Ape

John Sorenson

Animal series
Ape
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Ape

John Sorenson

reaktion books
Published by
reaktion books ltd
33 Great Sutton Street
London ec1v 0dx, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2009

Copyright © John Sorenson 2009

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval

system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior
permission of the publishers.

Printed and bound in China by Eurasia

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Sorenson, John, 1952–
Ape. – (Animal)
1. Apes
I. Title
599.8'8-dc2

isbn 978 1 86189 422 9

 Contents

1 Natural History 7
2 Thinking about Apes 34
3 Pets, Captives, Hybrids 70
4 Looking at Apes 92
5 Models for Human Behaviour 127
6 Extinction 163
Timeline 190
References 192
Select Bibliography 207
Associations and Websites 209
Acknowledgements 212
Photo Acknowledgements 213
Index 214
1 Natural History

Apes belong to the order of Primates, a collection of complex

creatures ranging from smaller, little-known prosimians such
as aye-ayes, angwantibos, galagos, lemurs and lorises to the
engaging and charismatic chimpanzees, orangutans and goril-
las, as well as humans. Although not all have all these features,
primates are distinguished by relatively large brains, frontally
placed eyes with binocular vision and protected by bony sockets,
grasping hands and feet with opposable thumbs and large toes,
nails rather than claws, small litters and slowly maturing young.
Great variation exists in size and many species are sexually
dimorphic. Primates are mainly vegetarian, relying on fruit or
other plant material, but many also feed on insects; some occa-
sionally prey on larger animals. They occupy various habitats
but most are skilled climbers with specially developed locomo-
tion. While smaller prosimians such as tarsiers and lemurs leap
through trees and monkeys run along branches, gibbons and
orangutans use brachiation, a specialized style of alternating
arm swings, to move rapidly from branch to branch. Gorillas,
bonobos and chimpanzees move quadrapedally on the palms,
fists or knuckles of their hands, while humans habitually walk
bipedally. Generally, features such as the anatomical structure
of the shoulders that allows brachiation, shortened spine,
absence of a tail, a y-5 cusp pattern on the molars and a more

7
In The History of
Four-footed Beasts
(1607), a bestiary
illustrating actual
and mythical
animals, Edward
Topsell reported
that apes are
terrified of snails.

developed brain differentiate apes from monkeys, but in popu-

lar usage the terms are often interchangeable.
Like other primates apes communicate vocally, by gestures
and by scent and have a variety of social systems and behaviours.
Most are gregarious, and even species that tend toward more
solitary behaviour are more social where food supplies are abun-
dant. Seasonal distribution of food is a major factor in population
densities and movement.
Outside captivity, apes are found in Africa and Asia. Gibbons
exist throughout Asia, while orangutans, once distributed from
China to Malaysia, now live only in lowland rainforests and
swamps in Borneo and Sumatra. African apes, too, live in rain-
forests but also occupy other habitats and elevations, including

8
mountains, dry forests and savanna. In all cases their environ-
ments are threatened by commercial logging, plantations, mining
and human settlement. Even low levels of human forest usage have
a severe impact on ape populations and unrestrained exploita-
tion will mean extinction for the apes, along with other animals.
Orangutans are the most solitary apes. Although females
contact them when they are ovulating, males seem intolerant of
each other’s presence and, through their calls, space themselves
out in overlapping ranges. But some community behaviour has
been noted and these animals coordinate their movements in
ways that observers do not fully understand. Gibbons live in
monogamous pairs, raising offspring together, and negotiate

Gibbons, the
smallest apes, are
known for their
agility and their
vocal displays.

9
relationships and territory through loud, prolonged calls and
songs. African apes are more social. Gorillas live in groups of up
to 50 individuals. These groups usually include one or two
mature males, several related junior males and several females
and their infants. Young females leave the group and join those
of males with whom they mate. Bonobos may congregate in
groups of up to 120 individuals and chimpanzees also gather in
smaller numbers.
Unique patterns of learned behaviour – culture – have been
noted among different groups of the same species in terms of
food processing, production and use of tools and grooming. Tool
use, once considered a defining human characteristic, has been
seen among birds and monkeys but is widespread among apes,
who use different tools for different purposes and who pass on
their knowledge through generations.
Debates continue about the relationship of living apes to fos-
sil discoveries. Many extinct forms are missing from the fossil
record. The earliest primate fossils may date to the Paleocene
about 65 million years ago (mya) and recognizably at least from
the early Eocene epoch, about 55 mya. These are small animals,
resembling living prosimians. In the past primate evolution was
explained as adaptation to arboreal life, suggesting that this
encouraged selection of the above-mentioned features, but the
absence of these features in other arboreal animals has led to
explanations based on diet. Many primates subsist on fruit and
flowers and primates may have evolved to pluck these foods
from slender terminal branches.
During the Miocene epoch (26–25 mya), apes emerged as a
distinct lineage, and it is assumed that a much greater variety of
forms existed than those reflected in the fossil remains. Living
forms therefore represent only a fraction of previous diversity.
Found in African deposits, the best-known early fossil apes are

10
those categorized as the genus Proconsul, arboreal, frugivorous
animals lacking tails (as noted, one common characteristic of
all living apes). Later in the Miocene, apes dispersed through
Eurasia and it is debated whether the last common ancestor of
the great apes lived in Africa or Eurasia.
Around 15 mya gibbons diverged first from the line that
has led to the other living apes, followed by orangutans at 11
mya, then around 6.5 mya gorillas split from the branch, lead-
ing to bonobos, chimpanzees and humans. A 13 million-year-
old partial skeleton discovered in Spain in 2004 may represent
a primate who lived after the lesser apes diverged but before
the great apes began to diversify into the forms we know today.
Named Pierolapithecus catalaunicus, this animal may have been
one of the last common ancestors of all the great apes, includ-
ing humans. But others question if Pierolapithecus was in fact
ancestral to orangutans or a creature in the evolutionary line of
African apes and humans. Another fossil species, Nakalipithecus
nakayama, discovered in northern Kenya in 2007, has been sug-
gested as a candidate for the last common ancestor of bonobos,
chimpanzees, gorillas and humans. Another 2007 discovery, in
Ethiopia, of some 10 million-year-old teeth belonging to Choro-
rapithecus abyssinicus, possibly an early form of gorilla, raised
new questions about timelines of ape evolution. Some thought
the 6–7 million-year-old Toumai skull discovered in Chad in 2001
represented the oldest fossil of a member of the human family,
but others maintained it was one of many species of human-like
beings that existed at the same time, or an ancestral form of con-
temporary gorillas. Until very recently research suggested that
bonobos, chimpanzees and humans diverged around 5 mya in
Africa, with bonobos and chimpanzees splitting between 1 and 2
mya. However, new genetic evidence suggests that chimpanzee
and human lineages diverged more recently than previously

11
Comparisons of
the skeletons
of gibbon,
orangutan,
chimpanzee
and man.

believed and that interbreeding could have occurred between

these lines for thousands or even millions of years after the orig-
inal divergence, producing multiple hybrid forms.
Contemporary humans are distinguished from our nearest
ape relatives by a larger brain, habitual bipedalism and differ-
ences in dentition. Despite much determined effort to deny it,
our proximity to other apes is readily apparent in shared mor-
phological features and is supported by evidence from molecu-
lar biology and genetics. Of all living animals, the great apes are
closest to us. We possess a shared evolutionary history, a close
biochemical and genetic composition, as well as similar ana-
tomy, appearance, cognition and behaviour. These similarities
are so evident that many scientists have concluded it is an error,
based on our own vanity, to classify humans separately: either
we should include apes as members of our own classification or
consider ourselves a type of chimpanzee. Geneticists have esti-
mated that our similarity with chimpanzees and bonobos is

12
over 98 per cent,1 meaning that we are closer to these animals
than either is to gorillas or orangutans. However, Roy Britten at
the California Institute of Technology challenges this, arguing
that measurements of indels (insertions or deletions of dna sec-
tions) result in similarities of only about 95 per cent.2 Based on
2003 studies, Morris Goodman of Wayne State University found
humans and chimpanzees were 99.4 per cent identical in func-
tionally important dna, which codes for proteins.3 Goodman
argued that both humans and chimpanzees should occupy the
genus Homo.
Insisting that we should be classified separately from other
closely related species, some taxonomists limit the family Hom-
inidae to humans and their now-extinct fossil relatives and place
other great apes into a separate family, Pongidae. However, most
taxonomists now divide all living apes into two families. Hom-
inidae includes seven living species: eastern lowland gorillas
(Gorilla berengi), western lowland gorillas (G. gorilla), orang-
utans of Sumatra (Pongo abelii) and Borneo (P. pygmaeus),
chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), bonobos (P. paniscus) and humans
(Homo sapiens). The other family, Hylobatidae, includes twelve
species of gibbons. Many think bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas
and human beings should be classed in a single genus, Homo.

chimpanzees
Chimpanzees are generally categorized into four sub-species:
Pan troglodytes troglodytes, P.t. verus, P.t. schweinfurthii, P.t. vellero-
sus. Chimpanzees are the most abundant and adaptable
apes, occupying various habitats from lowland rainforests and
swamps to dry forests and savannas. Their diet is also varied. They
mainly consume fruit and plant material and were once thought
to be vegetarian but are now understood to be omnivores who

13
Chimpanzees are
intelligent social
animals who use
tools and manipu-
late objects.

eat insects and small animals, as well as larger ones such as pigs
and monkeys. While hunting provides protein, it is also energy-
consuming and sometimes dangerous. Some believe hunting
and sharing meat were important processes in human evolution,
linked with development of bigger brains and social behaviour.
Chimpanzees sometimes form hunting parties and share the
flesh of animals they kill. Most researchers assumed that adult
males most often engaged in hunting and that hunting and shar-
ing meat provided males, in particular, with a means to maintain
social bonds and status. However, recent observations suggest
that adolescent females and young chimpanzees in general are
actually the most frequent hunters. In Senegal anthropologists
Jill Pruetz and Paco Bertolani observed chimpanzees fashioning
spears by breaking, stripping and sharpening branches and then
using them to hunt; they suggest that adult males were the last
to adopt innovations in tool manufacture and use.4

14
 Chimpanzees live in groups, usually numbering around 30
individuals, although much larger bands have been seen. They
occupy home ranges that are patrolled by males. These societies
are philopatric, meaning that males stay in their natal group
while females join those of their mates. Relationships between
males are significant and intense, developed by grooming and
formation of political alliances, while female social interactions
seem more limited. Dominance and aggression characterize
chimpanzee societies. In 1974, during fieldwork at Gombe in
Tanzania, Jane Goodall observed chimpanzees not only hunting
and killing other animals but also sometimes conducting mur-
derous attacks on other groups of their own species. Lethal
assaults within groups are less common but infanticide has been
observed. Behaviour and group size are affected by ecological
conditions: chimpanzees are characterized by a fission–fusion
pattern in which groups temporarily split or merge within their
territories, practices usually assumed to be related to distri-
bution of food resources or threats from predators.

Although closely
related to both
humans and
chimpanzees,
bonobos are
known for
their peaceful,
egalitarian,
matriarchal
societies.

