On August 7, 2017, an obituary attracted widespread attention from all walks of life in Atlanta, USA, and the name of the deceased was written "Chantek", but there is no doubt that most people have no idea who this Shatke really is.
But the truth is shocking, the deceased is not even a "person", but an orangutan, but in the orangutan world, Chateau is definitely the most well-known one, because he not only has a superior IQ, knows how to communicate with people in sign language, but also knows how to manage money, how to save money, make money, and consume, and he has also gone to college and is a highly educated person.
There are also rumors that in the special theme science fiction movie "Rise of the Apes" filmed in the United States a few years ago, Caesar, the protagonist who gained super intelligence and led the world's orangutans and humans to war, was based on Shattke.
For humans who claim to be higher intelligent beings, whether they want to admit it or not, orangutans are always the species closest to us to some extent, and intelligence, behavior, and even appearance are highly close to humans.
But as the world's most intelligent orangutan, a legendary character in the race, Charlotte's life is extremely tragic, she obtained something that did not belong to her, as an animal, but was framed by humans, and finally imprisoned for thirty years, in sorrow and pain depressed.
Between the 1950s and 1970s, when human science and technology were highly developed, we began to turn our attention to the study of ourselves.
Long ago, Darwin's Theory of Evolution opened up a whole new path for the natural sciences, but it could also be said to be subversive, because in the religious environment at that time, both the people and the government felt that his views were blasphemous with God, and of course, how could a proud human being be willing to admit that he had evolved from an ugly, stupid monkey?
After the time into the 20th century, "Evolution" has been generally recognized, human beings began to ponder their own problems, including psychology, sociology, education, etc., and scientific research first to do experiments, experiments need samples and objects, experiments on human beings must use people as objects, this goal is obviously not easy to achieve.
In this case, apes with a similarity of more than 97% to human DNA have become the best experimental subjects, and the conclusions drawn from them are also of great reference value to humans.
But in an era when science was neither advanced nor ignorant, many experiments were often very cruel, and the most famous of this kind of experiments was the "Rhesus Monkey Experiment".
This experiment was initiated by Harry Harlow, a well-known psychologist at the University of Wisconsin and former president of the American Psychological Association, aiming at the problem of education, with the purpose of figuring out whether the mother's care and affection have an irreplaceable effect on the child, or whether the mother only needs to provide milk or food.
In a word, whether the ethereal thing of "love" really exists.
Harlow isolated a newborn monkey from the population, and then made him two "false mothers" with wire and flannel, one of which would provide him with food and milk, but the other would give him warmth and allow him to hug comfortably.
It turns out that for most of the time except for eating, the little monkey stayed close to "Flannel Mother", but after the end of the trial, the monkey died tragically because he was completely unable to integrate into his group.
Obviously, such experiments are not unique, and in 1977, a biologist in the United States began to think about another question - are many human behaviors contained in genes, or are they learned through acquired learning?
It was a highly educated woman named Lynn, and as a biogeneticist, after a long period of thought, she decided to start an experiment with a juvenile red-haired gorilla.
Born in 1977 at a primate research center in Atlanta, Schartke was given permission to carry out his experiments just over two months after his birth, and Shattuck was transferred to the University of Tennessee, where Lynn had given him his name.
After a brief few days with Shatke, Lynn was surprised to find that the orangutan, who was less than a year old, was very agile, looked at his eyes very seriously, and was always able to respond to his actions.
This excites Lynn, who finds herself able to find the logical law of human behavior by observing the orangutan—what kind of behavior would it behave if it were raised as a human toddler?
At the time, it was undoubtedly a creative experiment, and when Shatska was born, for some reason, his mother had not fed him, so he was not close to his mother, which made it less difficult for Lynn to raise him.
After the experiment began, Lynn treated Shatke exactly according to the standards and environment of a baby, it had the care and love of her mother (Lynn), drank good milk powder, and Lynn would buy it a lot of children's favorite toys and read bedtime stories to it.
Not only that, but Lynn reversed all of its animal habits, taught it how to go to the toilet on its own, couldn't defecate on the ground, and wore diapers all the time.
As a red-haired gorilla, Shatke's treatment is almost emperor-level, it eats warm and exquisite food, and it is also very nutritious, with its own bedroom, separate bathroom, kitchen, and its own crib and a meticulous mother.
Lynn knew that there were some clever orangutans who could understand people's meanings, but it was certainly impossible to make them speak, so she was ready to teach Him sign language expression when Hettucker was older.
Shatke's progress was far beyond her imagination, and one night before going to bed, Lynn was sitting by the crib, the radio was playing some children's programs, and was making all kinds of animal calls, and Shattke suddenly got up from the bed, rolled a few times, and began to dance.
Lynn took a closer look and was shocked to find that it was imitating the iconic movements and gestures of different animals according to the sounds emitted by the radio, which was really amazing.
Seeing such a scene, Lynn began to teach Shatke sign language soon after, and taught it to recognize some simple words, and it learned very quickly, even to give an example, such as that word is a food, Shattke will make chewing actions at the same time, indicating that he does understand the meaning of the word.
