age or species, but they don't offer a money back guarantee or a free ticket home if you don't like it there. In fact, many old folks homes expect the elderly to sell their house and give them all the money. They have complicated contracts, so you can't just decide to go there as a vacation and then return home when you have had your fill. I have known a few people who went into those homes. They never come back out alive.

By this, of course, I do not mean that the institutions intentionally kill the elders who enter there. Most die of old age. But once you put yourself there, it is very hard to leave. The same is true for chimpanzee sanctuaries.

Once a chimpanzee enters the sanctuary system, he might be sent to a different sanctuary if the one he is in turns out to be a death trap, but he can never leave the sanctuary system. There is no going home. If I were a chimpanzee, I would be afraid to go there for that reason alone, much less what might happen to me during the first introduction to other inmates.

"If you really respect Bow, you would leave it up to him to choose," my primatologist friend said to me recently. Really? And if I had a little boy like Pinocchio, I suppose you think I should leave it up to him to accept or reject the offer of the fox and the cat? Because after all, that is the libertarian position, right?

Wrong. Which brings me to the recent issue of age of consent that came up in my libertarian circles. Most of us agree that minors do need to be protected by their parents and should not be allowed to make irrevocable decisions about their lives without the help of a parent while they are yet too immature to be emancipated. Most libertarians, even the radical ones, understand that being a human does not automatically equip one to deal with complex, life altering issues from day one. Literate fifteen-year-olds are in most cases still not ready to sell themselves to the highest bidder.

"But if you believe that Bow can read and write, then why won't you let him decide for himself?" For the same reason I would not let any teen sell himself to a place of no return.

The truth is, if there were a place that Bow could go for a fun vacation, I would probably let him go. I would use that time to take a vacation, myself. But I am not shipping him off to Pleasure Island -- because if it were a good place, they would not have a no return policy.

Bow's Christmas Day 2017

2017-12-26T06:10:00.000-08:00

Bow got two gifts on Christmas day: a new blanket and candy bracelets in festive red and green.

Half the fun in getting presents is unwrapping them.

Bow delighted in tearing away the paper to reveal the gift inside.

The blanket is an oversized plush with two foxes peering out at Bow.

The second present had Bow crying out in joy as he struggled to open it.

Imagine, candy you can wear! But not for long.

Bow had a wonderful Christmas. This morning, the candy bracelets are no more, and Bow is napping, entirely surrounded by the new blanket.

It's a new day, and the sun is rising.