15
bonobos
Only recently recognized as a distinct species, bonobos are
closely related to chimpanzees and were formerly called ‘pygmy
chimpanzees’. Although the exact population is unknown, they
are fewer in number and limited geographically to the
Democratic Republic of Congo, where their range of forests and
grasslands is limited by river systems. They have become well
known only recently: although mentioned in nineteenth-century
reports, bonobos were first described scientifically in 1929 and the
first field studies were undertaken in the 1970s, most extensively
by Japanese primatologist Takayoshi Kano. However, fieldwork
was disrupted by war throughout the 1990s up to a peace agree-
ment in 2002, followed by outbursts of violence that have
prevented serious study.
Bonobos eat a variety of plant material but are mainly fru-
givorous. Although they have been seen eating small animals,
such as flying squirrels and duikers, hunting does not appear
to play as significant a role for them as for chimpanzees.
Whereas chimpanzees have been seen to hunt monkeys, bono-
bos more often interact with them; bonobos have killed monkeys
accidentally through rough play but seem less inclined to eat
them.
Bonobos form larger groups than chimpanzees, although
they maintain the same shifting fission–fusion behaviour. How-
ever, bonobo societies seem far more relaxed. Bonobos get along
better within their own groups and with neighbouring groups
so they spend more time in larger units. Despite their close
genetic relationship with chimpanzees, their behaviour is strik-
ingly different. Bonobos are more cooperative and peaceful,
showing less aggression and less territorial defence; when food
resources are abundant, neighbouring groups forage in proxim-
ity. Whereas chimpanzees react violently to such contact and

16
engage in primitive forms of warfare, bonobos often appear
excited to meet neighbours and do not engage in inter-commu-
nal raids. Unlike chimpanzee societies, both captive and free, in
which much lethal intra-species aggression has been observed,
such attacks seem rare among bonobos.
Although both chimpanzees and bonobos are philopatric,
gender relations are very different. In contrast to patterns of
male dominance noted among primates, bonobo social systems
are structured around coalitions of females who control and share
food and influence males. Whereas chimpanzee society is struc-
tured by male hierarchies, female bonobos have equal status with
males and form alliances to dominate them. Mother–son bonds
are strong and a male’s status is linked with that of his mother,
whose own status is largely age-determined. Primatologist
Frans de Waal suggests that primatologists’ own cultural sensi-
bilities led them to deny the reality of female dominance in
bonobo societies and acknowledges that he initially dismissed
his own observations of this behaviour.5
Bonobos differ from chimpanzees physically and behaviour-
ally. They exhibit less sexual dimorphism, are less aggressive and
negotiate relationships by sexual contact rather than through
direct forms of dominance. Sexual activity is extensive and most
sexual activity is not directed towards reproduction. Intercourse
and mutual genital rubbing, along with a wide variety of other
sexual contact, are frequent, often initiated by females, and
these sexual contacts are believed to build alliances, reduce ten-
sion, negotiate food sharing, achieve reconciliations and con-
tribute to a more egalitarian society. Although high-status
males may be more successful in mating, they do not monopo-
lize females and there is no aggressive male competition over
females; instead, relations between the sexes are friendly.
Infanticide, common among some other primates, has not been

17
reported among bonobos. Some suggest that this is because
of the ambiguity of paternity in their societies.

gorillas
Gorillas are classified into two species, eastern (Gorilla berengei)
and western (G. gorilla). These are further divided into two sub-
species: eastern lowland (G.b. graueri) and mountain gorilla
(G.b. berengei) and western lowland (G.g. gorilla) and Cross River
(G.g. diehli). The two species are quite similar and were formerly
considered sub-species but dna analysis suggests a divergence
about 2 mya. Genetically, they are very close to humans.
Gorillas are extremely impressive, very large, with hairless
black faces and a sagittal crest along the skull; mature males
have silver hair on their backs. They are sexually dimorphic,
with adult males weighing 200 kg, about twice the size of
females. Gorillas are vegetarian, subsisting on leaves, shoots and
fruit, as well as bark and twigs. Because of this diet, gorillas must
eat a great deal and rest while digesting. Rather than maintain-
ing a limited range, gorillas fully exploit an area and then travel
on, returning only after it has recovered. Movement is linked to
availability of food, as well as avoidance of humans and other
predators. Gorillas typically move on all fours, using a distinc-
tive knuckle-walking motion. During bursts of display, they may
run bipedally for short distances and beat their chests with their
hands.
Gorillas form smaller groups than chimpanzees or bonobos,
usually of fewer than fifteen, but occasionally twice as many
individuals, consisting of a dominant silverback male, several
females, their offspring and some junior males. Young males
may form groups but it is more common for a male to leave his
natal group, taking some females with him, and start his own

18
unit. A female sometimes transfers from one group to another
but if she has offspring with her they may be killed by another
male who wants to mate with her.
Gorillas communicate by a variety of vocalizations, such as
alarm calls and barks to warn of specific dangers but also employ
frequent humming or rumbling that is answered by others. These
sounds may be used to negotiate space, avoid confrontations

Mugaruka, one-
handed silverback
in ParcNational
Kahuzi-Biega, drc.

19
or offer appeasements but also may indicate intentions about
travel. Gorillas are intelligent animals and tool use has been seen
recently. In 2005 Thomas Breuer of the Wildlife Conservation
Society reported what he claimed to be the first observation of
‘wild’ gorillas using tools.6 He observed a gorilla using a stick to
determine the depth of a stream she was crossing and another
gorilla using a rock to break open palm nuts. Similar use of stones
to crack nuts has been observed in captive gorillas. Although goril-
las had been previously observed, captured for zoos or killed as
museum specimens, few scientific field studies have been done
until recently.

orangutans
Orangutans diverged from the line of African apes and humans
about 11 mya and their ancestral forms spread throughout Asia.
The only great ape existing outside Africa, they are found now
only in Borneo and Sumatra, in lineages that diverged 1–2 mya.
There are three sub-species of the Borneo orangutan, Pongo
pygmaeus: P.p. pygmaeus, found in western Kalimantan and
Sarawak; P.p. wurmbii, the largest of the orangutans, found in
western and central Kalimantan; and the smallest, found in
Sabbah and eastern Kalimantan, P.p. morio. There are no sub-
species of the Sumatra orangutan. Orangutans live about 45 years
in nature, inhabiting overlapping ranges. They are mainly arbor-
eal but occasionally walk bipedally on the ground. Their diet
consists of leaves, bark, seeds, shoots, honey and insects and
they use a variety of tools to get their food. Unlike other great
apes, orangutans live in loose communities of genetically related
females and adult males with whom they mate. However, they
sometimes travel together for short periods and cluster where
fruit is plentiful. Females reach puberty at ten years of age, give

20
 Head of an
orangutan, 1895.

birth at fifteen and have pregnancies lasting eight and a half

months. Bonds between mothers and infants are especially
strong. Mothers suckle their infants for three years but carry
them beyond that age and children remain with their mothers
until they are about seven. Females bear infants only once every
seven to nine years, so they can produce at most four offspring
over their lifetime; this means any disruption in reproduction
can have significant effects.
Orangutans are among the most solitary and sexually di-
morphic of the apes. Only a few live in captivity and their essen-
tially arboreal lifestyle and relatively solitary nature means that

21
 orangutans have been studied less than other apes who are more
gregarious and ground-dwelling and thus more accessible.
Like gorillas, orangutans have a striking appearance: large
animals with expressive faces, covered in reddish hair, with elon-
gated arms that allow them to swing rapidly through the trees,
where they spend most of their time. Borneo orangutans are
darker and heavier, with a large, hanging throat sac. Males are
larger than females and are subject to a curious process known
as bimaturism: some develop large cheekpads (flanges), while
in others this process is delayed for many years. This may be

Samuel Howitt,
drawing of a
young orangutan,
around 1817;
watercolour
over pencil.

22
 Orangutan on
rope at Singapore
Zoo. Zoos face
difficulties in
providing
adequate space
for such large
arboreal creatures.

related to testosterone levels and status but the process is not

fully understood. Flanged males may have reproductive advan-
tages because of their dominant status, linked to access to food
and receptive females, but flanged males are much more
aggressive, meaning that they also face higher risks of injury
and individuals cannot sustain this condition for more than a
few years. Afterwards they pass into another stage in which
their flanges shrivel and they become less aggressive. Flanged
males make loud calls to alert others of their presence and
these calls may affect levels of testosterone production in other
males. Females prefer mating with flanged males and typically
initiate this after being attracted by the male’s calls but they are
sometimes forced by unflanged males. Generally, male and
female adult orangutans lead separate lives, with no lasting
relationships or paternal bonds with offspring. There are long
intervals between births, with reproduction about every eight

23
Orangutans years, perhaps the lowest reproduction rate among mammals.
demonstrate close
bonds between
Mothers carry their infants for years, providing them with
mothers and much attention and care.
infants. Females stay close to where they were born and maintain rela-
tionships with other females in that area, while males are more
solitary and occupy wider ranges. Although orangutans do not
defend their territory, they have stable, overlapping ranges in
which males do not tolerate each other but seek to spread them-
selves out. Mothers and infants maintain a close bond but this
weakens over time as offspring mature. These behaviours result
in a loose community with subtle processes of coordination.
Mainly vegetarian, orangutans eat various plant materials but
prefer fruit, and food supplies affect social behaviour. Fruit is
more abundant in Sumatra, allowing for more social interaction

24
among animals. In Borneo fruit supplies are less regular and
orangutans tend to gorge on fruit when it is available and range
in search of other foods when fruit is scarce. Orangutans main-
tain mental maps of food sources and remember routes through
the forest to reach them. When fruit is unavailable they exploit
other less-nutritious plant resources. Although they consume
insects, orangutans have not been seen to eat other animals
regularly. Reproduction and development seem directly linked
with their environment. To cope with insects, trees have evolved
a pattern known as mast fruiting, in which all bear fruit simul-
taneously, every four years. Female orangutan hormone levels
are elevated in accord with fruit cycles and male development
also may be affected. This mean that orangutans conceive dur-
ing periods of plentiful nutritious food, providing them with
energy during pregnancy and ensuring good physical condi-
tion for birth and lactation.
Tool use is seen among orangutans, such as the use of large
leaves for umbrellas or as protection when eating fruit from
Thomas Landseer,
etching of orang-
utan for Edward
Griffith’s The
Animal Kingdom . . .
(1827), translated
from George
Cuvier’s Le Règne
animal distribué
d’après son organi-
sation (1817). From
his observations of
a young female
orangutan, Cuvier
concluded her
senses were com-
parable to humans’
and that she had a
sense of the future.

25
Anonymous hand-
coloured etching of
an orangutan, from
Edward Donovan,
The Naturalist’s
Repository (1824).
thorny plants. Particularly in Sumatra, orangutans are seen
employing tools to obtain food, such as using sticks to probe and
extract food from holes in trees, to dig out seeds or scrape thorns
from fruit. Orangutans are renowned for using medicinal plants.
In addition to using natural objects, orangutans sometimes
adopt human tools for their own use. Primatologist Birute
Galdikas reports orangutans using dugout canoes from her camp
in Borneo and describes one female using a tube of ointment to
treat her son’s blind eye while refusing to let others touch the
tube.7 Captive orangutans quickly adopt human-type tool use
and pass this learned behaviour on to others, so it is assumed
they have the capacity to use tools but that limited social inter-
action in their natural habitat restricts development of these
activities. Reviewing decades of data, primatologists identified
various behaviours, many involving tool use, that seem to have
been culturally transmitted; they concluded that culture was
established among the great apes 14 mya, when the ancestor of
the orangutans and the African apes lived. More cultural varia-
tion exists where orangutans have more social contacts and
opportunities to learn from each other. Again, evidence demon-
strates that culture is not a uniquely human trait as formerly
supposed. Primatologist Carel van Schaik theorizes that greater
sociability not only allowed more efficient food acquisition
but that cooperation conferred evolutionary advantages and
influenced the success of early humans. He thinks orangutans’
arboreal lifestyle, with less risk from predators, allowed them to
develop far greater intelligence and culture than many believe.8
James Lee at Harvard University suggests that of all non-human
great apes, orangutans have developed the greatest problem-
solving abilities.9 However, their arguments are not widely
accepted among primatologists.

27
gibbons ‘Simia’, from H.G.L.
Reichenbach,
Gibbons constitute the lesser apes, meaning that they are Die vollständigste
generally smaller, but they could also be considered the lesser- Naturgeschichte der
Affen . . . (1862–3).
known apes, since vastly more attention is given to their larger
relatives. The gibbon lineage diverged from other apes about
15 mya. Gibbons are found throughout south-east Asia as
well as in Borneo, Java, Sumatra and other islands. They are
classified into four genera and twelve species, with several
sub-species, although taxonomists continue to debate classifi-
cations. Gibbons inhabit rainforests and are mainly arboreal,
spending most of their days hanging from branches, although
they have been observed to move bipedally on the forest floor.
They forage across ranges that vary in size according to species
and which they defend. In Borneo and Sumatra, gibbons
inhabit overlapping ranges with orangutans and exploit some
of the same food resources, although gibbons in Borneo tend
to travel longer distances and rise earlier to reach supplies
before the others, while Sumatran gibbons focus on defending
smaller territories.

Although primatol-
ogists first focused
on male behaviour,
aggression and
dominance, they
now have a more
sophisticated
gender analysis
and recognize the
importance of
family bonds.

29
Hoolock gibbon,
from William Jardine’s
Natural History of
Monkeys (1833).
While noting a
strong resemblance
between humans
and other primates,
Jardine considered
the former ‘infinitely
pre-eminent by the
high and particular
character and power
of his mind’.

Although they also consume leaves, flowers and insects,

gibbons mainly eat fruit and are especially fond of figs; they have
an important role as seed dispersers and some fig seeds can
germinate only after passing through a gibbon’s body. Reliance
on fruit means they are especially affected by seasonal changes.
When not eating, gibbons spend their time grooming and engag-
ing in bouts of calling or singing. These vocal displays, usually
heard in the mornings, are among the gibbons’ most noted char-
acteristics; all species conduct prolonged duets which are assumed
to be a means for reinforcing family relationships and of delin-
eating territory and food resources by ensuring that neighbours
know the borders of their ranges. Siamangs, the largest gibbons,
are distinguished by fused fingers and the presence of gular sacs
among males. These large throat pouches allow them to make

30
‘Siamang’,
from Geoffroy-
Saint-Hilaire and
Cuvier, Histoire
Naturelle des
Mammifères . . .
(1824).

