The moments in which a highly trained chimp is alone on screen, handling the test-tubes with quite as much dexterity as any actor, are at once disorientating and weirdly scary: here it is, a chimpanzee, doing exactly as well as any actor.
Luckily, Krusty's trained chimp Mr. Teeny sees the life-threatening explosives and throws them into the network executives' office, killing them all, though they later reanimate themselves like the T-1000 from Terminator 2. Bart comes out of his hypnotic state and he and his family serve dinner with Krusty, Bob and Sideshow Mel in a restaurant.
In Hillel Schwartz's book The Culture of the Copy, Gertrude Lintz, whose job was training chimps to act a bit more like people in Tarzan films, explained that her "apes were trying to become something else" – a quote that seems to encapsulate pretty much everything which needs to be said about the recording of a successful cover version.
Later, he stepped to the mike and introduced a new song by saying: "We can't help ourselves, we're trained like chimps.
In the new study, published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, de Waal and his colleagues trained six chimps to recognize that such colored tokens, made of short pieces of plastic pipe, represented one of two ways of dividing six banana slices: an equal 3-3 split or an unequal 5-1 seeit (see video).
Dr Proctor and her colleagues trained their chimp participants to play a similar game, using coloured tokens to represent a reward.
"People don't realize, first, the cruelty, to train the chimp for entertainment.
This August, the Arizona Game and Fish Department ordered a woman to get rid of her chimpanzee, claiming that she brought it into the state illegally — she disputed this and sued for discrimination, arguing that it was a diabetes-assistance chimp trained to fetch sugar during hypoglycemic episodes.
In separate interviews, Mr. Pacelle and Dr. Goodall said chimps who are trained for entertainment are taken away from their social group when they are young, which is very harmful to them.
Both chimps had been trained to "buy" food from the researchers with tokens, colored, 5-centimeter-long pieces of PVC pipe.
