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In 1960, Adriaan Kortlandt became the first animal behaviourist to gaze into
the eyes of wild chimpanzees. ‘A cold shiver went down my spine,’ he
recalls. ‘These were not animals, nor humans either, but eerie souls in
animals’ furs.’ Unbeknown to Kortlandt, this ambiguity was to prove a curse,
not a blessing, for chimpanzees in the decades that followed.

As biomedical research mushroomed, animal dealers did a brisk trade
supplying chimpanzees to laboratories anxious to test their vaccines, drugs
and theories about disease on our closest living relatives. Many more wild
chimpanzees ended up as zoo exhibits or photographers’ props. As a result,
between 4000 and 5000 chimpanzees are now incarcerated around the world,
says Geza Teleki, chairman of the Committee for Conservation and Care of
Chimpanzees based in Washington DC. Teleki calculates that for every infant
that survives a year at the final overseas destination, 10 chimpanzees die
in transit or on arrival, or are killed in the wild by poachers – small
wonder that conservationists are alarmed at the impact continued commercial
exploitation will have on wild populations whose habitats are being
progressively destroyed.

Now, as part of a radical approach to animal welfare and conservation, 30 or
more eminent biologists, philosophers and writers (Kortlandt and Teleki
among them) are to launch what amounts to a citizen’s charter for
chimpanzees. The charter, or ‘Declaration on Great Apes’, will be published
next week with a series of campaigning essays entitled The Great Ape
Project. With contributions from authors as diverse as the writer Douglas
Adams and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, the book is a manifesto
for a revolution in our treatment of our nearest relatives, the chimpanzees,
gorillas and orang-utans.

The movement’s message – that great apes deserve the same moral status as
humans because they share many social and psychological characteristics with
us – comes at a crucial time for captive apes. Medical laboratories are
themselves clamouring for a solution to a growing problem: what to do with
the chimpanzees they no longer need for experiments? The Great Ape Project,
with its uncompromising stance on ape rights, could strengthen the hand of
those campaigning for spacious ‘retirement’ sanctuaries.

Proponents of the project argue that great apes should be granted the right
to life, liberty and freedom from torture. Their declaration states that it
is wrong to ‘imprison’ great apes without due legal process, kill them, or
cause them severe pain. Indeed, great apes must be regarded as ‘persons’
rather than property under law, argues Gary Francione, a leading animal
rights lawyer and professor of law at Rutgers University in New Jersey. As
with young or intellectually retarded humans, he says, guardians must
safeguard the interests and rights of apes, and plead their case in courts
of law if need be.

The Great Ape Project is the brainchild of the philosopher Peter Singer,
founder of the modern animal liberation movement and professor of bioethics
at Monash University in Australia. To the argument that great apes should
not be a priority when humans are still maltreated, Singer replies: ‘If we
have to wait until we overcome all human rights abuses we would have to
wait forever.’ It’s like saying ‘we shouldn’t help the Third World as we’ve
got enough problems in Britain’, he says.

‘We now have sufficient information about the (emotional and intellectual)
capacities of chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans to make it clear that
the moral boundary we draw between us and them is indefensible,’ says
Singer. Much of this information comes from the work of Jane Goodall, famed
for her pioneering studies of free-living chimpanzees at the Gombe reserve
in Tanzania, and from attempts to teach apes human languages (see ‘Look
who’s talking now’, ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ, 27 April 1991). Chimpanzees may have
smaller brains than humans but they still have rich and varied social and
emotional lives. Ties between family members are close, supportive and
typically endure throughout life, observes Goodall: infants are carried by
their mothers for five years and thereafter continue to travel with their
mothers for another three to four years. And in a dramatic demonstration of
the language abilities of chimpanzees, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, an animal
behaviourist at Georgia State University in Atlanta, reports that one of
her 10-year-old chimps has recently outperformed a two-year-old human in
comprehension of English.