Luigi Rados, ‘Il

Gran Gibbone’,
from Jacob and
Rados, Storia
Naturale delle
Scimie . . . (1812).
particularly resonant calls in the forests of Malaysia, Sumatra
and Thailand.
After a day of foraging, gibbons go to sleep early, before
sunset. Unlike other apes who construct nest-like beds, gibbons
sleep sitting on branches, with infants curled on their mothers.
Their upper forelimbs have developed to allow brachiation but
gibbons also walk bipedally along large branches and make
impressive leaps between trees. These anatomical developments
allow them to exploit fruit and flowers located along terminal
branches. Their hands are adapted to assist locomotion and
they have not been observed manipulating objects to use as tools.
Gibbons have received little scientific study and most research
seems to have focused on feeding habits.
Gibbons live in small groups, travelling in single file through
the high forest canopy. Most form monogamous pairs, whose
offspring remain with them until adulthood, around nine years.
Interactions between these family groups and others seem to be
infrequent, possibly because of competition for fruit resources,
but this conclusion may partly reflect difficulties of observing
these animals. As arboreal animals, gibbons are endangered by
loss of habitat through extensive deforestation due to commer-
cial logging, plantations, road construction and encroaching
human settlement, but they are also victimized by the inter-
national trade in exotic animals as pets. For example, silvery
gibbons now exist only in a few parts of Java and are under severe
threat. The Western hoolock gibbon was placed on the iucn’s
2006 list of the 25 most endangered primates. The total popula-
tion of this species is less than a thousand; about a third are in
Bangladesh, where several populations have been made extinct
in the last decade due to deforestation and remaining groups
are unlikely to survive. Eastern black-crested gibbons of Laos,
Vietnam and China’s Hainan Island are critically endangered

32
and are the rarest of primates. Considered extinct in mainland
China, a small group of black-crested gibbons was observed
in Guangxi Autonomous Region near the Vietnam border in
2006.10
All non-human apes are under threat, some critically endan-
gered, and it is an open question as to whether they will avoid
extinction caused by the most violent apes of all, humans.

33
2 Thinking about Apes

Religion, folklore and literature of non-Western cultures depict

primates in positive ways. In ancient Egypt, Thoth, a major
deity associated with knowledge and equilibrium, was some-
times depicted as a baboon-headed human. In the ancient
Sanskrit epic the Ramayana the monkey-god Hanuman embod-
ies strength and devotion. While some African societies hunted
and ate apes, others did not because they recognized similari-
ties between these animals and themselves. These societies
elaborated discourses of animality and humanity, using apes as
metaphors to reflect on political and economic changes created
by European colonialism.1 In the Central African Republic, the
Mpiemu believed apes and humans shared the same origins
while the Bangando of Cameroon refrained from eating apes
because they believed these animals had rescued them from
enemies in the past. Other groups believed apes and humans
once lived together until some transgression shattered their
peaceful coexistence. Today the Bonobo Conservation Initiative
works with Congolese groups who observe traditional prohibi-
tions against eating bonobos to create no-hunting zones, such
as the Kokolopori Reserve for endangered animals, and hopes
to expand community-protected areas.
Asian cultures were less concerned about rigid species bor-
ders. While gibbons were unknown in Europe until the late

34
 Central African ape
mask, wood, 20th
century.
Ancient Egyptians
used the ape-
headed canoptic
jar to store the
deceased’s lungs,
which were
removed during
mummification,
but necessary for
the afterlife.

eighteenth century, Asian societies considered them magical

animals, linking humans and nature. In Thailand folk tales
explain the gibbon’s song as the mournful cry of a reincarnated
woman seeking her lost lover. Having completed studies with a
forest-dwelling sage, a young prince prepares to return home and
receives a box containing a special gift but is told not to open it
until he arrives. Impatient, he opens the box midway through
his journey and is pleased to see a beautiful woman emerge. This
transgression also conjures up a bandit who challenges him to a
duel. Knocked to the ground, the prince asks the woman to hand
him his sword but she hesitates and the bandit kills him. The
woman is transformed into a gibbon, whose remorseful calls
echo through the forest.
Ancient Chinese literature depicted gibbons as ethereal and
aristocratic animals, linked with poets and philosophers and

35
 Shosan (Koson),
Monkey Reaching
for the Moon,
Japanese woodcut,
c. 1910.

symbolizing their ideals.2 Other primates, such as macaques,

were captured and trained to perform tricks and were considered Swinging Gibbon,
painting by Xia
amusing but noisy and vulgar. In the sixteenth-century epic Xiyou Gui, well known
Ji Monkey is a mischievous trickster who causes trouble but for his scroll paint-
finally attains Buddha-hood. Gibbons were praised for their ings in China’s
Song Dynasty (late
quiet, serene nature and spiritual qualities. Elusive and rarely seen, 12th to early 13th
they inhabited remote areas thought to be haunted by supernat- century).

ural beings. Gibbons were considered magical animals, capable Mori Sosetsu
(1790–1830), Two
of assuming human form. Their evocative cries were associated Monkeys. Sosetsu
with the eerie atmosphere of these mysterious places and inspired is known for
meticulous, realis-
melancholy feelings in travellers. A famous image in Chinese tic depictions of
poetry was of ‘gibbons calling at the gorges’, reflecting the fact animals.

37
 that these animals were often heard but seldom seen among the
high, woody, mist-covered cliff-sides they inhabited. For exam-
ple, the fourth-century poet Yüan Sung wrote:

Sad the calls of the gibbons at the three gorges of

Pa-tung;
After three calls in the night, tears wet the [traveller’s]
dress.3

Another poem by Hsiao T’ung (501–31) conveys similar emo-

tions:

Hearing the gibbons call, inch by inch my entrails are

torn,
Listening to the cranes, pair by pair my tears flow down.4

In his ‘Poetical Essay on the Dark Gibbon’, Taoist recluse Wu Yun

(d. 778) described the gibbon as a being who communed simply
with nature. Praising gibbons’ lives as ideal, the essay questions
the status of humans as the most important of creatures.5 Chinese
artists, poets and philosophers expressed compassionate atti-
Nakajima Kaho
tudes towards gibbons and condemned hunting them.
(1866–1939), Chinese paintings often associate gibbons with cranes.
Gibbon Reaching
for the Moon, ink
Gibbons’ long arms and the cranes’ long necks and legs indicate
on paper. longevity and both creatures are appreciated for their graceful
movements. A common notion was that, by linking hands,
gibbons formed themselves into chains that allowed them to
dangle from branches and dip drinking water from streams.
Another popular image from Chinese and Japanese art depicts
gibbons, sometimes linked in such chains, grasping for the
moon’s reflection in a pool of water. A charming example is the
painting Two Gibbons Reaching for the Moon by Ito Jakuchu

38
(1716–1800), which depicts a mother hanging from a tree,
dangling her baby by the arm. The image is a parable about greed
and striving for things that are useless or cannot be attained. It
cautions us not to mistake the reflections of things for their
essence or not to attempt to grasp things that are unreal rather
than seeking truth.
In contrast, Western images of apes emphasize ideas of iden-
tity and purity, but are troubled by transgression and hybridity.
Western societies are dominated by anthropocentric determi-
nation to separate humans from other animals and Western
religious ideology asserts human superiority. For such societies
Medieval wood-
apes are especially problematic because they share so much of cuts of foolish apes
what we consider uniquely human. splitting wood or
trying to start a
Apes both amuse and trouble us. They fascinate us at least fire used animals
partly because we recognize ourselves in them. We seem to share to simultaneously
mock human
many abilities and emotions and believe we can understand vanity and assert
their actions and intent, even if this is not always true. It delights superiority.

Kakajima gibbon

39
us to see apes engage in activities we perform because, seem-
ingly, this confirms our behaviour as natural. In them we see
less perfect versions of ourselves, which we find endlessly
amusing. It seems especially hilarious if apes that emulate our
behaviour do so ineptly, because this reaffirms our superiority.
While we enjoy laughing at apes, their similarity to us is dis-
turbing and we deny them similar moral standing. Although it
is becoming increasingly evident that apes have highly developed
consciousness and that their cognitive behaviour and mental
lives are similar to ours, we are reluctant to acknowledge this
because of its inconvenient implications and challenges to our
self-image as uniquely sentient beings.
Nevertheless, apes have long served as models for specula-
tions about human behaviour. Physical resemblance offers rich
possibilities for caricature and critique. Just as medieval texts
used apes as devices to comment on human morality, providing
examples of lust, laziness or other forms of sinful behaviour and
profane existence, we still employ apes to signify our failings
and to represent humans’ worst characteristics. For example,
novelist Kurt Vonnegut, denouncing us imperialism, declares:

There is not a chance in hell of America’s becoming

humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us,
and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings
are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying
that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in
danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting
and dying in the Middle East?6

Similarly, in 2008 numerous websites juxtaposed photographs

of chimpanzees with images of us President George W. Bush,
suggesting Bush’s inferior intelligence or lack of moral qualities

40
possessed by normal humans.7 This not only misrepresents
historical continuities of government policies as individual
idiosyncrasies but depends on denigration of animals to work
as an insult. Using apes to signify negative human qualities is a
self-congratulatory exercise in speciesism: our bad behaviour is
displaced onto animals, rejected as ‘non-human’ and our own
superiority is reaffirmed. We use negative images of apes to
denigrate enemies. War propaganda deploys animal imagery
and depicts enemies as ‘apelike brutes’ to be defeated utterly,
perhaps exterminated, so more virtuous groups may assert their
proper dominance.8
Just as Western art and literature use images of non-Western
peoples to construct messages about fundamental human
qualities, hierarchy and world order, apes provide rhetorical
devices to support propositions about human nature and to
critique human society. Cast as evil brutes, apes warn of ‘the
animal within’ humans and of dangerous impulses lurking
inside even the most civilized people. Racists consistently deploy
tactics of animalization, depicting minority groups as sub-
human apes (and other animals). Slavery and colonial domina-
tion were legitimized by apelike depictions of Africans. In
England, the Irish were caricatured as having apelike features
and these racist images followed Irish immigrants to the United
States.9 Animals and racialized humans are considered inter-
changeable. For example, in 2008 the Arkansas State University
athletics team, the Warriors, reluctantly retired their ‘Jumpin’
Joe’ mascot after Native American complaints; formerly the
Gorillas, the Warriors renamed themselves the Wolves.
Biological similarities with other apes trouble religious adher-
ents, since this challenges claims that humans were specially
created by supernatural entities. In the twenty-first century some
Christians in the United States replay earlier controversies

41
A mythical ape-like
creature from
Topsell’s bestiary.

(such as the 1925 Scopes ‘Monkey Trial’ concerning the teach-

ing of evolution in Tennessee schools) as they jeer at sugges-
tions of ‘being a monkey’s uncle’, reject evolutionary science
and demand teaching of Creationism in public schools.10 Only
22 per cent of Americans believe humans evolved from earlier
species, while 64 per cent believe humans were created by a
supernatural being and 47 per cent reject the idea of a common
ancestor for humans and other apes.11
Similarly, Muslim Creationists such as Turkey’s Adnan Oktar
(Harun Yahya) reject evolution and consider the Qu’ran to be
literal truth. Although Islam recommends some compassion
towards animals, it remains anthropocentric. The Qu’ran itself

42
refers to a story in which impious Jews were transformed into
apes as punishment. In 2007 London’s Saudi-funded King
Fahad Islamic school came under scrutiny when a former
teacher, complaining of unfair dismissal, claimed the school
was promoting racial hatred with books describing Jews as apes
and Christians as pigs. The school’s principal defended the
books, saying they contained good chapters, but later said no
one had read them; they were withdrawn amidst calls for a gov-
ernment inquiry.12
Most classical and medieval discussions about apes refer to
animals we now classify as monkeys. Those societies had no
exposure to great apes as we define them today and references to
‘apes’ probably indicate Barbary macaques. Unlike most mon-
keys, these macaques have only stubby tails and are usually
depicted as entirely tail-less. Early Greek and Roman travellers
in Africa may have glimpsed chimpanzees or gorillas. The term
‘Gorillae’ first appears in a fifth-century bc report about West
Africa by the Carthaginian Hanno the Navigator. His party
encountered a group of hairy savages who defended them-
selves against their pursuers, although the Carthaginians killed
and skinned three females and brought their trophies home.
This murderous response to other apes characterized human

‘An Ape doctor

with a Bear
Patient’, from the
Macclesfield Psalter,
c. 1330.