Correspondingly, it soon began to express emotions, and if Lynn praised him, he would behave very lively and joyful, and if criticized, he would be sullen and secretly sad.
Nine months had passed in a flash, and at the age of the chimpanzee, Shatke was now worthy of a five-year-old human child, and by this time, he had mastered more than one sign language gesture and was able to flexibly combine them, and on his birthday, he successfully demonstrated the words "I love Lynn" in sign language.
Since shatroke also needs to go to school to be exactly like humans, Lynn takes it into a kindergarten to start further learning, and the other children are naturally very surprised by this "orangutan classmate", but as time goes on, they find that Shattke is almost no different from a normal person in other ways except that he can't speak.
In kindergarten, Shattke learned a lot more, it can easily pedal the children's bicycle around, can create some colorful stick figures, can fold clothes, fold quilts, and even make his own breakfast, which is simply incredible.
As the mind grew, it was clear that kindergarten was no longer suitable for Shatke, and Lynn, as a professor at the University of Tennessee, naturally had plenty of convenience, although from a human point of view, it must be very strange to go directly from kindergarten to college, but this was certainly not the case for short-lived orangutans, so Shattke was arranged to enter the University of Tennessee to start studying.
Lynn brought Shatke into her classroom, and for such a new classmate, the other students liked and found it very novel, it was very well-behaved, every day on the school bus to the school, and when he entered the classroom, he sat quietly in his seat.
Some students also know sign language, so they try to talk to Schartke, but it can always be answered clearly, and the understanding and expression are very perfect, which makes the students extremely surprised.
Since entering a "higher education institution", it is of course more difficult to learn, but Short's grades during his school years have always been very good, and after completing his "graduation exam", his photo has also been gloriously pasted on a large photo wall, becoming one of the graduates of this school.
Of course, its examinations are naturally specially designed individually, including sign language descriptions, recognition of looks, social interactions, etc., which are very advanced "learning" in the gorilla race.
In her extracurricular life, Lynn is also trying to explore the potential of Schaltek, cutting the jars into small iron pieces, which are Shattuck's exclusive "currency".
It's laughable to want to teach a gorilla about economics and consumption, but Shatke did, and he quickly understood what his mother meant—if he helped her with some chores, or fulfilled her request, he would get some corresponding amount of iron pieces, which were valuable and could be exchanged for what he wanted from his mother, such as toys, snacks, clothes, and so on.
It wasn't long before Lynn discovered that Shattuck himself had figured out the concept of saving money, and for a long time he didn't use iron sheets, but kept them, and then accumulated them to a certain extent and ran to Lynn to say that he wanted to buy a bicycle.
Lynn and Shatke grew closer and closer to each other over time, and she had almost taken the orangutan as her own child, which led her to overlook one of the most important issues – Shatke was still an orangutan.
This is not to say that Shattuck can never really become human, but that human beings can never truly regard it as their own kind, but this question cannot be changed by anyone, so Shatke's life finally ended in tragedy.
You know, an adult orangutan, the physique is very large and strong, thick arms, thick hair will make ordinary people feel a lot of oppression, and on February 5, 1986, everything is as usual, Lynn went to class, Shattke played alone in the school.
But soon Lynn received an urgent notice from the school: a schoolgirl said that Shatke had attacked her in public because it wanted to snatch her ice cream.
Without understanding, without tolerance, without hesitation, Shatrok was immediately arrested and sent back to the place of his birth, the institute of animals, and imprisoned in a large iron cage.
It cries out for help from Lynn outside the cage, hoping to go home, to go out to play, to eat something delicious, and Lynn runs around hoping to release it, but everyone agrees that it is just an orangutan, and it will definitely attack others.
Little by little, shatroke fell into endless despair, and he began to understand that no one could save himself, and he suddenly fell into a cage from the rich world outside, and from another point of view, he was actually a nine-year-old child who grew up completely by human standards, and then this child was locked up for eleven years in the darkness.
Lynn couldn't do anything, all she could do was come to visit often, but she could clearly feel that she and the "child" were getting stranger and stranger, until 1997, when Shatsk finally broke free of confinement and was sent to Zoo Atlanta, Lynn asked him in sign language: Do you think you are a human or an orangutan?
Shatke replied: I am both an orangutan and a human being.
In the long years that followed, Schartke was able to roam freely in the spacious zoo, but he was simply unable to blend in with other groups of his kind, because he was a "human" with intelligence far beyond that of other orangutans.
On August 7, 2017, Shattke died of depression, heart disease and other reasons in the Atlanta Zoo, as the only gorilla in the world who can communicate with humans, Shattke's mental journey, no one can understand.
As the famous American poetess Emily Dickinson wrote, "I could have tolerated darkness, if I had never seen the sun", Shatke's tragedy undoubtedly originated from human beings, even if we understand that racial differences are insurmountable, but the resentment in our hearts is still difficult to quell.