Then someone mentions the word ‘omelette’ — a Kanzi favourite, not just to eat but even to cook — and he’s off. He clambers on to a ledge in the viewing room of his concrete, steel and glass home and positions himself in front of a large, touch-sensitive computer screen showing a grid of some 400 symbols, or ‘lexigrams’, each representing a particular object or idea.
A huge forefinger skims dextrously over the icons, pressing the ones he wants. The computer voices his selections with an American accent.
He summons eggs, onions, lettuce, grapes, pineapple. His four-year-old son, Teco, comes up behind and presses ‘M&Ms’, pointing at a table behind me where, just visible, there is indeed a bag of the sweets.
Smart kid — he’ll go far.
‘Do you like M&Ms, Kanzi?’ I ask. Kanzi shoots me a withering look — one of many — that seems to say ‘What sort of bloody idiotic question is that?’
Not since I asked the actor Kevin Costner if it was true that he was in a relationship with the model Carla Bruni has an interview been this tricky.
Winningly charming and jaw-droppingly accomplished as he may be, this pygmy chimp (or bonobo) — a fire-starting, tool-making, marshmallow-toasting marvel of the animal world — isn’t going to make my job any easier.
And why should he? This remarkable creature is a superstar. For years he has been changing the way we humans think about our relatives in the animal world, and challenging our assumed superiority to them.
The bonobo is a more gentle and intelligent cousin of the chimpanzee. Its only natural homeland is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Bonobos are our closest animal relative (sharing about 99 per cent of our DNA) and physically resemble our distant ancestors.
Kanzi, now 33, has been fully immersed in the human world, and the English language, since birth. Scientists who have studied Kanzi all his life say he possesses a vocabulary big enough to follow and contribute to simple conversations.
He has learned to ‘say’ about 500 words through the keyboard and understands about 3,000 of them. Equally importantly, he was the first primate who didn’t acquire language through direct training.
Instead, much like a human child, he picked it up simply by listening as researchers tried to teach his foster mother. (Teco is now doing the same by watching his father.)
Through a mixture of observation and encouragement, Kanzi has also picked up an astonishing set of manual skills.
He can cook, make knives out of stone and play the arcade game Pac-Man (he can get past the first round — a feat beyond many humans). He and his similarly talented late sister, Panbanisha, once even jammed with British rock star Peter Gabriel, playing along on a keyboard as the former Genesis man played a synthesizer.
