Des Moines, Iowa – August 6, 2010 – A TIME magazine cover story, Inside the Minds of Animals, features an inside look at the bonobo language research program at Great Ape Trust and the intelligence of its most famous resident, Kanzi.
Jeffrey Kluger, a senior writer at TIME magazine, visited Kanzi and Great Ape Trust in southeast Des Moines last month as part of his August 16th cover story on animal intelligence. He reported that it’s the scientific method used at Great Ape Trust that makes their language studies unique.
“Kanzi is by no means the first ape to have been taught language. But the Trust takes a novel approach, raising apes from birth with spoken and symbolic language as a constant feature of their days,” wrote Kluger in Inside the Minds of Animals. “Just as human mothers take babies on walks and chatter to them about what they see even though the child does yet not understand, so too do the scientists at the Trust narrate the lives of their bonobos. With such total immersion, the apes are learning to communicate better, faster and with greater complexity.”
Kluger and his Inside the Minds of Animals cover story were featured during a segment August 5 on CNN’s American Morning and on the Charlie Rose program on PBS on August 6.
Links to the CNN and PBS interviews and the TIME magazine article are available in the Resources section of this news release
Background Information
Great Ape Trust, is a scientific research facility in Des Moines, Iowa, dedicated to understanding the origins and future of culture, language, tools and intelligence, and to the preservation of endangered great apes in their natural habitats. Announced in 2002 and receiving its first ape residents in 2004, Great Ape Trust is home to a colony of seven bonobos involved in noninvasive interdisciplinary studies of their cognitive and communicative capabilities, and to six orangutans. To learn more about Great Ape Trust, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization, go to GreatApeTrust.org
