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The Wauchula Woods Accord: Toward a New Understanding of Animals Hardcover – June 9, 2009

by Charles Siebert (Author)

17 customer reviews

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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.

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Editorial Reviews

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

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Product details

Hardcover: 208 pages
Publisher: Scribner (June 9, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0743295862
ISBN-13: 978-0743295864
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.9 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 17 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,393,350 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #182 in Books > Science & Math > Biological Sciences > Zoology > Primatology
- #215 in Books > Science & Math > Biological Sciences > Animals > Apes & Monkeys
- #709 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Anthropology > Physical

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This book is profound; its implications far-reaching

January 29, 2011

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Enthralling. Disturbing. Up-lifting.

Yes, somehow author Charles Siebert manages a hat trick.

The central narrative in the book The Wauchula Woods Accord, is the surprising connection, i.e. relationship that spontaneously happens between the author and Roger, a "humanzee": a chimpanzee that has spent his entire life living with humans, now being forced to retire in the company of other chimps. Roger must somehow find his inner chimp relinquishing his humanity. But is that even possible? Can his human/chimp psyche even be stretched that far? Isn't it too much to ask of him emotionally? And just where is the line between humanity and "chimpanity"?

Even though Roger's great ape retirement village is idyllic, he sits alone, plagued by insomnia, self-isolated from the other members of his species.

As the book progresses, Siebert dismantles the notion of anthropomorphism: the projection of human behaviors and emotions onto animals. He writes about other very "human-like" qualities found in mammals--great apes, elephants, whales, dolphins--completely dispelling the myth that only people have personalities, emotions, remembrances.

Siebert writes, "And yet it makes no difference any longer that we can't, as the standard warning against anthropomorphizing goes, possibly know what Roger is thinking. Or what a Roger day is like, or a whale's, or an elephant's, or a parrot's.

"That is one of the peculiar things about this moment we've arrived at with the animals. We've come to know enough now about the shared biological underpinnings of so many of those brains in Dr. Hof's cooler that somehow the question of what Roger's or another animal's day might be like has become wholly incidental to the fact that they clearly have days, too, and deeply wounded ones.

"Science has obviated anthropomorphism--the crime of projecting our stories upon the animals--by, of all things, repeatedly pointing out to us just how uncomfortably close to our stories so many aspects of theirs actually are."

Along the way, many of Siebert's side trips are disturbing as he details some of the anguish our kind has wrought upon the world of their kind, but in the final pages he restores our humanity, or at least the sense that it IS possible to heal a wounded psyche. And in the end we come to realize that our species is not alone, only disturbingly self-isolated like Roger.

This book is profound; its implications far-reaching. Why look to outer space for other intelligent life when it surrounds us here on earth.

6 people found this helpful

Must read if you care about the well-being of animals

March 14, 2016

Verified Purchase

My immediate response to the final pages of this book was a sense of gratitude to Charles Seibert for having shared his journey with Roger, the chimp with whom he experienced a deep connection.

The book is a thoughtful and beautifully written exploration into the lives of primates and other animals who are placed in sanctuaries and other sheltered environments once they are no longer useful as research subjects or attractions. I recommend this book to anyone who has ever looked into the eyes of a being of another species, and knew without a doubt that an intelligent creature was looking back.

Amazon Customer

Explores, without being maudlin, our relationship with the ...

January 4, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Explores, without being maudlin, our relationship with the animals that entertain us, educate us, and inspire us. Mr. Siebert takes you through a winding tale that sometimes seems wandering until it all comes together in the end with a quiet, reflective sunrise. This book changed my thinking and taught me to step back and observe primate behavior (ours included).

No Stone Left Unturned

This was a great story. The power of the author's story makes ...

November 21, 2015

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

This was a great story. The power of the author's story makes the sometimes not so great writing very unimportant to the telling. Thanks Mr.Siebert.

best book i've ever read

February 23, 2012

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

BEST book I have ever read. Amazing structure, writing, concepts, depth of humanity. I am no writer, however, I grew up in the woods & the author captured above & beyond what I wish I could express myself being one with nature. Was passed on via a friend who reads voraciously, the author & my friend met in the EV, where we live. Very out of element place for a book to strike a cord with folks who feel deeply within nature since NYC is no longer nature. I cried, I laughed, tried to get follks to read & love like I do to so many friends. Literally the best book I've ever read.

February 16, 2016

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

You will change your thimking

Evocative, Moving, Enlightening Nonfiction!

December 23, 2012

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

A great nonfiction work that often brought me to tears as reading it opened up new avenues of understanding the plight of animals in our world.

August 23, 2015

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

thanks

Most recent customer reviews

Dawn Killen-Courtney

A Remarkable Document

Before I even got to the title page of this book I found myself reading an excerpt from a poem by Pablo Neruda:
"It so happens I'm tired of being a man...Read more

Published on July 9, 2011

An anecdotal conceit

What I liked:

Mr. Siebert created a complex structure to tell his story, sort of like the Russian nested figurines. Throughout, we are with Mr.Read more

Published on May 22, 2010

Compelling and heart breaking....

I could not put this book down and cried at times while reading this book. The story is so compelling and I have for years believed that our use of primates for medical research,...Read more

Published on April 18, 2010

Robert Carlberg

Animals Are People Too

I don't know if Charles Siebert's long meditation on animal intelligence amounts to "a new understanding of animals" but it certainly casts light on our shameful exploitation of...Silent Partners: The Legacy of the Ape Language Experiments (1986).Read more

Published on January 14, 2010

Amazon Customer

@#$%^&* Writers!

Ignore the #of stars I entered. My browser's screwed up, and I can't see what I'm checking.

I catalog books for a library.Read more

Published on November 13, 2009

English United States

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