Lucy

Lucy, the humanized chimpanzee. In Biology class we listened to a podcast about Lucy, the chimp that was raised like a human child. It was very interesting and i enjoyed listening to it.
It started out about raising Lucy. They potty trained her, taught her sign language, and raised her just like you would a human child. She acted like a human child would too. She lied to her parents about having a potty accident, when she got older she was sexually attracted to human men. She was smart enough to be able to make tea and food and do most things that we as humans can do. but eventually she became to large and strong to be handled, eventually she was moved to an island with another group of chimps where they all had a terrible time adjusting to the wild. eventually the other chimps adapted but she still considered herself human. Finally she was able to live by herself in the wild. two years after her independence her trainer came back to the island and found her bones, she had been killed most likely by poachers.
Overall i really liked listening to the Lucy podcast although it was really sad. It showed me that there really is no hope for turning apes into people. Lucy taught us that being a chimpanzee should stay being a chimpanzee, it is a bad idea to try to turn chimps into humans. I have an incredibly different perspective of chimps after this, i never knew they could be so intelligent and i also don't want to own a chimp anymore. I think that the experiment was worthwhile as it showed us a ton about chimpanzee and human relations and also the intelligence of chimps. Lucy's end makes me feel really sad, poaching is awful, and she was such a friendly chimp that she never would have seen it coming.