Thus begins the syncopated lament of an orangutan named King Louie in the animated film The Jungle Book. Louie is confiding his envy of the human race to the man-cub Mowgli, whom he has recently, if forcibly, befriended. Ooh be dooh, he explains. I wanna be like you/I wanna walk like you/Talk like you, too. . . .
At the New Iberia Research Center in southwestern Louisiana, relations between humans and apes are far less flattering. Rather than serenade a visiting hominid, certain adolescent chimpanzees are likely to fill their mouths with water and then send the fluid out between their front teeth with a faucetlike force aimed at the visitor’s face, chest, or notebook. Along with the water comes a generous helping of half-chewed food and saliva. Ooh be dooh. Here’s what we think of you.
Brandy, no. No. Stop that. Stop it. Kara, you too. C’mon guys. Cut it out. The demands come from Daniel Povinelli, director of the center’s laboratory of comparative behavioral biology, who is wearing a smartly pressed white shirt and standing well within spitting range of the chimps’ chain-link compound. He and a small crew of caretakers raised these seven apes from toddlerhood, but the animals ignore him and continue their spirited greeting. Between the ages of four and five they start to figure out that they can control people’s behavior at a distance, says Povinelli, dodging another aqueous salvo.
I used to be able to get them to stop. Now I can’t even intimidate them.
It is hard to imagine Povinelli intimidating anyone. The lanky, towheaded 32-year-old seems barely removed from adolescence himself as he describes or, more often, acts out the behavior he has observed in a decade of research on ape cognition. Povinelli isn’t interested in the behavior as such, but he is always on the lookout for clues to the mental lives of his charges. He has carried out dozens of experiments with the New Iberia chimps to explore the way their minds represent the world. In doing so, he has discovered differences between human and chimpanzee mentalities that defy expectations and even common sense.
