By 10 years of age, Susan Savage-Rumbaugh had already undergone two great transforming moments. Both experiences were to exert a powerful influence over the rest of her life. When she was five she saw her first ape. A few years later, she had a near-death experience.

As a result, the impressionable, analytical little girl from Springfield Missouri, who grew up to become one of the world’s elite authorities on the great apes, developed while very young a clear recognition of the importance of individual responsibility.

“From as early as I can recall, there was a belief in some form of existence both before and after birth. From my near-death experience came the certainty that my life would pass before me, just before death, and that I needed to act in such a way as to be happy with what I would see. …Each one of us is here to make the world a better place and it’s up to us to figure out how to use our given talents to do this.”

Her random introduction to apes was a signature event; it was the beginning of a magnificent obsession, one that’s fueled her sense of purpose and her desire to leave the world better than she found it.

“I recognized then they were far more intelligent than other animals I had seen. They really did not seem like animals to me even then and at that age I wanted to learn more about them. They were in a show at the St. Louis zoo and I began to watch the show carefully to try and determine what they did as part of the 'show' and what they did because of their own intelligence. I certainly saw that their own intelligence was guiding their performance very distinctly.”

Today, Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, researcher and professor of biology and psychology, is the first and only scientist to conduct language research with bonobos—members of the gorilla family. Her work with Kanzi, the first ape to learn language the same way as children learn to speak, was heralded by the “MILLENIUM Project” as one of the top 100 most influential works in cognitive science in the 20th century by the University of Minnesota Center for Cognitive Sciences.

The author of Apes, Language and the Human Mind and Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind, (both available at Amazon.com), Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh is currently a lead scientist at Great Ape Trust of Iowa, (www.greatapetrust.org) an internationally acclaimed research center investigating the behavior and intelligence of great apes.

All scientific research at Great Ape Trust—a 200-acre facility featuring lowlands, river forests and lakes—is non-invasive and voluntary. The mission is to provide both sanctuary and an honorable life for the great apes, which include: bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans, while studying their intelligence and advancing their conservation.

In many fundamental ways, the girl predicted the woman. The oldest of seven children, she helped take care of her younger siblings, which stimulated her interest in developmental issues. Significantly, she became acutely aware of the impact of her influence on their abilities even as toddlers.

“I noted, for example, that treating early babbling as though it were speech and attributing intent to the utterances and figuring out the child's meaning from the gestures and the context, lead to the appearance of much earlier interpretable speech in my siblings, than in other children whose parents acted as though they were not able to understand anything until the child was able to produce correctly structured sentences.”

As a kid she also owned a dog and a horse and found herself focused on their intelligence and in the process perhaps inadvertently discovered something about her own gifts.

“In certain situations, with me, horses learned some things with exceptional speed –when supposedly they normally required patient training. It appeared to me that horse trainers focused on the horse but I began to focus on the circumstances surrounding the horse and learning how to intuit what the horse would/could do. In the right circumstances learning could occur very quickly this way.”

Intelligence is a hallmark trait of the eight bonobos who were selected to form the first research basis of Great Ape Trust—Kanzi, Panbanisha, Matata, Nyota, Nathan, Maisha, Elikya and P-Suke—form a stable kinship group possessing a variety of different language and cognitive skills acquired through their exposure to human communication systems.

“There is no real way to tell someone who has never seen bonobos what they are like other than to use analogies with ourselves as they are certainly more like us than they are like any animals. They are highly spirited and highly social. They can be deceptive, in a very intentional manner. They can for example, make it look like another bonobo and/or person is doing something they are not doing and then blame them for it, causing others to attack them.”

They express themselves openly and elaborately through sexual behavior in diverse social situations—often becoming completely uninhibited in large groups, much like human beings who scream rather than speak, says Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh.

“One on one, they are reflective, thoughtful and as intelligent and sensitive as are we, and much more intuitive than are we. The bonobos are part of the very first project ever to investigate ape language and cognitive skills in a socio-cultural kinship matrix in a cross-generational manner...without any form of rote inculcation and/or drilling of language capacities. Other investigators have not attended to environment. They have made the assumption that "apes are apes" no matter what you do. That assumption is clearly incorrect.”

