Orangutans have long captured the human imagination, their expressive eyes and human-like behaviors drawing parallels with our own species. Yet few individuals have had the opportunity to dive as deeply into the minds and lives of these great apes as Gary L. Shapiro. A pioneer in primate communication, Dr. Shapiro’s work spans five decades, encompassing not only groundbreaking studies in orangutan cognition but also a lifelong commitment to their conservation. Now, as his book Out of the Cage: My Half Century Journey from Curiosity to Concern for Indonesia’s “Persons of the Forest” prepares to hit the shelves, Shapiro reflects on the unique journey that brought him from the academic study of animal behavior to the jungles of Borneo, where he lived among and communicated with ex-captive orangutans. Shapiro’s foray into the world of orangutan communication was almost serendipitous. As a graduate student in the 1970s, he was inspired by the pioneering work of Drs. Allen and Beatrix Gardner, who had famously taught a chimpanzee to use American Sign Language. Shapiro soon found himself at Fresno City Zoo, where a juvenile orangutan named Aazk became the first of her kind to be taught an artificial symbolic language. This initial research planted the seeds of what would become Shapiro’s lifelong fascination with orangutan cognition and communication, leading him to a remote part of Indonesian Borneo in the late 1970s, where he conducted the first study of sign language in great apes living in their natural environment. Ex-captive orangutans at Camp Leakey in…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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