[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hello, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. The podcast.

ROBERT: The podcast.

JAD: So today on the podcast, we're gonna 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?

ROBERT: Right.

JAD: In this 10 minutes, we're gonna 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 reporter Ben Calhoun and grew out of a conversation that he had with a—well, just listen.

JERRY STONES: Okay. You can start any time you want.

BEN CALHOUN: All right. Thank you very much, sir.

JERRY STONES: You ready to go, are you?

BEN CALHOUN: Yeah, absolutely. Jerry, you ready?

JERRY STONES: Yes, sir. Whenever you are.

BEN CALHOUN: Let's just start with having you introduce yourself.

JERRY STONES: Well, I'm Jerry Stones. I'm the facilities director at the Gladys Porter Zoo.

BEN CALHOUN: That's where Jerry is now. But he told me this story. He was working at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Nebraska, and he was working with this orangutan named Fu Manchu.

JERRY STONES: I call him Fu. Everybody that loved that old boy referred to him as Fu or Phooey.

ROBERT: Wait, let me just set the scene. So we're in the Nebraska zoo. Where in Nebraska is this?

BEN CALHOUN: In Omaha.

ROBERT: Oh, in Omaha. Okay.

BEN CALHOUN: So in the Omaha Zoo. It's fall.

JERRY STONES: 1967, late '66 or '67.

BEN CALHOUN: Kind of cold. The leaves have fallen off the trees. Jerry Stones is just going about his daily business.

ROBERT: What is his daily business?

BEN CALHOUN: 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.

JERRY STONES: And all of a sudden, here come a couple of the keepers running up over this hill. They say, "Jerry. Jerry, Jerry. The orangutans are in the 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 'rangs are in the trees by the elephant building."

ROBERT: So the orangutans are no longer in their assigned area?

BEN CALHOUN: Yes.

JERRY STONES: So I took off with them and 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 orangutans.

ROBERT: Oh, God.

BEN CALHOUN: Yeah.

JERRY STONES: And there was Fu Manchu and his female Tondelayo, and an old female named Sophia, a big heavy set girl, and Toba, a young female, and Dennis, a young male.

And they were all up in the trees.

BEN CALHOUN: Five of them.

JERRY STONES: Five of them up there, you know? Looked like these huge red clumps of grapes.

ROBERT: [laughs]

BEN CALHOUN: At this point, Jerry's a young guy, so he went Tarzan on them.

JERRY STONES: Back in those days, I didn't think anything about going to the top of a tree and grabbing an 'orang by the hand and leading them back out of the trees, even though a couple of them had already bit me.

BEN CALHOUN: So he gets them all back in the exhibit and they didn't know how the orangutans had gotten out.

JERRY STONES: No. I'm questioning everybody and not listening. I have a tendency to do that, you know? Anyway, I can 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.

BEN CALHOUN: 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.

ROBERT: Right.

BEN CALHOUN: Well, down at the bottom of this moat, there was a door to a furnace room.

JERRY STONES: Big metal door that had just a regular lock and everything on it.

BEN CALHOUN: It was always shut.

JERRY STONES: Kept locked all the time.

BEN CALHOUN: That door was open.

JERRY STONES: What had happened is the 'orangs 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.

BEN CALHOUN: One, two, three, four, five. They all emerge from this janitor's closet.

JERRY STONES: And then just pushed the big glass doors open and went out into the park. I figured somebody had not locked the door shut.

ROBERT: Oh, right. Okay.

BEN CALHOUN: So Jerry Stones gathers his zookeepers around and he says ...

JERRY STONES: 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 vowed that this would not happen again. And it didn't. It didn't happen again for about a week.

BEN CALHOUN: Few days go by.

JERRY STONES: I can't remember where I was at.

BEN CALHOUN:  And again.

JERRY STONES: "The orangutans, they're in the trees by elephant building. And Jerry, we—we—the door was locked, Jerry. We didn't do it. We didn't do it," you know, on and on and on.

BEN CALHOUN: So they take them all back into the building.

JERRY STONES: Same thing. I get there, go down to the moat.

BEN CALHOUN: That furnace room door is open again.

JERRY STONES: I was convinced that these people were not smart enough to tie their shoes, you know? And—and—and they said, "But Jerry, we don't go down there." Well, somebody screwed up. So I'm discussing with these keepers what's gonna happen to them in their short lives. Now I swore to God, I said, "Dude, look, next time this happens, somebody's being fired." A few days later ...

BEN CALHOUN: Somebody runs up to him.

JERRY STONES: "Jerry, come."