As a result of her unique work conducted over more than 20 years, she has become more conscious of the common ground existing between human beings and bonobos—the latter sharing approximately 98.4 per cent of their DNA in common with the former.

“Formerly, I believed, along with many others, that human beings were fundamentally different from all other animals and that other animals had ways of living that were determined by 'instinct.' I now realize that 'instinct' is more or less a catch all term for behaviors that traditional theories of learning cannot explain readily and for all behaviors that appear rather rapidly and without ostensive training, thus people speak of 'the language instinct.'

“I now know that many complex behaviors can be both acquired and self-generated by complex brains and that the forces which channel behavior in a given direction in what we call a 'species', are to a very large extent, not instinctively driven but culturally transmitted across generations by mechanisms we are only beginning to understand.”

Her goal is to understand how we have come to be as we are—both as a species and as individuals and that such an understanding may help to serve the greater good.

“…We will be able to build better societies—societies in which both people and non-people lead sane and fulfilling lives. What many humans lack at this point in our bio/cultural evolution is the opportunity to lead a fulfilling life in a natural sort of way. Fulfilment seems to be continually sought by a chasing after ever more elusive goals.”

Highly motivated to serve the best interests of apes, she hopes her work will help them to survive in the wild, and give them greater opportunities to be treated with respect and dignity in captivity.

Ultimately, she would like captivity, as we currently know it to vanish altogether.

“…Replaced with an environment that allows such quality of life as to be where the apes choose to live fulfilling lives with many offspring and no sense of being arbitrarily confined or gawked at by visitors as we currently do in zoos. I also hope that the work with apes will help people see non-typical people in more enlightened ways.”

Her work and experiences set her apart from just about everyone—leading to an unusual level of personal and professional reward and some persistent frustrations. For the most part, it’s hard for people to grasp why apes are worth studying. Almost no one else has studied a single group of apes over the course of their lifetime working internally within that group—one in which there are apes who comprehend spoken language and employ symbols and apes who do not.

“It is also difficult for others to understand how much effort is required simply to maintain a happy healthy group of bonobos in a captive environment in a way that permits them the freedom and dignity to interact appropriately with each other and in a way that provides the complex challenges inherent in life in the wild. Finally, others cannot understand how it is that bonobos can comprehend language in a human manner or employ it with others-- people seem to fail to believe every accurate description of this phenomenon that they hear.”

Words like dedication and commitment are frequently accompanied by other words such as sacrifice and normalcy. Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh—who is married to a primate expert—concedes that every aspect of her life is devoted to what some what term her ‘career.’

She takes a slightly different view.

“This did not occur because it was a ‘career,’ to which I was devoting myself, it occurred because it became clear that the bonobos needed and deserved this kind of assistance and because there were so few others that understood and could act as translators and benefactors on their behalf. This commitment has prevented me from engaging in a normal aspect life -- but I cannot say that a more normal life has gone wanting – because I have made these choices of my own freewill.

“Had I chosen to give less to the needs of the bonobos I could have done so and I would have had a much more diverse life that was more rewarding in the traditional sense of the word. But I would also have had to live with the knowledge that I had compromised my efforts to help the bonobo – beings who cannot yet speak to us in a way most people understand, but who do speak. And I would know that I made that choice for personal pleasure. I could not look happily back on my life in my later years, knowing this. Moreover, personal pleasure is always temporary. What I have given up has provided me other kinds of rewards -- ones that I see on the faces of the bonobos and these rewards are not temporary.”

Bonobos, she says, enjoy communicating and interacting with human beings just as we like to do the same with them. “We are both entranced by the similarities and differences between ourselves. We are alike but separate and the separateness informs us both.”

Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh’s new book, Kanzi’s Primal Language: Why the Pan/Homo Culture Made Kanzi Speak (available at Amazon.com) illustrates the extent of those powerful emotional bonds.

In a lifetime of remarkable experiences she cites her most memorable encounter with the great apes.

“The realization that they were speaking and I was, from time to time, understanding.”

And ask her whose company she prefers—man or beast—and you’ll get a decisive answer.

“I prefer a Pan/Homos culture. Bonobos are not beasts.”