Chantek (born 1978, at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research CenterinAtlanta, Georgia) is a male Orangutan who was taught to use sign languagebyanthropologist Dr. H. Lyn Miles. Chantek knows hundreds of signs, makes and uses tools, and creates paintings, necklaces, crafts & music.
Chantek has a vocabulary of several hundred signs, comprehends both spoken English and American Sign Language, and is one of only a handful of signing primates scattered throughout the United States. Washoe, the 32-year-old female chimpanzee who is one of the most famous, lives in Ellensburg, Washington. Koko, a signing gorilla, lives in Woodside, California.
Orangutans comprise an exceedingly intelligent great ape species with long arms and reddish, sometimes brown, hair, and are native to Malaysia and Indonesia. The term Orangutan is derived from the Malay Orang Hutan meaning 'man of the forest'.
Like children, Chantek prefers to use a name rather than a pronoun - as the reference is fixed - even when talking to a person. He even invents signs of his own (e.g., 'eye-drink' for contact lens solution, and 'dave missing finger' for a special friend). He developed referential ability and pointed to and showed objects much as human children do. Chantek uses adjectives to specify attributes, such as "red bird", and "white cheese food eat." Chantek overgeneralizes in interesting ways. For example, he uses the sign 'lyn' for all caregivers, but never to strangers.
Chantek also demonstrates true self-awareness, grooms himself in a mirror, uses signs in mental planning and deception, and learned roles - and role reversals - in games like 'Simon Says'. Like many other Orangutans who have demonstrated phenomenal problem solving skills akin to Houdini's, Chantek exhibits certain intutitive and thinking character traits comparable to the rational archetype of human engineers. Indeed, his intelligence, language, and thinking abilities qualify him for personhood in the opinion of a growing number of scientists and other experts.
Chantek is not part of any zoo exhibit; he lives in a habitat a short ride from the main zoo grounds of Zoo Atlanta in Georgia, after the Yerkes Center gave him to the zoo in 1997. While he has a roomy habitat and plenty of trees for swinging from branch to branch (brachiation), as well as a hammock and private space, his home in Atlanta is still a cage.
Miles raised Chantek as a signing infant from the age of nine months, rearing him as much as possible as a human child on the campus of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Miles toilet-trained Chantek, gave him chores like cleaning his room, and even gave him an allowance. His favorite thing to spend it on was fast food. He reached twice the weight of a normal male Orangutan, however, and his weight threatened to become a lifelong problem. Before his arrival in 1997 at Zoo Atlanta, Chantek had returned to the University, living in a trailer at Lyn Miles' home for about nine years, but not until after a short return to Yerkes.
Growing up in a human setting, Chantek became really fat, about five hundred pounds. Concerned his lungs might collapse, scientists prescribed a strict diet. Five hundred pounds of blissful content became four hundred pounds of inspired rationality. Determined to find food while on his diet, and true to the clever spirit imbued in the DNA of his pedigree, Chantek pulled off an entirely predictable escape. Orangutans are notorious for their clever engineering feats, frequently baffling their captors by escaping confinement (e.g., 'Houdini', 'Hairy Houdini' etc.). Chantek was later found, gorging himself on monkey chow from an up-ended food barrel.
Thus, in 1986, when Chantek was eight, the University shipped him back to Yerkes, allowing Miles only limited visits for a few years. For a while, Yerkes even refused to allow Miles merely to see Chantek.
Dr. Miles would prefer freedom for Chantek, even going so far as to advocate personhood for Chantek and other great apes. Personhood is a term often used in the field of animal intelligence to denote conscious awareness, language, acculturation, and socialization. Miles and like minded advocates seek to expand personhood to great apes, to the extent that - eventually - rights of personhood would be conferred under the law.
To further her objectives, Miles created Project Chantek, seeking to understand the mind of an Orangutan. Miles hopes her findings will help ascertain how human symbolic systems may have evolved and developed. Unique among ape studies, her project has emphasized development of cultural models and processes in Chantek’s upbringing. Her work is supported by the Chantek Foundation, whose mission is to develop greater scientific understanding of rangutans, support cultural and language research with Chantek and other Orangutans, foster understanding of great apesaspersons, promote orangutan conservation through awareness of great ape intelligence, establish culture-based sanctuaries for great apes, and foster education about building a bridge between humans and great apes.
The Chantek Foundation is a member of ApeNet, founded by musician Peter Gabriel to link great apes through the internet, creating the first interspecies internet communication.