43
behaviour over the centuries. Early sightings blended with ideas
about imaginary and monstrous animals and contemporary
ideas about apes developed from these images.
Classical writers like Aristotle considered apes caricatures of
humans: ugly, evil creatures. Their capacity to mimic our behav-
iour fascinates us. Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia notes apes’
proclivity for imitation, often to their own detriment. Gaius Julius
Solinus, a major influence on medieval zoology, was himself
called ‘Pliny’s Ape’ for his extensive borrowing in his Polyhistor,
where he emphasized apes’ propensity to emulate human behav-
iour and described apes celebrating the full moon but growing
sad as it waned.
In De natura animalium Claudius Aelianus describes an ape
watching a hunter putting on boots; the hunter leaves the boots,
weighted with lead, in the forest, the ape puts them on in imi-
tation and is captured. In versions by Pliny and Solinus hunters
pretend to wash their eyes in water spiked with quick-lime and
the imitative ape blinds himself by actually doing so.13 Paulus
Potter’s painting Life of the Hunter (1650) depicts apes captured by
both tactics. Alexander Neckham’s De naturis rerum (1180)
describes an ape who cuts his own throat after observing a man
pretending to do so.14 After 1200 most bestiaries included similar
stories. Medieval interpretations showed the hunter as the devil,
demonstrating sins and capturing humans who commit them.
As Christianity developed, so did more negative views of apes.
The Physiologus, a second-century Greek compilation of knowl-
edge about animals and nature, linked apes with the devil. The
Physiologus influenced development of medieval bestiaries and
shaped European attitudes about animals for a thousand
years.15 Apes were associated with Egypt, which Christians con-
sidered a zone of false gods. From the Roman Empire’s collapse
to the Gothic period Christians saw apes as images of the devil

44
and elaborated representations within discourses about sin and
human nature. To Christians, apes were creations of Satan, the
Ape of God who mimicked their deity’s actions just as apes
mimicked human behaviour. Just as apes lacked tails (cauda),
the devil had no law (codex). The Physiologus suggested that the
ape’s lack of a tail reflected hubris and efforts to emulate
humans. Isidore of Seville thought it indicated a lack of a good
ending, as determined by a deity, whereas humans could deter-
mine their end by following supernatural instructions.16 The
twelfth-century Workshop Bestiary, containing descriptive infor- In ancient Egypt
mation plus moral lessons about ‘exotic’ animals (camels, croc- baboons were
associated with
odiles, elephants, lions and apes), depicts an ape carrying two
a number of
brightly coloured infants: her favourite in her arms and her different gods and
unloved one on her back. Pursued by an archer, exhausted, she were considered
both protectors
drops her favourite but carries the other to safety. The tale goes and dangerous
back to Greek writers such as Pliny, Avianus and Solinus, who figures from the
underworld.
suggest negative consequences of excessive affection (smother-
ing a favourite infant by hugging it too tightly while a neglected
twin survives). Isidore of Seville condensed the story and many
medieval bestiaries incorporated it. John Scotus considered it
an allegory of the human condition, with the favoured child
representing the material world’s pleasures and sins while the
neglected one represented spiritual virtues.17 The twelfth-century
Aberdeen Bestiary provides a standard account of medieval ideas
about apes:

Apes are called simie in Latin because the similarity

between their mentality and that of humans is felt to be
great. Apes are keenly aware of the elements; they rejoice
when the moon is new and are sad when it wanes. A char-
acteristic of the ape is that when a mother bears twins,
she loves one and despises the other. If it ever happens

45
Ape playing an
organ, from a
medieval manu-
script. Throughout
history, the ape’s
emulation of
human behaviour
has remained a
consistent theme.

that she is pursued by hunters, she carries the one she

loves before her in her arms and the one she detests on
her shoulders. But when she is tired of going upright,
she deliberately drops the one she loves and reluctantly
carries the one she hates. The ape does not have a tail.
The Devil has the form of an ape, with a head but no
Italian Baroque
artist Antonio tail. Although every part of the ape is foul, its rear parts
Tempesta’s are disgusting and horrid enough. The Devil began as
engraving associ-
ates the ape with an angel in heaven. But inside he was a hypocrite and a
Christian legends deceiver, and he lost his tail, because he will perish
of original sin
and expulsion
totally at the end, just as the apostle says: ‘The Lord shall
from Eden. consume him with the spirit of his mouth.’ (2 Thessa-
lonians, 2: 8)18

Hildegard von Bingen was the first medieval writer on natural

history to look beyond received knowledge from these texts

46
 European illustra-
tors also employed
apes’ frolicsome
behaviour as
a decorative
element, as in
Virgil Solis’s
16th-century
design for a
playing card.

and to note apes’ menstrual cycles, another point of similarity

with humans. Thirteenth-century encyclopedias, such as Alex-
ander Neckham’s De Naturis rerum, Thomas of Cantimpré’s
Liber de natura rerum, Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ De proprietati-
bus rerum, Albertus Magnus’ De animalibus and Vincent de
Beauvais’ Speculum naturale, began assessing animals in terms
of natural history, not just religious ideology. Nevertheless,
they still derived moral lessons from animal behaviour and
considered apes degenerate or inferior versions of more per-
fect humans, distinguished by rational souls.19
In the twelfth century apes became more common in
Europe, as performing animals and pets. As amusing performers,
they seemed less threatening, less devilish. Gradually, images
softened: apes symbolized foolishness or were seen as animals
created to amuse humans. However, apes always served as cari-
catures of humans, a role they still play today. Theologians

47
Martin Luther and John Calvin used apes to criticize human
corruption and denounce the insufficiently pious. In these miso-
gynistic cultures apes were associated with women and female
qualities, associations that persisted into contemporary popular
culture and primatology; the latter is often considered a femi-
nist science, despite practitioners’ protestations. Apes designated
sensuality and unreliability. Images of apes conveyed degrada-
tion, lust and sin: hideous deformations resulting from failure to
follow religious duties. From being an image of the devil, the ape
came to represent the devil’s victim, the sinner. Often depicted
with apples, symbols of forbidden knowledge, sin and immorality,
apes signified sensuality over spirituality, imprisonments of the
material world. Although resembling humans, apes were inferior,
just as sinners were deformations of virtuous individuals; it was
imagined that apes had degenerated from sinful humans.
Idolatry, defying supernatural instructions, attempts to imitate
divine powers or excessive pride might cause transformation
into an ape.
Only in the sixteenth century did Europeans begin hearing
reports about apes as we know them today. An English sailor,
Andrew Battell, was captured in Brazil by the Portuguese in
1589 and sent to Angola for almost two decades. His account of
his experience, published in 1625, describes two giant, hairy,
man-like ‘monsters’ called Pongo and Engeco by locals.20 These
terms may have referred to gorillas and chimpanzees. Battell
also mentions Pongo abducting a boy and keeping him for a
month. Battell’s account provided the genus name Pongo now
applied to orangutans.
During colonial expansion Europeans collected exotic animals
along with crops, minerals and human slaves. As well as provid-
ing direct material benefits, the capture and display of animals
and humans from subordinated groups was a demonstration

48
 Engraving of a
chimpanzee or
bonobo from
Nicolaes Tulp’s
Observationes
medicae (1641).

of power. As Europeans conquered the world, collections became

grander in scale. As travellers reported sightings of non-human
apes and as live specimens were captured, Europeans speculated
on the relationship of these creatures to humans.
In Amsterdam in 1641 the first dissection of an ape was done
by physician and anatomist Nicholaes Tulp. Tulp described his
dissection of an ‘orangutan’, now believed to be a chimpanzee or
a bonobo, who had been taken from western Africa, probably
Angola, and kept in the Prince of Orange’s menagerie. The first

49
 known reference to actual orangutans in Western scientific
literature comes from a 1658 description by Jacob de Bondt,
a Dutch physician and naturalist who lived in the East Indies:

Yet regard that wonderful monster with the human face

. . . walking erect, first that young female satyr . . . hiding
her face with her hands . . . weeping copiously, uttering
groans, and expressing other human acts so that you
would say nothing human was lacking in her but speech.
[Local people] say in truth, that they can talk, but do not
wish to, lest they should be compelled to labor . . . The
name they give to it is Orang utan.21

In Historiae naturalis et medicae Indiae orientalis, de Bondt illus-

trates a Wild Man, a hairy woman with a lion-like mane.

Jacob de Bondt,
The Wild Man of
the Woods.

50
 Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus used anatomical fea-
tures to develop a logical classification of all living things. In the
tenth edition of his Systema naturae, the foundational work in
modern taxonomy, he classified humans and orangutans in the
same genus, Homo. A committed Lutheran, Linnaeus sought to
explain the creations of a supernatural being but his scientific
observations unsettled him because he found no sharp division
between humans and the natural world. His placement of
humans in the zoological order of Primates threatened the idea
that they were specially created in the image of a god. Many
were outraged, despite the fact that Linnaeus emphasized his
belief that an invisible soul distinguished humans. Linnaeus
acknowledged that he was unable to distinguish between
human and ape and would have classified them together but for
fear of persecution by religious authorities.22

‘External
appearance
of the Orang
outan’, from
Tyson’s Orang-
outang, sive
Homo Sylvestris;
or, The Anatomy
of a Pygmie
Compared with
that of a Monkey,
an Ape, and a Man
(1699).

51
‘The Oran Ootan’,
from A Voyage to
and from the Island
at Borneo by David
Beeckman (1718).

In 1698 anatomist Edward Tyson dissected a chimpanzee

who had been captured in Angola, packed into a crate and died
from a jaw infection suffered during the voyage to England.
Adopting a term used by local populations in Indonesia to
describe apes living there, Tyson published his observations the
next year as Orang-outang, sive Homo Sylvestris; or, The Anatomy
of a Pygmie Compared with that of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man.
The term ‘orang-outang’ described apes generally, not the animals
we know by that name today. Noting anatomical similarities
and differences, Tyson attempted to distinguish relationships
between various creatures, as indicated in the book’s subtitle:
A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies, the Cynocephali, the
Satyrs, and Sphinges of the Ancients, Wherein it will appear that they
were all either Apes or Monkeys; and not Men, as formerly pretended.

52
Tyson described the ‘Pygmie’ as more human-like than monkey-
like, concluding that it belonged to both worlds: physically human
but mentally an animal. As evidence of a supernaturally pro-
vided soul, Tyson noted that both had a larynx but humans,
unlike apes, speak. As in de Bondt’s description, an illustration
from Tyson’s text shows the ape standing erect, using a walking
stick. Tyson’s effort to distinguish ‘orang-outangs’ from other,
mythical beings continues today. Cryptozoologists pursue crea-
tures such as the Himalayan Abominable Snowman, Viet Nam’s
Nguoi Rung, Sumatra’s Orang Pendek, the Sasquatch of north-
western Canada and the us, Florida’s Skunk Ape, China’s Yeren
and the Australian Yowie, all apelike beings who walk bipedally
and manage to avoid being captured, clearly photographed or
leaving skeletal remains.
Descriptions of apes appeared in accounts by travellers such
as Willem Bosman, whose Dutch text appeared in English trans-
lation in 1705. Claiming that apes in West Africa attacked people,
Bosman considered them ‘a terribly pernicious sort of brutes,
which seem to be made only for mischief ’ and said ‘Some of the
Negroes believe, as an undoubted truth, that these apes can
speak, but will not, that they may not be set to work; which they
do not very well love’.23 The idea that apes could speak but
refrained from doing so to avoid being forced to work was wide-
spread (see de Bondt above).
It was not until the late eighteenth century that Europeans
began distinguishing between various species of apes described
as orangutans. As more specimens arrived from Africa and Asia,
scientists and philosophers attempted to categorize them. Dutch
anatomist Petrus Camper in the 1770s was the first European to
dissect an actual orangutan from Asia. He noted differences
between this animal and African ‘orangutans’, now known as
chimpanzees. Camper also compared orangutans to humans.

53
 While noting similarities, he described the orangutan as an ugly,
monstrous creature, unable to reason or to use language (unlike
Tyson, he said orangutans’ vocal tracts made speech impossible),
and generally rejected ideas of a close biological relationship.
Scientists and philosophers debated the nature of this rela-
tionship. In his Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégal-
ité parmi les hommes (1755), Jean-Jacques Rousseau speculated
that orangutans might be humans in their natural state, the
happy, free Wild Men of a Golden Age. In On the Origins and
Progress of Language (1773–9), James Burnett, Lord Monboddo,
Two orangutans, proposed that no absolute border separated humans and apes.
from the Comte Comparing orangutans and feral children such as Peter the
de Buffon’s
Histoire naturelle . . .
Wolf Boy, Burnett suggested that orangutans were human, lack-
(1749–67). ing only capacity for speech. In 1769 Georges-Louis Leclerc,

54
 Fitzinger’s apes,
in a 19th-century
illustration.

Comte de Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière exam-

ined relationships between apes and humans and concluded that
while apes physically resembled humans and acted like them in
various ways, possession of a soul distinguished humans.
Although Buffon described an orangutan eating with a fork and
spoon at table and acknowledged similarities between apes and
humans, he rejected Linnaeus’ earlier classification, because it
humiliated humans. Emphasizing thought and speech, he insist-
ed that ‘divine breath’ had made humans rulers of the earth.
Similarly, in eighteenth-century Germany Johann Friedrich
Blumenbach considered the proximity of apes and humans
offensive and moved humans into their own order.