DNA studies support our closeness to the great apes, argues Jared Diamond,
an ecologist and physiologist at the University of California at Los
Angeles. Humans share 98.4 per cent of their DNA with the two living species
of chimpanzees, the common and the pygmy chimps. Gorillas differ a bit more,
by about 2.3 per cent, from us and from both kinds of chimpanzee. This means
that the chimpanzee’s closest relative is not the gorilla but the human.
‘The traditional distinction between apes and humans misrepresents the
facts,’ Diamond says.

The traditional taxonomic divisions place humans and apes in the order
Primates, and into the same superfamily, Hominoidea, but then split them
into separate families, Hominidae and Pongidae. The DNA evidence suggests
that humans do not constitute a distinct family, nor even a distinct genus,
but in fact belong to the same genus as common and pygmy chimps. Humans are
best classified as a third species of chimpanzee, Diamond concludes.

But what would happen if we were to act on our new-found knowledge and treat
apes as our moral equals. Steve Sapontzis, a philosopher at the California
State University at Hayward, dispels fears that we would have to behave
towards apes exactly as we do to humans. ‘Liberating nonhuman great apes
from human exploitation need not take the form of extending ‘human rights’
to them,’ he says, because the apes do not share in all human interests and
concerns. And we need not grant them ‘rights’ per se: ‘other moral and legal
protective categories may be more appropriate to the capabilities and
conditions of these apes,’ Sapontzis argues.

Take the problems of habitat loss and poaching. Chimpanzees once ranged
through forests covering most of equatorial Africa, but today less than 300
000 survive, and only half a dozen countries have populations exceeding
5000. Moreover, logging and human encroachment will intensify as Africa’s
human population doubles over the next 20 years. The biggest surviving chimp
populations are in Cameroon and Zaire, where vast areas of forest have
recently been sold as timber concessions. Yet no one behind the great apes
declaration is suggesting that this threat should be countered by granting
chimpanzees land rights, expect perhaps as a legal technicality. The onus is
instead on humans to protect land on behalf of great apes. Developed nations
should provide developing countries with the necessary aid, says Singer, who
hopes that The Great Ape Project will grow into an international
organisation with the clout to argue the great apes’ case at the UN.
‘Something has to happen at that level,’ Singer says, ‘to provide better
protection for apes still living freely.’

Implementing the great ape declaration would, however, spell the end of
their use in medical research and, in the long term, as exhibits in
traditional zoos or as objects of entertainment. London Zoo stopped its once
popular chimpanzee ‘tea parties’ some years ago. If those behind the
declaration have their way, the manufacturers of a popular brand of tea
advertised by tea-sipping chimps will have to follow suit, and it will be
illegal to use great apes in circuses and as photographers’ props on
Mediterranean beaches.

The prohibition on research would have relatively little direct impact on
British science, as no great apes are thought to be held in British
laboratories. Researchers in Britain experiment on the ‘lower’ primates,
monkeys. In 1991, British laboratories carried out just over 1800 scientific
procedures on Old-World monkeys – baboons and macaques – and gibbons, and
some 2600 on marmosets and other New-World monkeys (tamarins and squirrel,
owl and spider monkeys).

These animals deserve special treatment, too, argue primatologists
sympathetic to the plight of the great apes. ‘We work on monkeys because
they resemble us in so many respects,’ says Barry Keverne, director of the
subdepartment of animal behaviour at the University of Cambridge. But that
means ‘we have to take much the same precautions as if we were working with
people. My work on monkeys is very much noninvasive.’ If researchers must
experiment on primates, says the Universities Federation for Animal Welfare
in Hertfordshire, they should use marmosets rather than rhesus monkeys,
baboons and so on. Marmosets are smaller and thus cheaper to house, and
easier to keep in family groups. Moreover, Britain is now self-sufficient in
these animals, removing the need to use wild-caught animals or those bred in
inferior conditions abroad.

Like many primatologists in Britain, Keverne would be unwilling to
experiment on great apes or keep them in laboratories. Yet many British and
mainland European zoos, and several European laboratories do keep great
apes. At the Dutch government laboratory in Rijkswijk, for example,
chimpanzees are still used for, among other things, immunological studies.

