In Roger's World, Charles Siebert encounters a chimpanzee in a Florida retirement home for former ape entertainers, stars of the big screen, TV shows and commercials, and Big Top circuses. Of the 46 retirees at this facility, Roger, a 28-year-old former Ringling Brothers entertainer, is the only one who still lives alone. Born in captivity, and raised all his life around human beings, he still prefers human company to that of his fellow chimps.
Roger's World unfolds over the course of Siebert's last night with Roger. They sit together, a chimpanzee and a man, two beings separated by no more than some metal bars and a few strands of DNA; each of them trying, in a sense, to get past himself in order to get at the other's essence - like two primates, you might say, passing in the night.
Within this account, Siebert tells a larger story: the tales of his travels in Africa - where he encountered, among other things, elephants suffering from a collective nervous breakdown, and some of the last remaining chimps in the wild - and his travels in the U.S. through the dark heart of captive chimpdom at a moment in history when the number of chimps in the wilderness is rapidly declining, even as those in captivity continues to rise.
Siebert met chimpanzees everywhere in the course of his civil safari: chimps in research labs and roadside zoos; chimps dressed up in American flags and party caps for children's birthdays; chimps injected with everything from HIV to hepatitis for drug tests; chimps that have been strapped to everything from high-speed centrifuges and crash sleds for space flight and seat-belt tests; chimps in breeding compounds for making more chimps; and chimps in private homes and retirement homes for former ape actors.
In the end, Siebert's vigil with Roger leads to a number of moving revelations - not only about Roger and himself, but about the fraught moment that we humans have arrived at in our relationship with our fellow creatures. Roger's World suggests a new and positive way for human beings to see our fellow creatures, and to see ourselves in relation to them.
