Author(s): Charles Siebert

Science

In Roger's World, Charles Siebert encounters a chimpanzee in a Florida retirement home for former ape entertainers, stars of the big screen, TV shows and commercials, and Big Top circuses. Of the 46 retirees at this facility, Roger, a 28-year-old former Ringling Brothers entertainer, is the only one who still lives alone. Born in captivity, and raised all his life around human beings, he still prefers human company to that of his fellow chimps. Roger's World unfolds over the course of Siebert's last night with Roger. They sit together, a chimpanzee and a man, two beings separated by no more than some metal bars and a few strands of DNA; each of them trying, in a sense, to get past himself in order to get at the other's essence - like two primates, you might say, passing in the night. Within this account, Siebert tells a larger story: the tales of his travels in Africa - where he encountered, among other things, elephants suffering from a collective nervous breakdown, and some of the last remaining chimps in the wild - and his travels in the U.S. through the dark heart of captive chimpdom at a moment in history when the number of chimps in the wilderness is rapidly declining, even as those in captivity continues to rise. First published 2009.