So, how would you feel about serving up a chimp for your
Sunday dinner? Horror, disgust, revulsion: it would look and feel like
cannibalism.
This is not a make-your-mind-up contradiction. The
confusion is an unavoidable aspect of the relationship between humans and
chimp.
They’re different from us, all right — we know that in our
guts. But they’re also the same. They are closer to us than any other non-human
life-form on the planet.
Last week, a revolutionary decision was made in a U.S.
court: chimpanzees were acknowledged to have rights of their own.
It is the first time legal rights of any kind have ever
been accorded to anything other than a human.
The story started in 2013, when an organization called the
Nonhuman Rights Project filed a lawsuit in the New York Supreme Court on behalf
of four chimps kept for research by Stony Brook University. The eventual
conclusion of Justice Barbara Jaffe was that they were not to be treated as property,
but as legal persons.
Not as persons with full human rights, but as persons with
a right not to be held in captivity and a right not to be owned.
The fact is that chimpanzees really are almost human. It’s
a truth that humankind has tried to ignore ever since Charles Darwin declared
in 1871 that humans were related to the apes of Africa.
Modern genetic studies have shown that this relationship is
much closer than people thought. We have nearly 99 per cent of our genetic
material in common.
And if that one-and-a-bit per cent is unquestionably
significant, the rest of it takes a fair amount of thinking about. Chimpanzees
are more closely related to us than to their — or should it be our — fellow
apes, the gorillas and orangutans.
It has been suggested that humans and chimpanzees belong
not just in the same family, but in the same genus: in other words, the only
correct way to understand the human connection to other species is to accept
that humans are a species of chimpanzee . . . or chimpanzees are a species of
human.
And if that sounds fantastic, cast your mind back. Some
statements made about race — statements that are shocking now — were once
accepted as good sense: ‘There is a physical difference between the White and
the Black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living
together on terms of social and political equality.’ That was Abraham Lincoln
in 1858.
One more: ‘The mental constitution of the negro is . . .
normally good-natured and cheerful, but subject to sudden fits of emotion and
passion during which he is capable of performing acts of singular atrocity,
impressionable, vain, but often exhibiting in the capacity of a servant a dog-
like fidelity . . .’ That’s from Encyclopedia Britannica 1911.
The great primatologist Frans de Waal said of us humans: “We
are apes in every way, from our long arms and tail-less bodies to our habits
and temperament.”
A study published this week in the journal BMC Evolutionary
Biology said that the many humans who suffer from lower back pain do so because
their spines are more like those of chimpanzees than the spines of those people
who don’t suffer from back pain.
In other words, some humans are less well adapted to
walking upright than others because their spines are ‘statistically
indistinguishable’ from those of chimps.
And we find many traits in chimps that are equally
uncomfortable.
One chimp learned to use sign language.
Take language. Washoe was a chimpanzee born in West Africa
in 1965 and captured for use in the American space program. She was brought up
in an American family and taught sign language.
Experiments to teach chimps spoken language had all failed:
they don’t have the physical equipment to make sufficiently varied sounds, but
they communicate with body language in their wild daily lives.
Washoe acquired a vocabulary of 350 signs, and taught some
of them to her adopted chimpanzee son Louis. On seeing a swan, she signed
‘water’ and then ‘bird’.
Washoe put together a near sentence when a doll was put in
her drinking mug: “Baby in my cup.” Another time she signed to her teacher: “You
me out go.” She received the answer: “OK, but put clothes on.” Washoe
immediately put on her jacket.
And, touchingly, one of her regular teachers suffered a
miscarriage and was absent for some time. On her return, she signed to Washoe: “My
baby died.” Washoe signed back: “Cry.” She then traced the track of a tear on
her face. This is an astonishing bit of empathy: chimpanzees don’t weep.
A similar project involving a chimpanzee called Nim
Chimpsky failed to get the same results. It was conducted with clinical rigor,
without messy stuff like affection and with many changes of assistants.
A human child needs love to learn, as every parent knows.
This failed experiment seems to prove that chimpanzees are no different.
They outperform humans in some computer games, in which
snap decision making is required. In problem-solving tests, chimpanzees have
invented all kinds of complex ways to find and reach hidden fruit, building
towers and creating tools to stretch beyond a barrier. Chimpanzees experience
insight: they know what it is to have a ‘eureka moment’.
Desmond Morris, author of the best-selling The Naked Ape,
taught a chimp, Congo, to paint. Congo never tried representational art; his
style was described as abstract impressionism. But he would carefully balance
his paintings, putting, for example, blue on both sides.
He would throw an artistic tantrum if he was told to stop
painting before he considered the work finished, and he would refuse to add to
a painting he saw as complete. Picasso owned a Congo.
Observations of chimpanzees in the wild, most of them
inaugurated by the great anthropologist Jane Goodall, show all kinds of things
that humans and chimpanzees have in common.
Chimpanzees make and use tools, they co-operate. They
communicate with kisses, embraces, tickling, swaggering and threatening.
She also discovered the most significant thing we have in
common: childhood. Chimps and humans spend a long time before taking on the
responsibilities (such as breeding) of adult life.
A chimpanzee will spend five years with its mother,
suckling and sharing a leafy bed. Orphaned chimps show evidence of clinical
depression, and will sometimes be adopted by an older sibling.
Play is essential to humans and chimpanzees: it’s the way
we learn skills and behavior that we in turn pass on. In other words, this is
culture. Humans and chimpanzees don’t just pass on things through our genes: we
also pass things on by showing and learning and showing again in our turn.
Chimpanzees have emotions and express them. They have a
sense of self: unlike your dog, they recognize their reflection in a mirror. Its
clear chimpanzees know mental as well as physical pain. On what grounds, then,
would you deny them the right not to be enslaved or imprisoned?
The moral philosopher Peter Singer suggested human history
shows an ever-expanding circle of moral concern. At one stage, people from
another tribe were outside that circle.
In recent times, women, as well as people of other races
and religions, were excluded from the circle, but now they are all accepted
inside most societies in the developed world. The next stage is the beginnings
of acceptance of non-human animals into the circle.
Singer uses the term ‘speciesism’. It is the same idea as
racism and sexism: the denial of rights and moral concern to a group for no
reason beyond the personal convenience of others.
This judgment in New York is a small but meaningful strike
against speciesism. Perhaps in time it will acquire the significance of the
Slavery Abolition Act in 1833 or the Equal Pay Act of 1970.
No one will expect change to come with any itching hurry,
but it seems that the beginning of change is out there blowing in the wind.
FOLLOW US!
