Roger's World: Towards A New Understanding Of Animals

Roger’s World unfolds over the course of Charles Siebert’s last night with Roger, a chimpanzee in a Florida retirement home for former ape entertainers: stars of the big screen, TV, 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.

Charles and Roger 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.

Within this account, Siebert tells a larger story: the tales of his travels in Africa — where he encountered, among other things, elephants sufferring 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.

In the end, Siebert’s vigil with Roger leads to a number of moving revelations — not only about Roger and himself, but also about the fraught moment that we humans have arrived at in our relationship with the animal world. Roger’s World suggests a new way for human beings to see our fellow creatures, and to see ourselves in relation to them.

Charles Siebert

Charles Siebert's essays, articles and poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, Men's Journal, and Outside. He is the author of three other books, Wickerby: an urban pastoral, a New York Times notable book, Angus: a novel, and A Man After His Own Heart.