Radiolab - Fu Manchu

Episode Date: January 26, 2010

In our episode Animal Minds, we asked whether it was possible for one animal to know what was going on in another animal's mind. For us, it was a really about whether we, as humans, can really share a meaningful moment with an animal. In this podcast, we take that question another step further.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. Short! From.

W. N. Y. C. See? Yes. And NPR. Hello, I'm Chad Aboumrod. I'm Robert Krollwich. This is Radio Lab.

The podcast. So today on the podcast, we're going to continue the conversation that we started in our last hour. You know, animal minds. Like, what can you share with? say your dog, like really truly share. Right. In this 10 minutes, we're going to explore a kind of sharing that we didn't get to in our last hour. One that's arguably a deeper kind of sharing.

Comes to us from a reporter, Ben Calhoun, and grew out of a conversation that he had with a, well, just listen. Okay, you can start any time you want. All right. Thank you very much, sir. You ready to go, are you? Yeah, absolutely. Jerry, you ready? Yes, sir, whenever you are.

Let's just start with having you introduce yourself. I'm Jerry Stones. I'm the facilities director at the Gladys Porter Zoo. That's where Jerry is now. But he told me this story. He was working at the Henry Dorley Zoo in Nebraska. And he was working with this orangutan named Fu Manchu. I call him Fu. Everybody that loved that old boy referred to him as Fu or Fooey. Let me just set this scene. So we're in the Nebraska Zoo. Where in Nebraska is this? In Omaha. Oh, in Omaha. Okay. So in the Omaha Zoo, it's fall.

1967, late 66 or 67. Kind of cold. The leaves have fallen off the trees. Jerry Stones is just going about his daily business. What is his daily business? Being in charge of the zookeepers. So he's kind of the top dog among the crew of zookeepers there. And he's up at the office.

And all of a sudden, here come a couple of the keepers running up over this hill. He says, Jerry, Jerry, the orangutans are into trees by the elephant building. The line went dead for a minute because I couldn't figure out. what the blazes they were talking about. And I said, what? And they said, the orangs are in the trees by the elephant building. So the orangutans are no longer in their assigned area. Yes.

So I took off with them. We ran down there. And sure enough, there was this grove of elm trees on this hill overlooking the elephant building. And there, up in the top of these trees, were all the orangutan. Oh, God. Yeah. And there was a fu-manchu and his female, Tandaleo,

and an old female named Sophie, a big, heavyset girl, and Tobah, a young female. and Dennis, a young male, and they were all up in the trees. Five of them. Five of them up there, you know. It looked like these huge red clumps of grapes. At this point, Jerry's a young guy. So he went Tarzan on him.

Back in those days, I didn't think anything about going to the top of a tree and grabbing an arang by the hand and leaning him back out of the trees, even though a couple of them had already bit me. So he gets them all back in the exhibit. And they didn't know how the orangutans had gotten out. No, I'm questioning everybody and not listening. I have a tendency to do that, you know.

Anyway, we get them down to the building. We put them away in the cage, and we go out to see what was going on. And in the exhibit itself, there's moats on each side of this exhibit. You know, like a zoo moat. You've got the exhibit, and then you've got where people look from, and in between there's a moat. Right. Well, down at the bottom of this moat, there was a door to a furnace room.

Big metal door that had just a regular. lock and everything on it. It was always shut. Kept locked all the time. That door was open. What had happened, the Arang's had climbed down in the moat, went into the furnace room, which was in the basement, up a ladder to the janitor's closet on the first floor.

One, two, three, four, five. They all emerged from this janitor's closet. And then just pushed the big glass doors open and went out into the park. I figured somebody had not locked the door shut. Oh, right. So Jerry Stones gathers his zookeepers around and he says...

Basically, we needed to be more careful. Somebody evidently went out in that moat to do something. And when they came back in, they did not lock the door. A mistake. And it should not happen again. And everybody bowed that this would not happen again. And it didn't. It didn't happen again for about a week.

A few days go by. I can't remember where I was at. And again. The rain attends. During the trees by the elephant building. And Jerry, the door was locked, Jerry. We didn't do it. We didn't do it.

You know, on and on and on it. So they take them all back into the building. Same thing I get there, go down to moat. That furnace room door is open again. I was convinced that these people were not sharp enough to tie their shoes, you know. And they said, but Jerry, we don't go down there. While somebody screwed up, so I'm discussing with these keepers what's going to happen to them in their short lives. And I swore to God, I said, look, next time this happens, somebody's being fired.

a few days later. Somebody runs up to him. You got to come to see this. I don't know. Not now. They ran out into the zoo, and they went to this hill that's near the exhibit, peaked over the top of it, commando style. Down at the bottom of the moat, Fumanchu was messing with that furnace room door. What was he doing?