The bulk of the captive great apes – probably some 3000 now live in the US.
According to David Cantor, of the Washington-based People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals, between 1300 and 1600 chimpanzees are in laboratories,
800 to 900 in zoos and a few in entertainment. A dozen or so orang-utans are
used in entertainment in the US, 15 to 20 in laboratories and several
hundred in zoos. Almost 300 gorillas are in zoos and 10 to 15 in
laboratories. The only federal primate research centre in the US to house
great apes, the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia,
retains chimpanzees but has now moved most of its gorillas and orang-utans
into zoos.

Ronald Nadler of the Yerkes centre has studied great apes both in the wild
and in captivity and sees nothing wrong in keeping them in either zoos or
research institutes. He thinks that Goodall’s campaigns to improve the
conditions of chimpanzees held in laboratories and zoos are pointless.
Goodall has ‘exaggerated the intellectual nature of the animal and also
exaggerated the negative aspect of conditions in which we keep them’, he
argues. Their behaviour in captivity now ‘appears to reflect their natural
behaviour very well’, he says. ‘If laboratory conditions were like a
concentration camp, as Goodall has claimed, you would expect behaviour to be
distorted to a much greater degree.’ Goodall ‘is neglecting the real
benefits to mankind which derive from this research’.

Nonetheless, many American laboratories now welcome the notion of
sanctuaries, for retired laboratory chimps at least. ‘It is generally
accepted that you do not kill healthy chimps after the experiment is over,’
says Pat Gullett, a vet with the New York Blood Bank’s virology laboratory.
‘But what do you do with them? A chimp can live for 50 years, and cost
$25 000 to $30 000 a year to keep – more than a prisoner.’

The housing crisis for chimpanzees appears to be getting worse, mostly as a
result of a sustained breeding campaign in the wake of the AIDS epidemic.
Until recently, chimpanzees were thought to be the best, and only, animal
model for the human disease – they can be infected with HIV, and although
they do not develop AIDS, might still provide a test bed for human vaccines.
But there are now suggestions that a strain of immune-deficient mice, or a
species of monkey, the pigtail macaque, may prove to be better, or at least
cheaper, animal models. ‘Chimpanzees have been bred for AIDS research, but
it turns out that it doesn’t look like they are going to be all that
useful,’ Gullett says. Suddenly there is a glut of chimpanzees on the
market.

Everyone agrees that these animals cannot be summarily dumped into an
African forest. ‘You can’t simply take lab chimps back into the wild,’ says
Singer. ‘They don’t have the skills. It would be cruel to try to take them
back.’ Apes ‘rescued’ from laboratories or commercial uses are unsuited to
life in the wild and would inevitably have to live out their lives in the
company of other chimps in semi-natural conditions. There are already about
half a dozen sanctuaries for great apes, mostly in Africa, but more are
needed. The Jane Goodall Institute UK, set up in 1989 with sister
organisations in the US, Canada, Tanzania and Burundi, hopes to establish a
sanctuary in Glasgow for chimpanzees rescued from the beaches of Europe,
retired from medical research, and from zoos with substandard accommodation.

But creating sanctuaries for large numbers of chimpanzees is not easy. The
saga of ‘Vilab II’, set up by the New York Blood Bank in Liberia in 1975,
illustrates the difficulties. The Liberian laboratory uses chimps to study
hepatitis viruses B and C, and the parasite that causes river blindness.
These infections do not seem to cause the chimps any long-term problems, but
the Vilab II soon had a surfeit of chimps, says Betsy Brotman, its director,
and couldn’t find anyone who could accommodate them. The laboratory set up a
‘retirement fund’ – a sum put aside and invested for each chimp used – and
in 1978, began to release groups of chimpanzees on islands in a Liberian
river. The animals cannot escape from the islands, and the natural food
supply is inadequate, so the animals must be fed three times a week.

