Great apes and humans by Benjamin Beck, Smithsonian Institution Press,
拢26.95, ISBN 1560989696
VOTES for chimpanzees? The Great Ape Project, launched in 1994, didn鈥檛 go
quite that far. Yet that coalition of scientists and philosophers unleashed a
bioethical furore when they argued that our closest primate relatives deserve
鈥渉uman鈥� rights. It is morally indefensible, they claimed, for anyone to think of
chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans as their property鈥攖o be bought, sold
and incarcerated in zoos and labs around the world. Four years later, the debate
was still simmering, so ape experts met in Florida to take a closer look at the
issues, and Great Apes and Humans is the result.
Has the Great Ape Project made life better for our beleaguered primate
cousins? The good news is that in recent years many zoos have tried to improve
housing conditions for their great ape inmates. Most have worked harder too, to
promote the conservation message.
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At the same time, fewer labs are keen on keeping chimpanzees these days.
Indeed, the US in particular now suffers from an embarrassing surfeit of captive
chimpanzees. Then the National Institutes of Health announced that it had
hundreds of chimpanzees that it didn鈥檛 need鈥� the result of an aggressive
captive-breeding programme begun in the 1980s when researchers thought that
experimenting on the apes would produce a vaccine against HIV, says pioneering
chimp-watcher Jane Goodall.
Finding suitable homes for so many chimpanzees is a daunting task, Goodall
acknowledges, but she reckons that purpose-built sanctuaries are the only humane
solution.
As a cautionary tale she recalls the plight of Lucy, born in captivity and
brought up as a human child, clothes and all. She learned sign language too. But
as she reached adolescence, her human caretakers decided they could no longer
look after her, and that she should be given her freedom in Africa. She was
taken to Africa by a person she knew, but who ignored her signs, then introduced
to two young wild-born chimps and left on an island. Lucy fell into a deep
depression, says Goodall, and was found dead some years later with her hands and
feet removed. 鈥淭he whole exercise can be compared with taking a middle-class
American girl of about 14 years old to live with a group of indigenous people in
some far off part of the world,鈥� she says. Yet the long-term prospects for
wild apes remain frightening. The threats to their survival include a roaring
trade in bush meat in parts of Africa, documented here by David Wilkie of Boston
College and the Wildlife Conservation Society in the US. The evidence is
overwhelming that present levels of hunting alone will drive wild apes to
extinction, he argues. Even if local people don鈥檛 hunt the primates for food,
they often come into conflict.
For instance, in Uganda, primatologist Richard Wrangham of Harvard University
describes the damage done by wire snares set to catch pigs and small antelopes.
The chimpanzees appear to recognise the danger but are still caught when their
attention is distracted鈥攚hen they鈥檙e running or playing, for instance.
Young chimpanzees can be killed by the snares, and in one reserve, the snares
have caused permanent injuries in almost a fifth of the adults鈥攃rippling
or loss of hands, feet, fingers and toes. Conflicts arise too, when humans clear
the forest and create tempting stockpiles of bananas or plant sugarcane
crops.
The pressures on wild ape populations generated by expanding human
populations are a recurrent theme. Whatever their disagreements, all the
workshop participants agreed on one thing: politically just and sustainable
solutions to such conflicts are vital to prevent the imminent extinction of
great apes in the wild, 鈥渋n control of their own lives鈥�.