Almost Human. Alfred Fidjestøl

at her own reflection, she was asked “Who that?” and quickly answered the sign for “Me Washoe.”⁶⁵ In a different experiment Viki, another chimpanzee raised among humans, was given a pile of photographs featuring humans and animals and asked to sort them. She quite correctly separated them into two piles, one of the humans and one of all the animals. She made only one mistake, though not perhaps from her perspective, she placed the photograph of herself into the pile with the human photos.⁶⁶

      No one can say into which pile Julius would have placed himself. It was no easy task for Julius to figure out whether he was animal or human. Up until this point he had been a bit of both; he was almost chimpanzee, almost human.

Chapter 4

       HOME FOR CHRISTMAS

       “Julius to spend Christmas among his own kind.” ⁶⁷

       FÆDRELANDSVENNEN NEWSPAPER

      IN THE MIDST of the turbulent cage-training process, on December 1, 1980, the NRK channel premiered the program that Elisabeth Nergaard had produced about Julius. The feature episode was twenty-two minutes long and was first broadcast on the children’s TV program and later repeated multiple times on the so-called school television programming during the daytime. In 1980, most Norwegians only had access to this one channel, so the majority of Norwegian children soon developed a relationship with the charming chimpanzee. The concept was particularly well suited for children’s television, since it was easy for children to identify with a chimpanzee in diapers who crawled around and played with his “siblings.” The whole country watched Julius do chores, scrub the floor with soapsuds on his chin, climb the curtains, paint and draw with the Moseid girls and build Playmobil structures with the Glad boys.