55
 In the eighteenth century speculation developed about
creatures that combined animal and human characteristics.
Discovery of Neanderthal fossils in 1829, 1848 and 1856
intensified such discussions. New discoveries and classifica-
tions of ape species and other early hominid fossils inspired
debates on their relationship to Homo sapiens. German biolo-
gist Ernst Haeckel’s prediction that Pithecanthropus alalus, a
‘missing link’ between apes and humans, would be found in

A wide variety
of apelike beings
populated the
European
imagination.

56
 In this 1871
cartoon for
Harpers Weekly
Thomas Nast
parodied concerns
about ape–human
relationships
that followed
the publication
of Darwin’s
Origin of Species.

Indonesia was followed by Eugene Dubiois’s discovery in 1891

of Pithecanthropus erectus (now Homo erectus); Dubois thought
his ‘Java Man’ fossils were not human but represented a gigan-
tic, large-brained, bipedal gibbon-like creature constituting a
transitional form. Czech artist Gabriel von Max depicted them
as more ape than human, suitably depressed at their unsatis-
factory condition.
The context of colonial expansion encouraged overlap-
ping images of apelike hominids and ‘lower races’ conceived as
living ancestral forms.24 All were considered wild and savage,

57
contrasting with views of writers such as Rousseau and Burnett
who emphasized orangutans’ peaceful behaviour to create dif-
ferent images of ‘natural man’.
New images of competition and struggle developed within
the context of industrial growth, emergence of new classes and
imperialism. Ideas about ‘monstrous races’ and ‘wild men’ had
circulated since antiquity, often associated with unrestrained
sexuality. As Europeans encountered other societies, other pri-
mates and fossils of extinct animals including hominids, these
images simmered in an intoxicating brew now spiced with
ideas about evolution and distinct human ‘races’. Connections
between Africans and apes were particularly strong in the
English imagination. Largely isolated until the seventeenth cen-
tury, the English encountered Africans at the same time and in
the same places as they encountered apes. The apes’ human-like
qualities inspired speculation about relationship between them
and African peoples. Still affected by medieval ideas about
strange mythical monsters and about apes as providing symbols
of sin, lust and evil, Europeans readily mobilized these images to
explain other cultures. Historian Winthrop Jordan thinks: ‘Given
this tradition and the coincidence of contact, it was virtually
inevitable that Englishmen should discern similarity between the
manlike beasts and the beastlike men of Africa.’25
In European imaginations, apes, Africans and mythological
creatures were jumbled together, especially in ideas about sex-
uality and bestiality. Many believed Africans were closer to
apes, that they had sexual intercourse with apes, or that apes
were the product of Africans having intercourse with some
other animal. Such ideas saturated European thinking about
other humans. For example, Edward Long’s 1774 History of
Jamaica emphasized similarities between enslaved Africans and
apes and suggested that Africans had sex with apes. Historically,

58
 A very human-like
Troglodytes Niger,
from Jardine’s
Natural History
of Monkeys.

such ideas provided justifications for slavery and recent labora-

tory studies indicate that associations of Africans or black people
with apes still persist in American popular culture, while archival
content analysis shows that news articles create implicit associa-
tions between black criminals and apes and that those identified
as more ape-like are more likely to be executed.26
Fossil hominids, indigenous peoples, working classes, polit-
ical opponents and apes themselves were all depicted as violent

59
brutes, uncontrollable, sexual, prone to cannibalism and other
unthinkable behaviour. While some of Darwin’s ideas were
adapted to fit the political context, resulting in the ever-useful
notion of ‘survival of the fittest’, other aspects were more trou-
bling. Suggestions of evolutionary links with living apes (still
widely misunderstood as direct descent from those apes) dis-
turbed more self-congratulatory notions of human uniqueness,
a disturbance that still affects our own time.
Just as Linnaeus feared religious persecution for classifying
humans as part of the natural order rather than apart from it,
Darwin fretted about being seen as a radical atheist insulting
human dignity. Certainly Darwin was ridiculed for his ideas.
Opponents loved to caricature him as an ape or a monkey. At
a meeting of the British Association of the Advancement of
Science at Oxford University in 1860, Bishop Samuel Wilber-
force disparaged Thomas Henry Huxley’s defence of evolution
by enquiring: ‘Was it through his grandfather or his grand-
mother that he claimed descent from a monkey?’27 A Punch
cartoon from May 1861 showed a gorilla wearing a sandwich-
board emblazoned ‘Am I a Man and a Brother?’; linking
evolutionary theory with a famous anti-slavery slogan lampooned
both ideas.
Despite such attacks, scientists pursued comparative anato-
my. German physician and anthropologist Robert Hartmann
published Die menschenähnlichen Affen (1876), a study of chim-
panzees, gibbons, gorillas and orangutans, arguing that anthro-
poid apes and humans shared a common ancestor. This is now
accepted by all scientists. Nevertheless, these debates have not
disappeared. While Creationists reject common ancestry of
human and non-human apes, even those not seized by religious
ideologies attempt to maintain boundaries between ourselves
and other animals.

60
 Ambivalence about the animal/human boundary is re-
vealed in the short but dramatic history of our interactions
with gorillas. In his 1819 ‘Sketch of Gabon’, T. Edward Bowdich
describes purchasing an ‘African Ourang-outan’, presumably a
chimpanzee, with the ‘cry, visage and action of a very old man’
but reports a much larger ape ‘lurking in the bush to destroy
passengers’. Bowdich echoes classical and medieval tales
about apes’ self-destructive mimicry, claiming ‘their death is
frequently accelerated’ by their tendency to imitate humans,
picking up heavy loads and carrying them through the jungle
until they drop.28
American missionary and naturalist Thomas Staughton
Savage made the first scientific description of gorillas in 1847,
based on bones purchased in Gabon from the Mpongwe peo-
ple. Publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859
heightened public interest in apes. Ideas about them were in-
separable from ideas of racialized human difference, expressed
in popular culture through such musical pieces as The Gorilla
Quadrille, written in 1861 by Joseph Williams:

My name it is Gorilla
And by that you plainly see
By birth I am a darkie
But you can’t get hold of me.
I laugh A Ha!
I sing doo dah
I’m the wonderful gorilla
Whom you’ve heard of but not seen.29

Gorilla bones and skins became coveted objects and dis-

plays of their corpses attracted crowds to museums. European
and North American adventurers made careers out of killing

61
‘Troglodytes
Gorilla’, from
Transactions of the
Zoological Society
of London, vol. v
(1866).

animals, selling corpses to museums, zoological societies and

private collectors, writing about their exploits and giving public
lectures, often to huge crowds. Novelists romanticized them as
heroes, as in H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, and they
were celebrated as Great White Hunters whose personal
strength reflected the general superiority of European civiliza-
tion and allowed them to dominate wildlife and indigenous
people around the world.

62
 One Great White Hunter who sought his fortune in Africa
was Paul Belloni du Chaillu, who claimed that his travels in
the 1850s and ’60s made him the first white man to see ‘that
monstrous and ferocious ape, the gorilla’. His bestselling book
Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa sensational-
ized gorillas: ‘a hellish dream creature’,30 ‘no description can
exceed the horror of its appearance, the ferocity of its attack’,31
although he did note that gorillas are ‘strict vegetarian[s]’.32
Like many nineteenth-century Europeans, he provides a lurid,
exhausting account of slaughtering one animal after another.
While he boasted of killing thousands of animals, murdering
gorillas particularly stimulated him: he was ‘never more excited

Du Chaillu
depicted the
vegetarian gorillas
as fierce monsters
of the African
forests.

63
in my life’33 than when shooting one, although hearing his
victim’s ‘half human devilish cry’ he ‘almost felt like a murder-
er’.34 This was but a fleeting qualm since Du Chaillu empha-
sized their ferocity: ‘monstrous as a nightmare dream – so
impossible a piece of hideousness that, was it not for the dan-
ger of its ugly approach, the hunter might fancy himself in some
ugly dream’.35
While playing up their bestial ferocity, Du Chaillu was dis-
turbed by their similarity to humans, as he noted in a childrens’
book, Wild Life Under the Equator:

Though there is much dissimilar between this animal

and man, I never kill one without having a sickening real-
ization of the horrid human likeness of the beast.36

Although acknowledging that he ‘almost felt like a murderer’37

when killing gorillas, this ‘sickening’ realization of similarity
provided the essential thrill: ‘It is the lurking reminiscence of
humanity indeed, what makes one of the chief ingredients of
the hunter’s excitement in his attack of the gorilla.’38
Du Chaillu was intrigued by tales of gorillas abducting local
women for sex and sought evidence of hybrid offspring but con-
cluded that these were just stories. While sceptical about tales
of gorillas inhabited by spirits of dead humans and who abduct-
ed women and murdered men in the forest, he depicted them as
fearsome beings from whose ‘fiercely glaring . . . eyes [shone a]
. . . hellish expression . . . like some nightmare vision’.39
Already thrilled by killing these human-like animals, Du
Chaillu experienced further excitement from capturing infants
whose mothers he had slain. After capturing a baby gorilla Du
Chaillu pronounced it ‘one of the greatest pleasures of my
whole life’,40 but complained that his captive was ‘morose . . .

64
 An infant orang-
utan depicted in
A. R. Wallace’s
Malay Archipelago
(1869). Although
Wallace shot
many orangutans
as museum
specimens,
he sometimes
attempted to
raise the orphans.

ill-tempered . . . savage’ in his cage, a ‘monster’ with ‘wicked lit-

tle eyes’ who attempted to escape and ‘always cherished a feel-
ing of revenge’ during the ten days he survived in captivity.41
Undeterred, Du Chaillu repeated his efforts, puzzled that his
next infant captive ‘seemed really to feel grief ’ after her mother
was shot; like the first prisoner, the baby remained ‘gloomy and
treacherous’ until she, too, died after a few days.42 Although Du
Chaillu’s actions now seem pathological, they were characteris-
tic of the time. For example, evolutionary theorist Alfred Russel
Wallace shot as many orangutans as possible in Indonesia, but
tried to keep as a pet one young animal he had deliberately
orphaned. Like Du Chaillu, Wallace repeatedly marvelled at his
victims’ human-like aspects, describing the orangutan as being
‘exactly like a baby’.43 Although progressive in other respects (a
socialist, a supporter of women’s suffrage and aware of envi-
ronmental issues), Wallace exhibited little concern for the lives
of animals. The public felt much the same.
Du Chaillu toured the us in 1860, displaying a collection of
corpses, and the next year took his show to England, drawing
capacity crowds. However, John Edward Gray, Vice-President

65
of the British Zoological Society and Keeper of the British
Museum’s zoological collections, criticized his scientific obser-
vations and accused him of incompetence and plagiarism. Du
Chaillu also faced accusations of falsifying chronology and
engaging in slavery. Suspicion that this particular Great White
Hunter might be of ‘mixed race’ fuelled the controversy. Al-
though one website now claims him as one of history’s ‘Great
People of Colour’,44 Du Chaillu himself presented his racial
identity as white. He took a dim view of the ‘dreadful and dreary
lives’ of Africans and advised that ‘the cunning hand and brain
of the white man’ could improve their situation.45
Sir Richard Burton challenged Du Chaillu’s depictions of
gorillas as nightmarish devils but also discussed difficulties of
keeping captive infants alive for shipment to Europe, outlining
possible diets and suggesting: ‘In order to escape nostalgia and
melancholy, which are sure to be fatal, the emigrant should be
valeted by a faithful and attached native.’46 Presumably Burton
believed a ‘native’ would be more comforting to the animal be-
cause of what he assumed was a closer similarity between them.
Efforts to bring living gorillas to Europe and America were
unsuccessful. Most died soon after being captured or on the
voyage. In the 1890s Richard Garner went to Gabon to observe
and collect gorillas, spending 112 days in a specially construct-
ed cage to protect himself from the savage apes he hoped to
encounter. The gorillas mainly avoided him but he did use
early phonographic equipment to record vocalizations. In
October 1902, on a military patrol through present-day
Burundi and Rwanda to further German imperialism, Captain
Robert von Beringe was the first European to see mountain
gorillas. Although the apes tried to escape, Beringe’s party killed
two of them. Beringe sent parts of a corpse to Berlin’s Zoological
Museum, which classified the animals as Gorilla beringei after

66
the first European to have murdered one of them. American taxi- Dian Fossey with
gorilla.
dermist Carl Akeley killed gorillas for the American Museum
of Natural History in the 1920s but, shaken by his victims’
simi larity to humans, he challenged their depiction as violent
demonic beings. Recognizing even then that gorillas were en-
dangered, in 1925 he convinced the Belgian government to create
Albert National Park as a sanctuary; in 1929 this was extended
to the Virunga area. Although George and Kay Schaller pro-
duced field observations of gorillas there in 1959, it was Dian
Fossey who definitively transformed the gorilla’s image in
Western popular culture. Although she was untrained in bio-
logy, Louis Leakey selected her as one of his famous ‘angels’
(along with Birute Galdikas and Jane Goodall) to observe apes
in their natural habitat. Fossey spent almost nineteen years on

67
her research, first in Zaire in 1967 but most famously at Karisoke
in Rwanda. Fossey became the first researcher to have close,
affectionate contact with gorillas. The emotional connections
she established with the apes motivated her to protect them
against human depredations, including poaching and capture
for zoo collections.
Fossey’s efforts to protect gorillas became controversial,
especially after the murder of Digit, a gorilla with whom she
had an especially close bond. In 1978 Fossey established the Digit
Fund in his memory to raise money for anti-poaching work.
However, in the uk Fossey lost control of this fund to the Fauna
Protection Society (fps). She complained that the fps diverted
money to Rwandan government officials and to promotion of
gorilla tourism, which she opposed. Fossey kept control of the
Digit Fund in the United States until her death. Afterwards, the
Fund was renamed in the United States as The Dian Fossey Gor-
illa Fund International and in the uk as The Dian Fossey Gorilla
Fund-uk (renamed the Gorilla Organisation in 2006).
In 1985 Fossey was murdered. Initially, her death was attrib-
uted to poachers, then to a revenge attack by a former employee,
who was arrested and later found dead in his cell, but she may
have been murdered by Rwandan government officials seeking
profits from the gorilla tourism she opposed. Detractors portray
Fossey as an unstable, alcoholic racist who ignored the plight of
poor Africans. Robert Sapolsky thinks she worsened dangers
for gorillas by persecuting poachers who accidentally killed
them while hunting other animals and provoked their revenge.47
Fossey herself claimed she was vilified by those who wanted
to control Karisoke and promote tourism: the Rwandan tourist
office, African Wildlife Foundation, fps, Mountain Gorilla
Project, World Wildlife Fund (wwf) and some of her former
students.

