Humans are often thought to be the only animals capable of language. But it's difficult to prove a negative like this because we'll never definitively know the subjective interior monologues of other ...

Back in the 1970s, a chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky took part in a Columbia University research study called "Project Nim." Project Nim was led by Herbert Terrace, a psychologist at Columbia who was ...

In this archival episode of The Ear, reporter Alicia Theologides Rodriguez commemorates the 50th anniversary of a controversial Columbia study that explored whether chimps possess the cognitive ...

Many people feel comforted and understood by animals. In that sense, they communicate with them. What they can't do, however, is talk with an animal. Whereas all animals, ourselves included, ...

"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." That's the longest string of words that Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who scientists raised as a human and taught sign ...

Could a chimpanzee raised from infancy by a human family bridge the gap between species--and change the way we think about the boundaries between animal and human? Here is the strange and moving ...

In what is surely one of the most memorable and intelligent recent books about animal-human interaction, Hess (Lost and Found: Dogs, Cats and Everyday Heroes at a Country Animal Shelter) tells the ...