With ASL Washoe learned how to combine words to create new meanings, to understand and follow grammatical rules. Some scientists, like Herbert Terrace, scoffed. Chimps, they said, learned signs only to obtain food, to please their handlers. What's more, chimps taught ASL teach it on their own to their offspring. Much of this book is fascinating for Fouts' musings on linkages between chimpanzee and human languages.
Human language is simply a more specialized version of chimpspeak.
The stories Fouts tells are often conversation-stoppers. Using ASL, Fouts pleaded with a subject who stubbornly refused to eat his supper to think of the poor starving chimps in Africa. This book also tells, in candid fashion, Fouts' personal story. Fouts rolls out heavy artillery against several other chimp researchers, some of whom display all the cold conscience of a Nazi doctor at the gates of Auschwitz. One such was William Lemmon, an Oklahoma psychologist-gauleiter who controlled his charges with cattle prods, Dobermans and barbed wire, literally insisting that they kiss his ring.