The Wauchula Woods Accord: Toward a New Understanding of Animals

Product Description An award-winning journalist’s all-night vigil with a retired chimp performer named Roger blossoms into a whole new way to regard our fellow creatures as well as ourselves. While researching a recent New York Times Magazine cover story about chimpanzees, Charles Siebert visited a retirement home for former ape movie stars and circus entertainers in Wauchula, Florida known as the Center for Great Apes. There Siebert encountered Roger, a twenty-eight-year-old former Ringling Brothers star who seemed convinced he knew the author from some other time and place. Haunted by Roger’s response, Siebert takes up residence at the Center for Great Apes and, in the course of one late-night visit to a sleepless Roger’s quarters, gets to the bottom of this mysterious connection between himself and his simian counterpart. The result is The Wauchula Woods Accord, a strikingly written, wide-ranging physical and metaphysical foray into the increasingly fraught frontier between humans and other animals; a journey that encompasses many of the author’s encounters with chimpanzees and other animals, as well as the latest scientific discoveries that underscore our intimate biological bonds not only with our nearest kin, but with far more remote-seeming life-forms. By journey’s end, the reader arrives at a deeper understanding both of Roger and of our numerous other animal selves, a recognition—an accord— that carries a new sense of responsibility for how we view and treat all animals, including ourselves. From School Library Journal While visiting a primate sanctuary for a story on captive chimpanzees, Siebert (Wickerby: An Urban Pastoral) encounters Roger, a chimpanzee formerly used in the entertainment industry, who seems to remember him. In one transformative night, Siebert sits up until dawn with Roger, repairing their apparently severed bond, pondering the meaning of humanity's relationship to nonhuman animals, and recounting some of the ugly history of exotic animals killed, captured, bred, and abused by humans in the name of entertainment and research. While Roger seems to find healing in the interaction, the human finds metaphysical escape. Seeing in Roger reflections of himself, Siebert concludes that a self-centered humanity may stop abusing nonhumans if we perceive them to be part of ourselves. While his musings occasionally come across as self-absorbed, Siebert's writing is fresh and evocative, and his sensitive and sustained attention to Roger is moving. Given the popularity of human/animal friendship stories, this book will likely be of interest to readers in both public and academic libraries.—Leslie J. Patterson, Chicago P.L. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist While writing a story about chimps for the New York Times Magazine, Siebert was visiting sanctuaries established for former ape actors and research animals when he came to a facility in Wauchula, Florida. As soon as chimpanzee Roger saw him, he stood up and gave three loud, slow claps, causing the caregivers to comment on the immediate recognition. Siebert asked to stay and visit with Roger, wondering at this connection with an animal he’d never met, and the result is this elegiac meditation on the bond between human and ape, centered on one night that the author spent with Roger as he and the chimp sit and commune through looks and body language. This leads the author delving into our treatment of nonhuman animals and finding the connection that he and Roger both sought. --Nancy Bent Review " Simply amazing. Siebert is our most inventive and eloquent writer on the subject of the natural world, and The Wauchula Woods Accord is his masterpiece: provocative, witty, deeply moving, and above all, essential." -- Alan Burdick, author of Out of Eden About the Author Charles Siebert is the author of two memoirs and a novel. A poet, journalist, essayist, and contributing writer for The N