The researchers learnt many lessons in the process: they discovered, for
instance, that once a group has become established for even a few months, it
is not possible to bring in more chimpanzees – the others will kill them.
The chimpanzees also now wear radio collars so that they be monitored. ‘Lots
of them get lost, eat the wrong things or go into shock,’ says Brotman.
Early on, the researchers were forced to give up plans to release the
animals into national parks in West Africa, for fear that the animals would
harm people on the edge of the parks. ‘The problem that we did not foresee
is that the chimpanzees have lost their natural fear of humans,’ says
Brotman.

In time, most of the retired chimpanzees seemed to thrive on the islands,
and 90 had been released by 1990. Then civil war reached the river, with
the two armies on opposite banks, and nobody could get to the chimpanzees to
feed them. More than half of the animals died. The researchers brought as
many as they could back into cages in the Liberian laboratory, but many more
chimpanzees died when the compound itself was attacked earlier this year,
and Brotman’s husband, Brian Garnham, was murdered by soldiers. There are
now 60 chimpanzees left in the laboratory, and 10 remaining on one island.
Fighting has ceased, and fresh releases are planned for later this year. ‘We
hope by 1995 or 1996 to have introduced all the releasable animals and to
have sufficient funds to support several caretakers and a primatologist,’
Brotman says.

Gullett, the vet in charge of Vilab II, sympathises with Singer’s position
in principle – ‘anyone who works with chimps develops a feeling for them
very quickly’ – but worries about the practicalities. She fears that if we
stop experimenting on chimps they will lose their economic importance: ‘The
only animals going to survive in the long term are those that people have
an economic interest in.’ It remains to be seen whether ‘ecotourism’ can
make free-living great apes ‘useful’ enough to save them and their habitat.
Habitat destruction and poaching have decimated the number of chimps in
Tanzania over the past 30 years despite Jane Goodall’s work, Gullett points
out. ‘If she can’t protect them, then who can?’

Goodall has now largely given up her research at Gombe to campaign for
chimpanzee conservation and welfare throughout the world. The proposed
chimpanzee sanctuary at Glasgow Zoo is one of her latest projects, and
Richard O’Grady, director of the zoo, is delighted. ‘We have the land, and
the possibility to help,’ he says. At present there is only one chimpanzee
sanctuary in Britain, Monkey World in Dorset, run by Jim Cronin. In its
large compounds it houses 24 chimps, most of them rescued from Spanish beach
photographers, but its capacity is limited. The plan at Glasgow is to raise
£2 million to build four wooded enclosures of some seven
acres each, connected to spacious and warm indoor accommodation. Each unit
will hold an integrated social group of a dozen or so chimpanzees. ‘If we
have got to keep them in captivity, we want it as near as damn it to the
wild as we can make it,’ says O’Grady.

So in the end, the newly signed ‘citizen’s charter’ for great apes will not
result in captive chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans being returned to
the wild. But it could encourage the gradual ‘phasing out’ of captive apes.
To that end, breeding in the existing chimpanzee sanctuaries is already
strictly controlled. Most of the females in the Liberian releases have been
sterilised, as would many of the Glasgow chimps. It may seem irresponsible,
in light of the much-vaunted captive breeding programmes of today’s
conservation-minded zoos, not to breed these endangered animals. But captive
apes cannot be set free; they lack the social identity and the sophisticated
knowledge of the natural world that is the birthright of their free-living
counterparts.

The Great Ape Project hopes to inspire a sea change in our attitudes to our
closest relatives, in time to save them in their natural state. ‘We believe
that success is possible,’ Singer and his colleagues conclude. ‘History
shows us that there has always been, within our species, that saving factor:
a squad of determined people willing to overcome the selfishness of their
own group in order to advance another’s cause.’

Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri, editors of The Great Ape Project, ask
those who endorse their declaration to write, indicating their support, to:
The Great Ape Project, PO Box 12838, A’Beckett Street, Melbourne, Victoria,
Australia 3000 or fax to + 39 2 481 4784.

The Jane Goodall Institute (UK), now seeking funds for the Glasgow
chimpanzee santuary, is at 15 Clarendon Park, Lymington, Hants SO41 8AX.