To perform this research, the family itself becomes the experiment as it cross fosters a human daughter, Rosemary, with a chimpanzee daughter, Fern.

Cooke, both father and head researcher, undertakes a psychological experiment in which he attempts to discover whether a chimpanzee can truly learn human language, rather than just imitating humans to communicate. Karen Joy Fowler’s novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves examines the paradoxical values of scientific experimentation on animals through an experiment involving the Cooke family and the subsequent ramifications after its end. Therefore, scientific research on nonhuman animals relies on resemblance between human and nonhuman animals while rejecting a moral equality implicated by that resemblance. However, on another level, the research denies nonhuman animals “inclusion within the sphere of moral equality” which would question the ethics of most nonhuman animal research. Nonhuman animal research must, on one level, recognize that nonhuman animals are similar to human animals because the research is valuable for humans. These concepts result in fundamentally paradoxical values in scientific research involving nonhuman animals. A human/nonhuman boundary is the concept of a rigid distinction between human and nonhuman animals, while the species hierarchy values human animals over nonhuman animals. Scientific research involving animals as research subjects necessarily reinforces the notions of a human/nonhuman animal boundary and a species hierarchy.

We re all completely beside ourselves