a glass just like a human. She often accompanied her mother to work. She never got used to using the toilet, however, nor did she develop the taboo relationship that most humans have to their own feces. At the age of three, she was so difficult to have in the house that the couple was forced to create a separate room for her where she could play without destroying things while unattended. Still, the Termerlins continued their human childrearing. Lucy learned how to dress herself, though she preferred to dress up in other people’s clothes rather than her own. She also learned to handle a range of instruments and appliances, from keys and pencils to vacuum cleaners and lighters. She was trained in ASL, and the Temerlins were able to communicate with her in a meaningful way. Lucy loved leafing through newspapers with her own cup of coffee, alongside her parents in the morning. Her coffee was, of course, nothing but warm milk mixed with a teaspoon of coffee to give it color. At only three years of age, she tasted her first sip of alcohol when, by chance, she suddenly grabbed a whiskey glass from a guest who was visiting and chugged it down. When they later discovered Lucy’s penchant for boozing in the garden with rotten apples, her liberal foster parents decided it was time to allow her an indulgent drink every now and then. She was thereafter permitted to have a drink or two before dinner, a gin and tonic in the summer and a whiskey sour or Jack Daniels with 7-Up in the winter.41 Lucy relished those evenings curled up on the sofa with her parents, sipping her drink and flipping through magazines before dinnertime. When she reached puberty, they gave her a copy of Playgirl, which she seemed to enjoy very much. She taught herself to masturbate shamelessly, quite creatively, with the family vacuum cleaner.
For twelve years Lucy’s lived like this, but thereafter, things were no longer manageable. It became impossible to have her in the house. Although the chimpanzee is a human’s closest genetic relative, it is nonetheless an animal we have never been able to fully tame. Even a chimpanzee hand-raised among humans with familiar, close and emotional bonds will, at some point in time, transform from a tame and predictable animal to a dangerous one. To tame an animal, the species must be systematically bred with particular care to their unique abilities. Modern animal keepers have found it challenging enough to get chimpanzees to breed in captivity; they haven’t yet reached the conclusive ability of taming them. Most of the animals that humans have successfully tamed, such as dogs, sheep, goats, pigs, cows and horses, were domesticated over 6,000 years ago.42
The Temerlins had put themselves—and Lucy—into an impossible bind. Maurice Temerlin was a psychology professor and the adoption had been part of a larger research project led by the psychologist, Bill Lemmon, in which different types of animals were raised among humans. But the experiment was poorly thought out, morally dubious and completely lacking in a long term plan for the next phase of Lucy’s life.43 The couple didn’t want to euthanize her or send her to a zoo or research laboratory, and so the twelve-year-old chimpanzee accompanied researcher Janis Carter to a rehabilitation center for chimpanzees in the Gambia. Carter hoped to persuade Lucy to adapt to a life in the wild. But Lucy was incapable of interacting with other chimpanzees, for example, only becoming sexually aroused by humans. She displayed many of the classic signs of depression, refused to eat for long periods and constantly signed the ASL sign for “pain.” After many years of training and acclimation, she was nevertheless set free into the wild. Her skeleton was found two years later, missing its hands and with its head torn off from the rest of the body.44
Julius was going to avoid this fate. He was not ever going to sit sipping a gin and tonic with a newspaper in one hand. He was to understand, at all times, his place as a chimpanzee. He was going to be returned to his community.
MOSEID IS PUNISHED
During the summer holiday of 1980, Julius accompanied the Glad family on vacation to Skjern Island outside of Mandal. He was allowed to roam freely around the island, though he never wandered far from Reidun’s sight. He preferred sitting on a lounge chair or holding her legs as she worked in the potato patch, playing in the grass with the boys, greeting the neighbor farmer and his sheep, going to the lighthouse in Ryvingen and taking boat trips to the southern rock island archipelagos. People were astonished to see a chimpanzee on a boat. It’s hard not to be smitten by a clothed chimp going fishing, and the regional newspaper, Fædrelandsvennen, picked up the story. On August 9, 1980, an article was included in the newspaper, written by journalist Trygve Bj. Klingsheim with accompanying photographs by Arild Jakobsen. This article was the first hint at the media storm that Julius would soon unleash. Klingsheim interviewed the four “foster parents,” Edvard and Marit Moseid and Billy and Reidun Glad, focusing, among other things, on how the two couples were going to miss him when he was finally returned to his community. The men acted tough and the women were honest.
“It will be a fantastic victory for me. That is when we will know that we were successful,” said Edvard Moseid.
“I feel confident that I will be emotionally strong enough to handle it. He is an animal,” said Billy Glad.
“I try not to think about it. No, I don’t think that I will ever be able to distance myself from him emotionally,” admitted Reidun Glad.45
Edvard Moseid was often in touch with Elisabeth Nergaard from the TV station NRK, which had filmed several school programs at the zoo. Moseid realized the media potential for the story and told her about Julius. With her interest piqued, she decided to create a television program about the chimp. NRK traveled south with a camera crew to follow the unique, everyday life of Julius. They filmed his participation in the Moseid family chores and captured him on camera dangling from the vacuum handle and splashing in a bucket of suds. This made for good TV, even if it wasn’t exactly representative of everyday life in the Moseid home.
Marit Moseid studied during the day. The girls didn’t go to daycare but instead accompanied Julius each day to the zoo. This was as good a daycare as any for the girls, and for Julius, it was an essential reminder of his origins as well as his eventual destination. Julius loved the car ride from Vennesla to the zoo. He especially enjoyed holding onto the steering wheel and even managed to figure out that something or other had to be done with his right hand on the stick shift. Moseid had provided a hammock for Julius in his office, but he was allowed to run around as he wished. The girls often took him out around the park, and Edvard took him to see other animals whenever there was time. For the short period that he had been a part of the zoo’s chimpanzee community, Julius had only ever spent time in the indoor Tropical House. But in the summer, the chimpanzees were allowed to range freely across a hanging bridge of trees to a large, natural “Chimp Island” with pine trees and bilberry bushes. In his homemade human clothes, diapers and underwear, he crawled around with turtles and rabbits, and got to peer over at Chimp Island toward his parents and fellow species. Edvard noticed that Julius started to get anxious and afraid whenever they neared the island, sometimes putting his hands over Moseid’s eyes and grasping tightly onto his neck.46 Julius’s reaction was worrisome. One day, one of the keepers ferried Julius on a small rowboat across the moat toward Chimp Island, while the other chimpanzees were kept inside. But he became so afraid that he wouldn’t let go of his keeper.
These distanced meetings with the other chimpanzees were intended to serve a dual purpose. Not only was Julius supposed to remember the other chimps, they also needed to remember him. Edvard Moseid often brought some of Julius’s diapers with him to the zoo in order to familiarize the community with the scent. Moseid would pass the diaper to Dennis through the fence, and Dennis would often sit solemnly sniffing his son’s feces before handing the diaper off to the other inquisitive chimps.
On Sunday, August 17, 1980, Edvard took Julius into the Tropical House to let the other chimps see him and smell his diaper. He intended to be quick about it because his daughters were waiting in the car. His daughters had asked him to go into the kitchen next to the chimpanzees and get them some fruit. He decided to use the opportunity to display Julius to the other chimps for a moment.
Edvard was behind the public viewing area, in the private sleeping quarters designated for the chimpanzees. The cages were open and he squatted down holding Julius toward the bars so the chimpanzees could see and smell him. Meanwhile, zookeeper Åse Gunn Mosvold was at work in the neighboring kitchen. Several of the chimpanzees had gathered near the bars of the cage. The alpha male Dennis was