BEN CALHOUN: "You've gotta come see this."

JERRY STONES: I go, "No, not now."

BEN CALHOUN: They ran out into the zoo, and they went to this hill that's near the exhibit. Peeked over the top of it, commando style. Down at the bottom of the moat, Fu Manchu was messing with that furnace room door.

JAD: What was he doing?

BEN CALHOUN: 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 ...

JERRY STONES: All of a sudden the door opened.

BEN CALHOUN: ... bam!

JERRY STONES: It just popped open and we went bowling down the hill and we caught him before he could do any damage.

ROBERT: You mean the orangutan seemed to be opening the door?

BEN CALHOUN: Yes.

JERRY STONES: You know, I had realized 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 was a few little sticks and stuff laying around. We thought, "Well, he must be using this stuff to pry the door open or do something," you know?

BEN CALHOUN: So Jerry figured, easy solution: clean the exhibit every day.

JERRY STONES: I said, "Look, from now on, we need to go out in this yard every day before we put the 'rangs out 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—in the trees by the elephant building. And we checked it, Jerry. We did everything we were supposed to." You know, they're—they're bound and determined they didn't do anything wrong. So we went out.

BEN CALHOUN: So—so they had been searching this exhibit every day to make sure that he didn't have anything.

JERRY STONES: Yes. There was no—we walked that exhibit. We cleaned them all. We did everything. There was no sticks, no anything we could find that he used to pry the darn door open.

BEN CALHOUN: No tools?

JERRY STONES: No tools, no nothing.

ROBERT: Wait, aren't we now like, how can this be? How can this be?

BEN CALHOUN: How can this be? So he's ushering Fu Manchu through the building. They've got all the orangutans, they're moving them. And all of a sudden he sees in the corner of Fu Manchu's mouth.

JERRY STONES: I saw this little blink of light.

BEN CALHOUN: Just a little glimmer of light.

ROBERT: Like a silver filling or something?

BEN CALHOUN: Yeah.

JERRY STONES: A little shiny thing at the corner of his mouth.

BEN CALHOUN: He walks over, pulls down Fu Manchu's lip. And in there ...

JERRY STONES: Lo and behold, there was a piece of wire about four inches long that he had bent into a horseshoe to fit inside his lower lip and around his gum.

BEN CALHOUN: And he's had it there for so long ...

JERRY STONES: That it was just polished, shiny.

ROBERT: Suggesting what? That this animal has been secreting his actual key all this time?

BEN CALHOUN: Yeah.

JERRY STONES: 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.

BEN CALHOUN: 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?

ROBERT: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

JERRY STONES: 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.

ROBERT: Well, this has been very interesting. It is a really great story.

BEN CALHOUN: Oh, thanks. [laughs]

ROBERT: Very nice. But—but I don't quite understand, like what—what exactly was—why are you telling it to me? What is the reason for this?

BEN CALHOUN: Well, you know, there's a lot of stories of orangutans using tools right?

ROBERT: Yeah.

BEN CALHOUN: But even though this is a funny story, there's actually a really serious question at the heart of it about deception.

ROBERT: Why? What's so important about it?

BEN CALHOUN: 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, you know, consciously deceive them. So I took the Fu Manchu story to a scientist, a primatologist named Rob Shumaker.

ROB SHUMAKER: Hello, Rob Shumaker.

BEN CALHOUN: Hey, Rob, it's Ben. Am I catching you at a good time?

BEN CALHOUN: He's at the Great Ape Trust in Iowa.

ROB SHUMAKER: And I study the behavior and cognition of orangutans.

BEN CALHOUN: And he says the Fu Manchu story doesn't prove that animals are capable of doing this.

ROB SHUMAKER: Well, in—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.

BEN CALHOUN: But, when I really pushed him ...

BEN CALHOUN: I'm just wondering, like, personally, do you believe in his case that it was?

BEN CALHOUN: He said ...

ROB SHUMAKER: You know, if I had to just give an opinion about this ...

BEN CALHOUN: ... that deep down ...

ROB SHUMAKER: ... I have no doubt at all. I 100 percent 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 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.

JERRY STONES: 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—you know, you have to be in awe. I've been around a lot of other orangutans in my almost 45 years in this business, and the 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 this—these wheels turning, trying to figure you out.

JAD: Ben Calhoun is a reporter here in New York City. Thank you to him, and thanks to the people who make Radiolab possible. They are ...

ROBERT: Well, they're the National Science Foundation.

JAD: And they are the Sloan Foundation.

ROBERT: Yep.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

 

-30-

 

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

 

 New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.