Throwback Thursday: ‘The Pope of the Chimps’ by Robert Silverberg

“Go away” is not the chimp euphemism for death. So far as our animals know, no human being has ever died. Chimps die. Human beings go away. We have kept things on that basis from the beginning, not intentionally at first, but such arrangements have a way of institutionalizing themselves.

The first member of the group to die was Roger Nixon, in an automobile accident in the early years of the project long before my time here, and apparently no one wanted to confuse or disturb the animals by explaining what had happened to him, so no explanations were offered. My second or third year here, Tim Lippinger was killed in a ski-lift failure, and again it seemed easier not to go into details with them. And by the time of Will Bechstein’s death in that helicopter crack-up four years ago the policy was explicit:  we chose not to regard his disappearance from the group as death, but mere going away, as if he had only retired.

The chimps do understand death, of course. They may even equate it with going away, as Gonzo’s question suggests. But if they do, they surely see human death as something quite different from chimpanzee death — a translation to another state of being, an ascent on a chariot of fire. Yost believes that they have no comprehension of human death at all, that they think we are immortal, that they think we are gods.