On June 12, the team waited for the translators to complete work on the source material. Checked translations were expected to be ready within two days. But a trip to Africa for Amy and two staff members would cost at least thirty thousand dollars, a substantial fraction of their total annual operating budget. And transporting a gorilla halfway around the world involved a bewildering tangle of customs regulations and bureaucratic red tape.
Clearly, they needed expert help, but they were not sure where to turn. And then, on June 13, a Dr. Karen Ross from one of their granting institutions, the Earth Resources Wildlife Fund, called from Houston to say that she was leading an expedition into the Congo in two days' time. And although she showed no interest in taking Peter Elliot or Amy with her, she conveyed - at least over the telephone - a confident familiarity with the way expeditions were assembled and managed in far-off places around the world.
When she asked if she could come to San Francisco to meet with Dr. Elliot, Dr. Elliot replied that he would be delighted to meet with her, at her convenience.
3.Legal Issues.
PETER ELLIOT REMEMBERED JUNE 14, 1979, AS A day of sudden reverses. He began at 8 A.M. in the San Francisco law firm of Sutherland, Morton & O'Connell, because of the threatened custody suit from the PPA - a suit which became all the more important now that he was planning to take Amy out of the country.
He met with John Morton in the firm's wood-paneled library overlooking Grant Street. Morton took notes on a yellow legal pad. "I think you're all right," Morton began, "but let me get a few facts. Amy is a gorilla?"
"Yes, a female mountain gorilla."
"Age?"
"She's seven now."
"So she's still a child?"
Elliot explained that gorillas matured in six to eight years, so that Amy was late adolescent, the equivalent of a sixteen-year-old human female.
Morton scratched notes on a pad. "Could we say she's still a minor?"
"Do we want to say that?"
"I think so."
"Yes, she's still a minor," Elliot said.
"Where did she come from? I mean originally."
"A woman tourist named Swenson found her in Africa, in a village called Bagimindi. Amy's mother had been killed by the natives for food. Mrs. Swenson bought her as an infant."
"So she was not bred in captivity," Morton said, writing on his pad.
"No. Mrs. Swenson brought her back to the States and donated her to the Minneapolis zoo."
"She relinquished her interest in Amy?"
"I assume so," Elliot said. "We've been trying to reach Mrs. Swenson to ask about Amy's early life, but she's out of the country. Apparently she travels constantly; she's in Borneo. Anyway, when Amy was sent to San Francisco, I called the Minneapolis zoo to ask if I could keep her for study. The zoo said yes, for three years."
"Did you pay any money?"
''No.
"Was there a written contract?"
"No, I just called the zoo director."
Morton nodded. "Oral agreement. . ." he said, writing. "And when the three years were up?"
"That was the spring of 1976. 1 asked the zoo for an extension of six years, and they gave it to me."
"Again orally?"
"Yes. I called on the phone."
"No correspondence?"
"No. They didn't seem very interested when I called. To tell you the truth, I think they had forgotten about Amy. The zoo has four gorillas, anyway."
Morton frowned. "Isn't a gorilla a pretty expensive animal? I mean, if you wanted to buy one for a pet or for the circus."
"Gorillas are on the endangered list; you can't buy them as pets. But yes, they'd be pretty expensive."
"How expensive?"
"Well, there's no established market value, but it would be twenty or thirty thousand dollars."
"And all during these years, you have been teaching her language?"
"Yes," Peter said. "American Sign Language. She has a vocabulary of six hundred and twenty words now."
"Is that a lot?"
"More than any known primate."
Morton nodded, making notes. "You work with her every day in ongoing research?"
"Yes."
"Good," Morton said. "That's been very important in the animal custody cases so far."
For more than a hundred years, there had been organized movements in Western countries to stop animal experimentation. They were led by the anti-vivisectionists, the RSPCA, the ASPCA. Originally these organizations were a kind of lunatic fringe of animal lovers, intent on stopping all animal research.
Over the years, scientists had evolved a standard defense acceptable to the courts. Researchers claimed that their experiments had the goal of bettering the health and welfare of mankind, a higher priority than animal welfare. They pointed out that no one objected to animals being used as beasts of burden or for agricultural work - a life of drudgery to which animals had been subjected for thousands of years. Using animals in scientific experiments simply extended the idea that animals were the servants of human enterprises.
In addition, animals were literally brutes. They had no self-awareness, no recognition of their existence in nature. This meant, in the words of philosopher George H. Mead, that "animals have no rights. We are at liberty to cut off their lives; there is no wrong committed when an animal's life is taken away. He has not lost anything
Many people were troubled by these views, but attempts to establish guidelines quickly ran into logical problems. The most obvious concerned the perceptions of animals further down the phylogenetic scale. Few researchers operated on dogs, cats, and other mammals without anesthesia, but what about annelid worms, crayfish, leeches, and squid? Ignoring these creatures was a form of "taxonomic discrimination." Yet if these animals deserved consideration, shouldn't it also be illegal to throw a live lobster into a pot of boiling water?