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Toward a New Understanding of Animals
Scribner
June 2009
On Sale: June 9, 2009
224 pages
ISBN: 0743295862
EAN: 9780743295864
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
WHILE TRAVELING AROUND THE COUNTRY to report on the
conditions in which captive chimpanzees in America live,
Charles Siebert visited a retirement home for former ape
movie stars and circus entertainers in Wauchula, Florida,
known as the Center for Great Apes. There Siebert
encountered Roger, a twenty-eight-year-old former Ringling
Bros. star who not only preferred the company of people to
that of his fellow chimps but seemed utterly convinced that
he knew the author from some other time and place.
"Mostly I was struck by Roger's stare," writes
Siebert, "his deep-set hazel eyes peering out at me with
what, to my deep discomfort, I'd soon realize is their
unchanging expression. It is a beguiling mix of amazement
and apprehension, the look, as I've often thought of it
since, of a being stranded between his former self and the
one we humans have long been suggesting to him. A sort of
hybrid of a chimp and a person. A veritable 'humanzee.'" Haunted by Roger's demeanor, Siebert promptly moved into a
cottage on the grounds of the Center for Great Apes,
spending day after day with Roger, trying to get to the
bottom of the mysterious connection between them. And then
late one night, awakened by the cries of chimpanzees, a
sleepless and troubled Siebert suddenly began to conjure a
secret, predawn encounter with his new cross-species
confidant, an apparently one-sided conversation that, in
fact, takes us to the very heart of the author's
relationship with Roger and of our relationship with our
own captive primal selves. The result is The Wauchula Woods Accord, a strikingly
written, wide-ranging physical and metaphysical foray out
along the increasingly fraught frontier between humans and
animals; a journey that encompasses many of the author's
encounters with chimpanzees and other animals, as well as
the latest scientific discoveries that underscore our
intimate biological bonds not only with our nearest kin but
with far more remoteseeming life-forms. By journey's end, the reader arrives at a deeper
understanding both of Roger and of our numerous other
animal selves, a recognition -- an accord -- that carries a
new sense of responsibility for how we view and treat all
animals, including ourselves.
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