Guy is “overworked and overstressed” when he hires Aimee to mind Sam, a job which is soon one of dogsbody, live-in maid, and finally as someone “malleable, easy pickings, a girl he could ride and ride”. Scenes in the breeding facility are a montage of horrors recorded of the experiences of chimps in breeding facilities or being held for biomedical research. Azalel’s suicide seems to be based on that of a monkey in a Chester Zoo in 1932. Sam signing BLACK BUGS is based on Washoe’s opinion of her fellow chimps, and Guy imagining Alice signing to her infant once born, echoes Washoe teaching signs to her adopted son Loulis. Sam desperately signing KEY LOCK OUT echoes chimp Bruno at the LEMSIP facility in Tuxedo, New York. Many, if not all, of the chimp incidents are based on real incidents. The reader’s first encounter with Sam is traumatic – many of his chapters are set in Moncrief’s chimp breeding facility in Iowa, others are in more pleasant surroundings, but are from the point of view of a confused and disoriented psyche. And many will know that the experiments themselves were far from beneficial for the chimps. ‘Inevitably’ as most readers will know that the chimpanzees used in the cross-fostering language studies of the 1970s, did not end up part of their loving families for the rest of their lives. Talk to me tells the inevitably tragic story of Sam from differing points of view. Guy is the “golden boy” of Iowan university professor, Dr Donald Moncrief, who is the alpha male in the field of primate language studies – “the hottest thing going”. The academic is Guy Schermerhorn, ambitious, arrogant, lascivious. When Aimee sees Sam, an “adorable, big-eared doll come to life”, she is captivated.
#Talking chimpanzee tv
Aimee Villard is a misfit, a loner, an undergrad at a California university, when she sees an associate professor from the university on a TV gameshow, accompanied by Sam, a chimpanzee.
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