In 1973, an
infant chimpanzee was taken from his mother’s arms and sent to live with a human family as part of a Columbia University psychology experiment.
The goal of the project was to see if the animal, named Nim Chimpsky, could be conditioned to communicate with humans if he was raised like a human child in a human household. He learned some very basic words in American Sign Language, but Nim continued to act like a chimp — he bit the children in the house and didn’t understand how to behave like a human child. It was decided that the family could no longer care for Nim, and he was shuffled from caretaker to caretaker for several years.
…
While taking long walks around the grounds of the primate facility, Ingersoll occasionally smoked pot with Nim, who had been introduced to marijuana in New York City and even appeared in the magazine *High Times *in 1975.
“He actually signed ‘stone smoke time now’ to us first,” Ingersoll says. “We were shocked. Although we were familiar with chimpanzees that did things like drinking and smoke cigarettes and that sort of thing, I’d never had a chimpanzee request weed from me. That was an eye-opener.”
