The Human Age Read Online Free PDF

do to a human. Yet they’re also empathic enough to recognize another’s pain, regardless of species, and feel bad about causing it.
    “If he knows how to behave with people, the nicer his life’s going to be—as he gets older he can do things like present body parts so that people can look after him. There’s no guarantee that he’ll be at this zoo forever, so it will be nice to say, This is the language Budi knows. This is what you need to know to communicate with him .”
    Budi’s mom, Puppe, wanders over to see what we’re doing. Elderly by orangutan standards, at thirty-six, she’s the oldest of the zoo’s orangutans, with mature grayish skin (juvenile skin, like Budi’s, is paler), a Buddha belly, and wrinkling around her nose and mouth. Her face looks strikingly humanlike, as does Budi’s. Orangs meet our gaze with familiar faces and expressions across a hazy evolutionary mirage. Small wonder that, in Indonesian, their name means “Orange Forest People.”
    Budi climbs the bars above his mom and dangles onto her head in a handstand, then slides upside down across her shoulders and rolls sideways off her back with a half twist. But she doesn’t seem unduly bothered. After raising five tykes, she’s used to such antics, and in any case she’s always had a placid personality, a trait she’s passed on to Budi, who tends to be relatively quiet as well. Not that orangs make much noise. The males may groan their long call to tell receptive females that they’re hunks and other males not to mess with them, but the females and young always stay so close together that they only need to make subtle squeaks and grunts. Also, they’re virtuosos of the visual. Most of their mutual knowing flows through an anatomy of signs, in which body language and pantomime offera shared vocabulary. So Matt’s work with them always includes gestures as well as words. It’s a technique that’s also gaining popularity among human parents with toddlers—teaching them basic sign language to make themselves understood before they can speak.
    “Show me your tummy,” Matt says, turning his attention to her and quietly gesturing come here with both hands.
    “Let me see your tummy, Puppe,” he says, pointing to her hairy orange belly. His tone with her is tender and respectful.
    Puppe presses her big tummy close to Matt, who gives it a gentle rub. When he offers her some fruit she places a few pieces in one hand and delicately eats them one at a time.
    “Where are you going, kiddo?” Matt says, as Budi runs off to a corner.
    Grabbing a crinkly blue tarpaulin, he wraps himself up Caped Crusader style and returns to iPad play, triggering gorilla and rhino calls. Then Budi reaches for a control bar with buttons outside of the cage, and Matt brings the remote closer to him and lets him push the button that lifts a door on the wall dividing his enclosure from the next one. Hauling the tarpaulin overhead, he kicks a large ball through the door and dashes after it, brings it back, and pushes the button to close the door. Open, close, open, close. He’s like any kid getting a rush out of opening and closing drawers and doors.
    Matt believes in giving the orangs as much volition as possible, and lots of mental and sensory stimulation (or privacy if they wish).
    “We make almost all their choices for them, and an intelligent animal should have opportunities to make more choices themselves,” Matt says, “from deciding on the type of food they want that day to what activities they’d like to do.”
    “They didn’t choose to be ambassadors for their ill-fated species,” I think aloud, wondering if future geologists will discover that we allowed orangutans to go extinct in our age, or if we were able to rescue them at the eleventh hour.
    “No.” His face clouds over.
    “The situation in the wild is very bad, I gather.”
    “The last I’ve heard,” he says sadly, “is that the population is segmented, and right now none of the