Nick Pyenson

This guy's going to need a little friend and I'm going to be it.

I was kind of surprised that the New York people had so much trouble controlling them and he was biting everybody and that sort of thing.

It didn't occur to me that I was going to have any trouble at all.

And

And in no time, we were rough and tumble playing and doing the kind of things, you know, you have to be a chimp to be with a chimp.

You can approximate the relationship that chimps have with one another if you're willing to roll around and tickle and play and that kind of stuff.

So that's what I did.

I can.

That was a day that I'd spent out with the chimps all day, and I'd taken four or five chimps out and came back, and we had squared them away, got them back in their cages, and I had walked out to my car to drive away and come home.

And as I was getting in my car about to close the door, I looked at the chimps all lined up in their cage and they were looking at me behind the bars and I was going home.

Air conditioning, a TV and that sort of thing and a refrigerator with whatever I wanted in it.

And they were in that cage at the mercy of whatever it was that we provided for them.

And that's it.

They couldn't get out.

They couldn't go home.

So all of those philosophical questions just rushed into my brain right at the same time.

And from that point on,

Things changed for me because up to that point I thought it was cool and everything was cool.

That day I realised everything's not cool and everything is not good and I was determined to do something about it.

The institute closed.