They couldn't exactly see what he was doing because of how far away they were, but he was fiddling with the lock. and he's fiddling and he's fiddling and then all of a sudden the door opened. Bam. It popped open and we went boiling down the hill and we caught him before he could do any damage. You mean the orangutan seemed to be opening the door? Yes.

You know, I realize now it wasn't their fault and, you know, I ate the crow that I had to eat. And we still didn't know exactly how he did it. And we went out there and we looked around and there were a few little sticks and stuff laying around. We thought, well, he must be using this stuff to pry that. the door open or do something, you know. So, Jerry figured easy solution. Clean the exhibit every day. I said, look, from now on, we need to go out in this yard every day before we put the

rangs up and search that place over and again. You know, make sure there's no sticks or anything out there because I don't know how he did it, but he did it. You know, we knew what the problem was and we knew how to deal with it. Went along like that for a week or two, and then here come the keepers. Jerry, the orangutans are in the trees by the elephant building. And we checked it, Jerry. We did everything we were supposed to do.

They're bound and determined. They didn't do anything wrong. So they had been searching this exhibit every day to make sure that he didn't have anything. There was no, we walked that exhibit. We cleaned them. We did everything. There was no sticks, no anything we could find that he used to pry the darn door open. No tools.

No tools. No nothing. Wait, aren't we now like, how can this be? How can this be? How can this be? So he's ushering Fumanchu through the building. They've got all the orangutans. They're moving him.

And all of a sudden, he sees in the corner of Fumanchu's mouth. I saw this little blink of light. Just a little glimmer of light. Like a silver filling or something? Yeah. A little shiny thing. It's a corner of his mouth. He walks over, pulls down Fumanchu's lip, and in there.

Lo and behold, there was a piece of wire about four inches long. that he had bent into a horseshoe to fit inside of his lower lip and around his gum. And he's had it there for so long. That it was just polished shiny. Suggesting what? That this animal has been secreting his actual key all this time? Yeah. All this stuff that we're picking up and hauling away to keep him from opening the door

was of no use because he was carrying his own key with him all the time. What he had done was stick the wire into the space between the door jam and the door. wrap it around the latch and pull it back. It's like the credit card trick, you know, from the movies. Nobody taught him this. Nobody ever did anything like that around him. Not only did he make the tool, but he put it in a place where I couldn't find it.

He was smart enough to know that if I found it, I'd take it away from him. The locksmith Union of the United States gave him an honorary membership, and the zoo in Omaha had that hanging on their wall for years. I don't know if they still have it or not. Well, this has been very interesting. It's a really great story. Oh, thanks. Very nice.

But I don't quite understand. What exactly was it? Why are you telling it to me? What is the reason for this? Well, you know, there's a lot of stories of orangutans using tools, right? Yeah. But even though this is a funny story, there's actually a really serious question at the heart of it about deception. Why?

What's so important about it? Well, deception is special. It requires that the deceiver. get into the mind of the person who they're deceiving. And nobody has been able to prove that animals can actually do this. Know a human being's thoughts intimately enough. Get inside their heads and consciously deceive them. So, I took the Fu Manchu story to a scientist, a primatologist named Rob Shoemaker.

Hello, Rob Shewaker. Hey, Rob, it's Ben. Am I catching you? He's at the Great Ape Trust in Iowa. And I study the behavior and cognition of orangutans. And he says the Fumanchu story doesn't prove that animals are capable of doing this. Well, in this particular case, I can't prove it one way or another. There's always a question of whether or not it was really happening.

But when I really pushed him... I'm just wondering, like, personally, do you believe in his case that it was? said, you know, if I had to just give an opinion about this, that deep down, I have no doubt at all. I 100% believe it was deception, keeping a tool concealed over a whole number of days and timing his escapes so that no one was around to see him. I think the evidence is just absolutely compelling to suggest that Fu Manchu was able to deceive and was deceiving. And if someone really really has that much trouble believing it, I think then maybe they ought to question, is it because I don't believe what I'm hearing or I don't want to believe it because it's an orangutan.

If they don't want to believe it because it's an orangutan, that's no excuse. It was like, who taught him? I just, I couldn't figure out, I mean, when you think you're so smart that all the other animals are way below you, and all of a sudden you find this animal that does these sort of things, and you know people that couldn't open the door with a key. Right there, you have to be in awe. I've been around a lot of other orangutans in my almost 45 years in this business.

And next time you go to a zoo, and you're around one, you just look at their face and you look at their eyes. And you can see in there, there's these wheels turning, trying to figure you out. Ben Calhoun is a reporter here in New York City. him and thanks to the people who make radio lab possible, they are. Well, they're the National Science Foundation.

And they are the Sloan Foundation. Yep. I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Kulwicz. Thanks for listening.