68
 Despite personal eccentricities, Fossey undoubtedly drew
international attention to the gorillas’ plight. Her work became
more famous through the film Gorillas in the Mist (1988). Her
letters were published in 2005, and in 2006 the Kentucky Opera
premiered Nyiramachabelli, based on her life. Also in 2006
Georgianne Nienaber assumed Fossey’s voice in a fictionalized
biography which begins with Fossey attending her own funeral
and portrays the murdered gorilla Digit guiding her in the after-
life.48 Transformation of gorillas in the popular imagination
from nightmarish monster to innocent victim and psychopomp
reflects a significant shift in consciousness. Whether or not this
change will prevent their extinction remains to be seen.

69
3 Pets, Captives, Hybrids

Although much effort goes into denying our proximity to other

apes, we are fascinated by their resemblance to us and by possi-
bilities of transgressing the border separating us. Apes are pop-
ular pets, for those who can afford to acquire them. The first live
ape to reach Europe was sent as a gift to the Prince of Orange in
1640 for his private menagerie. Ever since, keeping apes has
provided pleasure for wealthy people. In 1925 primatologist
Robert Yerkes made his earliest observations of chimpanzees at
Rosalia Abreu’s private menagerie on her Cuban estate, site of
the first captive chimpanzee birth in the Western hemisphere.
This inspired Yerkes to acquire chimpanzees himself and to cre-
ate breeding institutions. Entertainers used apes to build their
own images. In 1920s Paris ‘Black Venus’ Josephine Baker con-
structed her exotic persona with a string of artificial bananas as
a skirt and a pet chimpanzee, Ethel. A whiskey-drinking chim-
panzee named Scatter joined 1960s sex parties at Elvis Presley’s
Bel Air mansion, where the King derived voyeuristic thrills from
watching him wrestle with young women.1 As Scatter grew and
became uncontrollable, he was banished to a cage at Graceland,
where he died. Michael Jackson acquired a chimpanzee, Bubbles,
from a cancer research facility in 1985. Reportedly, Bubbles was
assigned housework duties at Jackson’s Neverland ranch and
the pair attended social events and awards shows, wearing

70
 Jeff Koons,
Michael Jackson
and Bubbles, 1988,
ceramic.

matching costumes. Jackson and Bubbles are portrayed in a life-

sized, gold-leaf ceramic sculpture by Jeff Koons, made in 1988 as
a symbol of media culture, celebrity and excessive consumption
and auctioned in 1991 for $5.6 million. At Jackson’s 2005 child-
molestation trial it was reported that Bubbles, now unmanage-
able, had been replaced by another chimpanzee, Max. Monkeys
are also desirable pets for the less wealthy. In July 2008 abc
News reported that ownership of ‘monkids’, monkeys raised as
surrogate human children, had reached ‘fever pitch’ in the
United States, creating spin-off industries to provide fashion-
able clothing and accessories.
Captive apes serve as pets in other societies too. Prima-
tologist Birute Galdikas, describing fieldwork in Indonesia
during the 1970s, noted ‘virtually every town and village houses
captive orangutans’.2 Keeping orangutans and gibbons as pets
was fashionable among the upper middle classes, including
senior government officials responsible for enforcing Indo-
nesian laws against those very practices. Galdikas suggests that

71
this reflects colonial mentality, a means by which educated and
wealthy Indonesians could emulate their former Dutch mas-
ters, who were impressed by orangutans’ human-like qualities.
Possessing apes and other exotic animals satisfies desires for
domination: imprisoning them demonstrates abilities to control
nature. Through magical associations exotic pets make owners
feel special, powerful or imbued with properties of their cap-
tives. While fulfilling certain people’s fantasies, ownership is
unlikely to meet the animals’ needs. Even when young, chim-
panzees are very active and soon become strong and assertive.
Even smaller monkeys become aggressive when older and can
inflict serious wounds. In response, owners try to beat them
into submission, remove their teeth, chain them and imprison
them in cages, usually isolated. Apes are highly intelligent,
social animals with complex emotions; captivity, usually with-
out others of their own kind, creates psychological problems.
When controlling them becomes impossible, they are sold to
roadside zoos or into biomedical research. Similarities between
humans and other apes lead to analogies with human slavery: if
we are morally opposed to keeping humans in chains, why con-
done enslavement of apes?
Even with good intentions, keeping a chimpanzee as a pet
typically ends badly, exemplified by the case of St James and
LaDonna Davis and their pet, Moe. St James Davis acquired the
infant chimpanzee on a 1967 trip to Tanzania, where poachers
had killed Moe’s mother. At their California home, Moe slept
with the Davises, watched television and learned to use the toilet.
However, in 1998 when Moe escaped from his cage after receiv-
ing an accidental electric shock, he bit one of the police officers
chasing him through the neighbourhood. A year later Moe bit a
visitor who put her hand in his cage, despite warnings. City offi-
cials removed Moe to Animal Haven Ranch in Bakersfield.

72
Visiting Moe to celebrate his 39th birthday, the Davises were
attacked by two other chimpanzees, Buddy and Ollie, who
escaped from their cage. LaDonna Davis lost a thumb, but her
husband lost his nose, an eye, most fingers, both testicles and
large pieces of flesh from his face and body and spent weeks
near death in a medically induced coma. Buddy and Ollie were
shot. The story is a series of tragedies, from the killing of Moe’s
mother and his abduction, to the misguided attempt to raise
him as a quasi-human being and keep him as a house pet.
Separated from other chimpanzees and no longer a manageable
infant, Moe was frustrated by confinement in a cage, making
him dangerous to visitors. Undoubtedly the Davises loved him,
but created an impossible situation in which everyone suffered
when Moe had to be removed. Buddy and Ollie had worked for
an animal trainer, probably enduring mistreatment. Their vio-
lence may have been a dominance display directed at Moe as a
strange, threatening male and they may have attacked the
Davises simply because they were within reach, while Moe was
locked in his cage. All were victims of a series of bad decisions.
The pet trade is contributing to imminent extinction of
many primate species. Over 130 primate species are endangered
and wild populations are at great risk in every country where
they occur. Tens of thousands of primates are sold on interna-
tional markets annually, many illegally. The us imports one-third,
followed by the uk, Japan, the Netherlands, Russia, France and
Taiwan. interpol estimates the illegal animal trade is worth $20
billion a year, second only to the illegal drug trade. It has a dras-
tic impact on biodiversity, ecosystems and national economies.
Apes are sold to zoos, private collectors and hotels, where they
are displayed for tourists.
Dealers operate internationally with impunity. For example,
journalists Karl Amman and Jason Mier provided evidence of

73
‘The Chimpanzee’,
from Joseph Wolf,
Zoological Sketches
. . . (1861).

dealing extending over many years, during which time no

charges were laid.3 They conclude that African and Middle East
governments, national airlines and international organizations,
such as the un Secretariat overseeing the Convention on
International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and
Flora (cites), are failing in their obligations to protect animals.

74
Many dealers and private collectors are wealthy people with
connections at the highest levels of government. Amman and
Mier filmed one notorious dealer, an Egyptian named Heba
Abdul Moty Ahmad Saad. With her family, she has smuggled
apes for almost three decades, mainly from Cameroon and
Nigeria, where her husband runs a transport business. Mike
Pugh, an rspca inspector in the uk, encountered Heba in
Nigeria during a 1997 undercover investigation; he estimated
that she exported 50 chimpanzees and a dozen gorillas annu-
ally. Many went to private zoos and hotels in Egypt, Lebanon,
Qatar and the United Arab Emirates; others were sold to the
biomedical trade. Several Egyptian hotels keep animals in
deplorable conditions; one is the Tower Club Hotel at Sharm el
Sheikh, a favorite vacation spot for former British Prime Minister
Tony Blair. After questioning Enab Ashraf, owner of the Hauza
Hotel, about chimpanzees in its private zoo, Amman’s room was
raided, his films stolen and all pictures on his computer were
deleted. In 2008 the Hauza Beach Resort’s website still advertised
chimpanzees and other animals.
Africa’s illegal pet trade was exposed in January 2005 when a
crate of chimpanzees and monkeys was confiscated at Nairobi
airport, having been refused entry at Cairo for lack of documen-
tation and re-routed back to Nigeria through Kenya. The animals
received no water or food for several days and were dehydrated
and stressed. One chimpanzee died and survivors were placed in
Kenya’s Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary. Amman and Mier
say Kenya Airlines had long been shipping animals in unsuitable
containers and it was just an accident that this shipment was
discovered, a charge denied by the airlines.4
The ‘Taiping Four’ case illustrates the trade’s international
complexities. Cameroonian smugglers captured four baby goril-
las, probably killing several adults, and sold them to Nigeria’s

75
Ibadan Zoo. Officials ran an international animal-trafficking
operation and produced certificates stating that the babies
were born at the zoo, which holds only a single, elderly female
gorilla. Although cites prohibits commercial trade in gorillas,
Malaysia’s Taiping Zoo purchased the babies, to replace others
who had died. The gorillas were shipped on South African Air-
ways through Johannesburg, where South African Veterinary
Services issued a permit. Following the International Primate
Protection League’s protest, Nigeria held an inquiry into smug-
gling and fired several zoo officials. Malaysian officials confiscated
the gorillas but sent them to Pretoria’s National Zoological
Gardens, despite South Africa’s own illegal activities. For three
years zoo officials and the governments of Cameroon, Malaysia,
Nigeria and South Africa argued about the gorillas. Although
international conventions indicated they should be returned to
Cameroon, South African zoo officials opposed this, claiming
they could provide better care. Welfare groups wanted the gorillas
returned to Cameroon to demonstrate that foreign zoos cannot
keep illegally obtained animals; this would discourage purchas-
ing, thus eliminating profits from killing gorillas and selling
babies. In 2007 the Taipang Four were returned to Cameroon
and settled in Limbe sanctuary.5
The pet trade’s cruelty has inspired action against it. Since
1973 the International Primate Protection League has exposed
international animal smuggling and opposed using animals in
biomedical and military research (including some gruesome
biological, chemical and radiation experiments). Their investi-
gations led to several important convictions. Nevertheless,
penalties are minimal, while demand and profits encourage
dealers to resume operations.
England’s Monkey World sanctuary helped Spanish author-
ities confiscate ‘beach chimpanzees’, used as props to attract

76
 Two gorillas in
a Canadian zoo.
Although zoos
may try to provide
realistic looking
exhibits, they
seldom meet
the needs of
the animals.

tourists by photographers, who controlled the apes by remov-

ing their teeth, drugging them and keeping them terrified and
submissive by beatings. In 1998, appalled by a hotel’s display of
caged chimpanzees, American veterinarian Sheri Speede,
backed by In Defense of Animals, persuaded Cameroon’s gov-
ernment to create Sanaga-Yong animal sanctuary, which now
shelters apes, provides jobs, income and basic medical care to
local people, and supports the local school.
Apes are key attractions at circuses, zoos and amusement
parks. Throughout history zoos have been connected to imperi-
alism as expressions of power over nature. Exotic animals were
symbols of empire and the conquest of foreign lands. Zoos
allowed the public to enjoy this power vicariously and thrill
to the domination of others. Gazing at an imprisoned collection
of strange creatures, humans can imagine themselves to be
something different, not animals. Sometimes zoos demonstrat-
ed direct links between racism and speciesism by exhibiting

