The zoo had a tiny monkey that scientists took there in 1974.
The chimpanzee was rescued and brought up by the family. Years passed before it was realized that the Nim project was trying to transform a chimpanzee into a human.
Stephanie LaFarge, a scientist, accidentally became the owner of Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee. Herbert Torres, a professor at Columbia University, organized the study.
He believed that the monkey couldn’t speak because that was a fact. However, he believed that teaching her words in the form of sign language would allow them to communicate freely.
Nim was initially taught how to use the bathroom and eat with a spoon from a plate by Stephanie Lafarge.
The chimpanzee started washing dishes and maintaining order in his room a year later. Nim learned 125 motions after 4 years of diligent study.
When the ongoing learning process was interrupted, his gesture vocabulary quickly dropped to 25. They also chose to end the research in 1977 after the final exam. Because they were unable to transform the monkey into a man.
The Torres experiment is criticized by modern scientists. According to them, the initial attempt to create a monkey as a representative of another species was a failure.
