Chimps are, like us, given to occasional violent outbursts, but they have exponentially greater strength. Chimps also have, like us, minds enough to lose and memories that can hasten the process. Wild chimps “recruited” by poachers for entertainment watch as their mothers are gunned down  the only way a chimp mother would ever relinquish a child. Chimps born in captivity are spared that experience, but they suffer the same premature separation from their mothers, isolation from their normal social groups and often mistreatment from trainers and keepers, all traumatic events that have been shown to cause deep psychological scarring and, as in human beings, can lead an animal to overreact to the slightest stimuli: the look in someone’s eye, the color of someone’s hair or, as with Ms. Herold’s friend that day, hair done up in an unaccustomed style. These are, in short, deeply conflicted beings, evolutionary anomalies that only we could have created: chimps with names and yet no recollection of trees.

The most tragic example of this is Lucy, who lived in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Raised from infancy to age 10 as a human child by the psychologist Maurice Temerlin and his wife, Jane, Lucy made her own meals, mixed her own cocktails, flipped through magazines, slept on soft mattresses, raised a pet cat, learned sign language  and had no contact whatsoever with other chimpanzees. By the time she reached sexual maturity, however, she became more and more difficult to handle, and the Temerlins decided they had to let Lucy go.

They chose to send her to a place that was the complete opposite of what she knew, a refuge that reintroduces captive chimps into the wild. Lucy, it will perhaps come as little surprise, struggled mightily. She refused to socialize with the other chimps, to climb trees, forage for food, make nests. She took to waiting beneath trees for the others’ crumbs to fall.

Eventually, Lucy adopted an orphan baby chimp and mothered him until he died three years later of a stomach parasite. She herself barely survived a bout of hookworm, then began to show enough positive signs of socializing with the others that they were all left for a time to their own devices. A year later, however, Lucy’s skeleton was found near the shores of the island refuge, without, some reports said, her hands or feet. The cause of her death isn’t known, but speculation is that Lucy, always the first to greet human visitors, one day unwittingly approached a group of poachers, who readily seized upon their overeager prey.

Lucy, Travis and all the others died for the same reason that Tulp couldn’t draw the actual being seated before him: our ongoing inability to see animals outside our own fraught frame of reference. The chimp that Tulp, in fear of science, preserved as a mythic human, Temerlin tried to make a human, in science’s name. Lost in the shuffle of either agenda were the animals themselves, creatures we still can’t regard and respect for what they are and just leave alone.