77
exotic people alongside apes. For example, in 1904 Ota Benga, a
‘pygmy’ from Congo’s Batwa society, was displayed beside an
orangutan in a cage at the Bronx Zoo. Among P. T. Barnum’s
prime attractions was William Henry Johnson, a black man with
a small head, known as ‘Zip the Pinhead’ or the ‘What Is It?’ and
exhibited in a furry suit as a ‘missing link’ ape-man. Exhibiting
humans from foreign territories alongside apes, zoos and circuses
constructed powerful messages about legitimacy of empire and
racist hierarchies.
In the 1930s and ’40s a gorilla named Gargantua the Great
became the main draw for financially struggling Ringling
Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus, which promoted him as
‘The World’s Most Terrifying Living Creature!’ Posters depicted a
giant ape the size of King Kong, scowling ferociously. In reality he
was a normal-sized gorilla and his scowl and ferocity were the
consequence of abuse from his captors. Captured in the Belgian
Congo in 1929 and originally named Buddy by the missionaries
who acquired him, he was then given to a naval captain who took
him to the United States. A drunken sailor, angry after losing his
job, took revenge on the captain by throwing acid in Buddy’s face.
Near death, he was given to Gertrude Lintz, a wealthy animal
lover, who nursed him after the acid attack and then again after a
poisoning by another vengeful worker, fired by Lintz. Lintz raised
Buddy and another gorilla, Massa, as human children, dressing
them and having them eat at the table. In 1937, while being
driven around New York, Buddy was frightened by a thunder-
storm and his panicked response led Lintz to sell him to Ringling
Brothers. From 1938, as Gargantua, he became the circus’s star,
although he was treated miserably, isolated in small cages with-
out stimulation, until his death from pneumonia in 1949.
Amusement parks are notorious for mistreatment of animals,
exemplified by Thailand’s Safari World’s orangutan kick-boxing

78
 Baby orangutan
with zoo-keepers.

shows. In 2004 Safari World held about 140 captive orangutans,

even though they are supposedly protected under cites regula-
tions. Dorset-based rescue group Monkey World’s Thailand
investigation in 2001–3 found illegally obtained gibbons, chim-
panzees, orangutans and other animals held at Samutprakarn
Crocodile Farm and Zoo in terrible conditions: many were in
small, dirty cages and some had had their teeth knocked out so
different species could be caged together.6 Staff cleaned animals
by tossing buckets of disinfectant over them. Prompted by
such investigations and by the Borneo Orangutan Survival
Foundation, Wildlife Friends of Thailand and the International
Primate Protection League, the Indonesian government offi-
cially requested return of the animals in 2004. Safari World
claimed the orangutans had died suddenly and been buried but,
after police raids and wildlife smuggling charges, 480 orang-
utans were eventually returned in 2006. Although orangutan
shows supposedly halted, Safari World’s website still advertised

79
 them in 2008 as providing ‘non-stop entertainment’, along
with other attractions such as the Dolphin Show, Sealand Show
and the Jungle Walk.7 The last, featuring orangutans, leopards
and walruses, constructs a ‘jungle’ that could exist only in the
owners’ imaginations, undermining any claims about ‘educa-
tional value’.
When Europeans first began capturing apes for zoos, pris-
oners’ survival chances were poor. Most died within days or
months until it was learned that apes are very susceptible to
human diseases, especially common respiratory infections.
Until recently, many zoos kept animals crowded in small cages
that prevented natural movement, showing no awareness of or
attention to their needs, feeding them inappropriately and
driving them insane from overcrowding, stress and boredom.
Although apes have complex social relationships, their social
groups are shattered as zoos pursue breeding programmes and
exhibition needs. The psychological impact of separation and iso-
lation on apes is heavy, and many zoos dose captive gorillas
with antidepressants.8
Other dangers threaten apes in zoos. Brooks, a 21-year-old
gorilla, died in 2005 while under anaesthetic at Cleveland
Tethard Philip
Metroparks Zoo. In 2006 Ben, a 21-year-old gorilla, drowned in
Christian Haag, a moat at Florida’s Jacksonville Zoo, while two gorillas died with-
Orangutan, oil
in three days at National Zoo in Washington, dc, one from a
on canvas, 1777.
Haag depicted heart condition that is a common cause of death for captive
this orangutan male gorillas.9 Although four gorillas died of various diseases at
(who had been
given as a gift to Calgary Zoo in Canada during 2007, suggesting that the insti-
Prince William v tution’s conservation programme was failing, officials insisted
of Orange) in
a human-like on continuing gorilla exhibitions.
standing pose but In 2007 two chimpanzees, Coco and Jonnie, escaped from
the painting was
made after the
England’s Whipsnade Safari Park. Although Coco was recap-
ape’s death. tured, Jonnie was ‘gunned down by the zoo’s specially trained

80
Habitat destruction firearms squad’. Questioned why tranquillizer darts were not
means that orang-
utans may soon
used, a representative said the Park had a shoot-to-kill policy for
be extinct in the escapees. The Zoological Society of London, which operates the
wild and survive zoo, defended this as ‘standard procedure’.10 Apart from any
only in zoos and
sanctuaries. ethical issues of keeping such intelligent animals in captivity, the
fact that chimpanzees are considered so dangerous that they
must be killed if they escape raises questions about the wisdom
of displaying them in public spaces for entertainment. These
dangers were demonstrated in 2006 when escaped chimpanzees
killed one person and mauled several others at Sierra Leone’s
Tacugama Sanctuary. In 2008 two chimpanzees escaped from
Tenerife’s Oasis Zoo and destroyed much of a nearby bar, fright-
ening customers and injuring themselves.
In 2005 in Xi’an, capital of China’s Shaanxi province, Qin-
ling zoo officials decided to end chimpanzee AiAi’s sixteen-year

82
habit of chain-smoking cigarettes because her health was
threatened; she began smoking after two mates died in succes-
sion, followed by the death of one offspring and removal of
others.11 Chinese zoo-goers were not alone in finding this hilar-
ious. A ‘spokesman’ for South Africa’s Bloemfontein Zoo
explained that ‘it looks funny to see a chimp smoking’ when
describing its imprisoned Charlie puffing cigarettes provided
by visitors seeking laughs.12
Another amusing zoo performance was the chimpanzee tea
party.13 Young chimpanzees were trained to use cups, teapots,
spoons and other utensils. They quickly mastered such skills but
this was considered insufficiently entertaining so they were also
trained to ‘misbehave’ on cue, by drinking directly from teapots
and so on. For decades audiences found this hilarious and by the
1950s London Zoo had become a training centre for tea-party
chimpanzees, who were exported to zoos around the world.
Inspired, British tea company pg Tips began using tea-
drinking chimpanzees in television advertisements in 1956.
Canada’s Red Rose tea company also ran television commercials

The chimpanzee
tea party was a
popular zoo
attraction,
satisfying our
desire to see
animals imitate
us in comically
unsuccessful ways.

83
Another chimpan-
zee tea party.

in the 1960s, in which the Marquis Chimps (Baron, Enoch,

Hans and Susie) enacted a Wild West shoot-out, played golf
and, most famously, performed as a jazz band. Their owner, cir-
cus acrobat Gene Detroy, trained them to roller skate, use cut-
lery and punch time-clocks, and the chimpanzees went from
English music halls to us television spots on The Ed Sullivan
Show, Here’s Lucy and The Jack Benny Show, as well as skating
through Ice Capades programmes. However, the pg Tips chim-
panzees were even more popular and commercials used them
for nearly half a century, listed by the Guinness World Records as
Britain’s longest-running advertising campaign.14 Commercials
depicted chimpanzees as Tour de France cyclists, movers haul-
ing pianos up staircases, housewives doing ironing and as James
Bond-type secret agents. They became so popular that pg Tips
created a line of ceramic figurines depicting them, now prized
by collectors.

84
 The appeal of the tea parties and television commercials was
to see chimpanzees breaking the rules, such as letting the piano
slide down the stairs in order to enjoy a cup of tea. While it is
not always considered funny when humans ignore rules of
behaviour and etiquette, many are delighted to watch chim-
panzees’ transgressions. The tea party’s degeneration into farce
reaffirms our own role as mature humans who can restore
order. Watching the chaos, we can see, in a safely managed way,
what things would be like if we did not maintain control of the
situation and of ourselves. Chimpanzee tea parties allow spec-
tators to enjoy a safe parody of middle-class behaviour while
reaffirming the rules underlying it.15
While ape tea parties were phased out of zoos, chimpanzees
remain popular in advertising, where they sell everything from
hamburgers and beer to employment agencies and investment
firms. YouTube videos show chimpanzees promoting peanut
butter, credit cards, rental cars and a film festival. As with the
tea parties, commercials emphasize the apes’ misbehaviour, as
in the CareerBuilder advertisements that debuted at the 2005
Super Bowl and featured suit-wearing chimpanzees acting
unprofessionally in office settings to depict the plight of a man
who is ‘tired of working with monkeys’. Revenues boomed fol-
lowing these advertisements. Noting that other corporations
also ran successful commercials featuring chimpanzees during
the Super Bowl, usa Today counselled advertisers: ‘You Just
Can’t Go Wrong With A Chimp.’16
On television and in person, chimpanzees advertise an end-
less variety of products and events. In July 2006 abc News
announced that a chimpanzee named Mikey would compete
for the $10 million prize at the 2006 World Series of Poker, and
featured scenes of Mikey wearing a t-shirt and visor-cap, play-
ing poker as news announcers and his trainer laughed at him;

85
 organizers did not allow him to play. Apes are rented out to per-
form at all types of events. For example, the Rosaire Zoppe
Chimpanzees have performed for us presidents and are regu-
larly transported across America to work at county fairs, boat
sales and recreational vehicle shows.
Seeing nothing amusing in animal abuse, activists campaign
against using apes in entertainment and advertising.17 Borneo
Orangutan Survival Foundation uk urged Pepsi Corporation to
withdraw its commercial featuring a taxi-driving orangutan and
stop using animals to sell their products. In 2002 pg Tips final-
ly replaced their chimpanzees with animated figures, although
the company claimed this was due to changing public tastes
rather than advocacy campaigns. In 2003 the British automo-
bile and bicycle equipment company Halfords agreed to stop
using chimpanzees in its advertising after a successful cam-
paign by the Captive Animals’ Protection Society. In February
2006 animal advocates forced Kentucky’s Department of Fish
and Wildlife Resources to enforce laws restricting ownership

Advertising
campaign using
chimpanzees.

86
and movement of exotic animals and stop the Rosaire Zoppe
Chimpanzee act from performing at the state fairgrounds;
nevertheless, existing penalties are too small to be a serious
deterrent. In 2007, after a human actor was almost attacked
by a chimpanzee, and facing criticism about animal abuse,
CareerBuilder announced it would discontinue chimpanzee ad-
vertisements. However, other companies still use chimpanzees
(and other animals) in their advertisements.
In contrast to chimpanzees, performing gorillas are rare.
Nevertheless, the gorilla is a powerful image and a perennial
favourite among advertisers. The gorilla has been transformed
from du Chaillu’s nightmare creature to an icon of fun. Busi-
nesses rent giant inflatable gorillas in vibrant colours, some
sporting sunglasses and swimming trunks, and situate them
outside shops to announce a ‘grand opening’ or ‘huge savings’.
Touts wear gorilla costumes to indicate ‘crazy’ sales or to signi-
fy the entertainment to be derived from shopping. No logical
connection is necessary between apes and advertised products.
For example, sculptures of gorillas, some clothed, others motor-
ized, are common at vacuum-cleaner sale and repair shops in
small towns throughout Arkansas; possibly, linking these
appliances to nineteenth-century legends of a hairy ape-man
roaming the area boosts sales.18
In 2007 Cadbury launched a £9 million campaign using an
actor in a gorilla suit. Their commercial opens with Phil Collins’s
song In the Air Tonight and a close-up of the gorilla’s face. As the
song reaches its percussion break, the camera pulls back and the
gorilla pounds a drum kit. No obvious links exist between choco-
late and apes (beyond the fact that cacao production is responsi-
ble for significant deforestation in West Africa). Nevertheless,
the company hoped their advertisement had ‘created a branded
space in which Cadbury’s can be generous in bringing joy’ and

