Deborah Fouts - Professional Background

Professional Background

Roger and Deborah Fouts are co-directors of the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute.

The Foutses have been a part of Project Washoe since 1967. Project Washoe is the first and longest running project of its kind. Washoe was the very first nonhuman animal to acquire the rudiments of an otherwise fully complex human language, American Sign Language for the Deaf (ASL). The project now focuses on the signing of its four sign language using chimpanzees who live together as a social group: Washoe, Tatu, Dar and Loulis. The chimpanzees use some of the signs of ASL in their interactions with humans and with each other, to comment on their environment, but mostly to make requests, and sometimes answer questions and describe activities and objects. Loulis acquired a total of about five signs from his adoptive mother Washoe and the other chimpanzees, becoming the first chimpanzee to acquire five signs of a human language from chimpanzees thus demonstrating the ability of the chimpanzee to culturally transmit five signs of a language across generations.

Together the Foutses have more than 100 articles published in scientific journals and books. In 1981 they founded Friends of Washoe a non-profit organization dedicated to the welfare of chimpanzees. They have resided in Ellensburg since 1980 and with hundreds of students they have conducted their research and enriched the lives of the chimpanzees at Central Washington University. In 1992 they founded at CWU the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute (CHCI), a sanctuary for chimpanzees. CHCI is dedicated to the protection of chimpanzees, the education of students and public alike. Recent research at CHCI has focused on the private signing of the chimpanzees, imaginary play and signing, chimpanzee to chimpanzee conversations, conversation repair, representational drawing, and the symbolic representation of spatial relations with ASL signs as well as a comparison of gestural dialects in this population of captive chimpanzees and three populations of free-living chimpanzees. The Foutses are beginning a new research direction and will be studying four different free-living communities of chimpanzees in Africa to record and analyze their behavior for gestural dialects.

The Foutses are very active in their efforts to improve the living conditions and treatment of chimpanzees in captivity by developing and promoting humane care techniques and programs. In addition, they are active in efforts to protect the free-living chimpanzees in Africa. The Foutses played a role in the U. S. Fish and Wildlife, raising chimpanzees in Africa from "Threatened" to "Endangered" species status (see Endangered Species Act). The Foutses are very active in the Sanctuary movement to provide for chimpanzees used in and retired from the Air Force Space program and other biomedical research (see Animal Testing). They are active as well in promoting basic rights for Great Apes, as founding members of, and signatory contributors to, the Great Ape Project.

In 1997, Roger Fouts wrote Next of Kin a memoir of their lives with Washoe. It was selected by The Los Angeles Times as one of top 100 books of 1997.