87
consumer loyalty. The campaign was effective: the Sunday
Mirror reported it as the year’s favourite television commercial,
based on numbers of online viewings.19
Relationships between humans and other apes have trou-
bled Western societies, where consistent efforts are directed
towards policing borders. While religious believers reject ideas
of shared evolutionary history and film-going audiences are
thrilled by menacing apes and ape-men lurking at these bound-
aries, many humans enjoy pretending to be other types of apes.
Gorilla suits are popular rentals for Hallowe’en, costume par-
ties and promotional events. Finnish racing-car driver Kimi
Raikkonen attends parties in his gorilla costume and in 2007
joined a gorilla-suited crew at a motorboat race; Theo Epstein,
manager of the Boston Red Sox baseball team, wore a gorilla
suit to avoid reporters when leaving Fenway Park after his 2005
resignation. Mad Magazine cartoonist Don Martin created a
strip about National Gorilla Suit Day (31 January), in which the
protagonist complains that the event has been created by goril-
la suit companies just to sell their products and then is attacked
by suited devotees of the holiday.
Seemingly, the suit permits wearers to ‘go ape’ and unleash
their ‘inner beasts’, freeing usually suppressed impulses through
formulaic performances of swaggering, chest-pounding actions
and sexual gestures mimicking stereotyped gorilla behaviour.
Like the zoo tea parties, the gorilla suit’s appeal involves con-
trolled chaos. While horror films present gorillas and various
ape-men as warnings about the ‘Beast within Man’, donning
the gorilla costume allows the ‘Man within the Beast’ to turn the
monster into a joke, seemingly designed to be read in terms of
Freud’s Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, which sug-
gests that jokes allow pleasurable discharge of pent-up emo-
tions as inhibitions are temporarily relaxed to allow expression

88
of aggression and sexuality in the form of humour. Sometimes,
such jokes may help gorillas. In the Great Gorilla Run, organ-
ized annually in Britain and in North American cities by the
Gorilla Organization, hundreds of gorilla-suited participants
jog, rollerblade or walk to raise funds for conservation.
Fascination with transgressing the ape–human boundary
has led to efforts to create hybrids. Citing ‘recently uncovered
secret documents’, the Scotsman reported that Soviet dictator
Joseph Stalin planned an invincible army of super-warriors
composed of ape–human hybrids and ordered Ilya Ivanov,
Russia’s top animal-breeding scientist, to begin development.20
Although Stalin’s plan to create ‘Planet of the Apes-style war-
riors’ is unverified,21 Ivanov himself tried to produce such
hybrids. In 1926 the Soviet government and Academy of
Sciences sent Ivanov to Africa to inseminate chimpanzees artifi-
cially with human sperm. Assuming greater proximity between
Africans and apes, Ivanov believed hybridization would be best
achieved using sperm from African humans. Ivanov performed
impregnation experiments with female chimpanzees in West
Africa and wanted to use chimpanzee sperm to inseminate
unsuspecting African female hospital patients but could not
carry out his plan. Although efforts to impregnate female chim-
panzees with human sperm failed, Ivanov shipped captured
apes to Sukhum, in the Republic of Georgia, site of the first
Soviet primate research station and sought female volunteers to
be impregnated with ape sperm. These plans, too, failed, com-
plicated by the difficulties of keeping apes alive. Accused of
counter-revolutionary activity, Ivanov was imprisoned in 1930.
Although he was released two years later, his health was shat-
tered and he died before he could resume his work.22
Other researchers shared Ivanov’s interests. Wolfgang Kohler,
director of Germany’s Canary Islands primate research station,

89
thought hybridization of human and non-human apes was pos-
sible. Dutch zoologist Hermann Bernelot Moens proposed an
expedition to the French Congo to capture chimpanzees and goril-
las. He planned similar experiments on them and on orangutans
and gibbons captured from Asia. Ernst Haeckel, a leading ex-
ponent of evolutionary theory, encouraged his efforts. Haeckel,
convinced of the separate origin and development of distinct
human ‘races’, advised Moens to use the sperm of Africans, since
he considered them closer to chimpanzees. When Moens’s plans
were publicized in a 1908 pamphlet, however, they created a
scandal and cost him his job. In 1920s France Serge Voronoff pio-
neered xenotransplantation by grafting testicular tissue of chim-
panzees and monkeys onto humans to prevent ageing and
boost sex drive; he also implanted chimpanzee thyroids and
monkey ovaries into humans and attempted to inseminate chim-
panzees with human sperm. To meet demands from rich patients,
Voronoff maintained a primate colony near the Riviera.23
Decades later, a chimpanzee–human hybrid, a ‘humanzee’,
was exhibited in the person of Oliver, an unusual-looking ape
captured in the early 1960s in Congo or Gabon. Several features
distinguished him: reportedly, he had a chromosome pattern
intermediate between humans and chimpanzees; he was less
hairy, had a peculiar body odour, possessed human-like facial
features, tended to walk bipedally and did not interact well with
other apes. Animal trainers touted Oliver as a ‘missing link’,
exhibited him on television and on stage, and sent him to Japan
to promote a concert tour by the 1960s pop group The
Monkees. While his owners depicted him enjoying life, relaxing
by mixing martinis and smoking cigars, Oliver endured the
usual brutalities inflicted on captive apes. Like other prisoners,
Oliver’s teeth were removed to prevent him from biting his
captors. After years of exhibition as a freak, Oliver was sold to

90
Buckshire Corporation for biomedical and cosmetics testing.
Oliver spent seven years in a cage so small that his muscles atro-
phied; after an undercover video by People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals exposed the deplorable conditions of his
captivity he was sent to Texas animal sanctuary Primarily
Primates. The owner hired geneticists to determine if Oliver
was in fact a ‘humanzee’, but results clearly indicated that he
was a normal, albeit unusual-looking, chimpanzee. Although
the ‘humanzee’ remains unrealized, our fascination with trans-
gressing species boundaries persists.

91
4 Looking at Apes

Art and literature are haunted by apes standing in for humans

and providing moral lessons. Their resemblance to humans has
allowed representations as ugly cousins, miniatures, inferiors,
impostors or indicators of our primal selves, often brutal or
witless. Apes suggest negative aspects of human nature – sinful-
ness, savagery and our failure to measure up to divine standards
of morality or creativity – but also serve as devices by which we
reaffirm our more evolved mental and moral superiority. From
medieval times onwards, apes were key symbols in moral mes-
sages conveyed in art. A circle of dancing apes illustrates a fable
of a king who trains apes to dance but sees their performance
deteriorate into chaos when a handful of nuts is tossed to them,
suggesting irresolute Christians’ vulnerability when given oppor-
tunities to sin. Mirror-gazing apes signified vanity and self-love,
or the search for the soul, an interesting comparison with the
images of gibbons captivated by the moon’s reflection in water,
widely used by Chinese artists and poets. Birds confronted by
apes indicated human souls threatened by dark forces.1 Images
of apes in chains, common from the thirteenth century, sig-
nified sinners imprisoned by earthly desires. Medieval wood-
cuts show apple-munching apes, suggesting the Fall from Eden,
and associations of ape-as-seducer, echoing the Satanic seducer,
permeated northern Europe in the sixteenth century.2

92
 Apes represented human follies, conducted while insuffi-
ciently alert to Christian responsibility. The French Monkey
Cup (1425) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Cloisters col-
lection exemplifies this, depicting Barbary macaques robbing
a sleeping pedlar and playing with their loot. One examines
his reflection in a mirror; another toys with the pedlar’s boot;
some play musical instruments; inside, two monkeys stand
upright, one blows a hunting-horn, the other aims a bow and
arrow at some deer. Pedlars, like monkeys, were unreliable trick-
sters (an English Book of Hours from around 1300–25 depicts
a monkey as a pedlar), so the image may portray ‘just deserts’.
An early version appears in a fourteenth-century manuscript,
the Smithfield Decretals, where the pedlar seems drunk, and it
occurs in Florentine engravings from about 1470. In 1468 the
scene was enacted at the wedding of Charles the Bold, Duke
of Burgundy, to Margaret of York, where actors in monkey

Images of apes
riding turtles were
used to provide
moral messages
about folly and
sloth, as in this
15th-century
woodcut. The
theme goes back
to at least 6th-
century bc Greece.

93
Albrecht Dürer,
Virgin and Child
with Monkey, 1498.

costumes ‘amazed’ guests.3 The image persisted into the six-

teenth century, evidenced in Herri met de Bles’ Sleeping Pedlar
Robbed by Apes.
After 1400 artists attempted realistic depictions of apes, as
in Antonio Pisanello’s sketches.4 Although sometimes just
exotic elements, monkeys still conveyed moral lessons about
human sin, folly and attachment to the material world. Albrecht

94
Dürer’s engraving Virgin and Child with Monkey (1498) uses a
chained monkey as a symbol of greed, lust and selfishness, the
chains indicating the prison of worldly passions. Pieter Brueghel
the Elder’s Two Monkeys (1562) uses accurately rendered Colobus
monkeys chained in a window archway to demonstrate the con-
sequences of sin.5
Apes consistently provided parodies of human behaviour. By
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries northern European
paintings used them to satirize various professions, as in the
work of the Flemish engraver Pieter van der Borcht. This con- Pieter Breughel
the Elder, Two
tinued in eighteenth-century French singeries, a type of painting Monkeys in Chains,
featuring monkeys wearing clothing and engaged in human oil on wood, 1562.

95
Edwin Landseer, behaviours. Associated with the Rococo, it peaked at the château
The Travelled
Monkey, oil on
of Chantilly with Christopher Huet’s Grande singerie, a room com-
canvas, 1827. pletely covered with paintings of dressed-up monkeys. Humorous
paintings of monkeys acting like humans became hugely popular
and provided satirical comments on society. Louis-Joseph
Watteau provided an Assemblage of Monkeys in a Park, Dressed as
Humans (after 1750) to ridicule high society and the priesthood.
Sir Edwin Landseer mocked human self-importance in The
Travelled Monkey (1827), in which the well-dressed cosmopolitan
deigns to astonish his less-worldly fellows. Previously, Landseer

96
had depicted the monkey’s malicious craftiness in The Cat’s Paw
(1824), where the animal forces a cat to pull chestnuts from a
fire, an image best known from La Fontaine’s fable ‘The Monkey
and the Cat’ (1671), although an earlier version occurs in John
Sambucus’ Latin verse Emblemata (1564), where the victim is a
sleeping dog. Thomas Landseer’s Monkeyana, or Men in Miniature
(1827) included 25 etchings of monkeys parodying human
activities, including a frightened duellist, two monkeys riding a
donkey, a punitive teacher, a brutal policeman, a dandy, a love-
struck couple, a cowardly general retreating from a ‘ghost’
wearing a sheet and two fox-hunters brawling over a corpse.
Gustave Doré’s In the Monkey House (1872) satirizes the gawping
crowd surrounding animal prisoners.
William Holbrook Beard, famous for dancing bears and
other anthropomorphized animals, began painting monkeys

The Monkey House

at London Zoo,
from Gustave
Doré’s London: A
Pilgrimage (1872).

97
 and apes in human situations in 1861, soon after Darwin pub-
lished On the Origin of Species. Beard parodied evolutionary
ideas in paintings such as Discovery of Adam (1891): apes in
suits discover they are descended from a turtle, whose shell is
inscribed ‘Adam 200,000 bc’. In Scientists at Work (1894) suited
apes puzzle over their research. In Runaway Match a love-
struck couple are scrutinized by an older monkey, presumably
a justice of the peace, whom they have distracted from his
newspaper, The Darwinian, which shows a picture of Darwin
greeting an ape. An older, less happy monkey couple present
their claims in The Divorce. For What Was I Created? depicts a
sad monkey in jester’s costume, distractedly gripping a dog’s
tail with his strange prehensile foot while pondering his exis-
tential dilemma. Although Beard is considered a comic illus-
trator, this painting belongs in a tradition of disturbing works
about the predicament of hybrid apes who do not know where
they belong.
Illustrator Lawson Wood observed apes in London Zoo but
merged characteristics of different species for the creatures

William Holbrook
Beard, Runaway
Match, oil on
canvas, 1872.

98
that appeared on Collier’s magazine covers in the 1930s and ’40s.
His most popular creation was Old Gran’Pop, a chimpanzee–
orangutan hybrid engaged in human activities: painting lamp-
posts, piloting aircraft, baking pies, smoking cigars and reading
a book at the bus stop on Chimp Street. Wood combined
humour with compassion, establishing a sanctuary for old ani-
mals; the Royal Zoological Society made him a Fellow for his
animal welfare work.

John Isaacs,
Untitled (chimp),
1995, wax, poly-
ester, hair, syringe.

99
 Our appetite for anthropomorphized images of apes contin-
ues to the present, exemplified by Donald Roller Wilson’s
hyper-realistic Gothic kitsch paintings of chimpanzees wearing
elaborate costumes and bunches of flowers. More sinister is
John Isaac’s Untitled (chimp) (1995), an unsettling, life-size wax
sculpture of a sad, patchy-haired chimpanzee–human hybrid
about to inject itself with a syringe. Possibly the addict’s monkey-
on-the-back, the Rolling Stones’ Monkey Man (‘I’m a flea-bit
peanut monkey/All my friends are junkies’), Isaac’s hybrid recalls
Hans Bellmer’s disturbing mutated dolls created to protest against
the Nazi cult of physical perfection, suggesting biotechnology’s
dark side, a horribly failed genetic experiment. The hybrid ape-
man, displaced and enslaved, is the image of abjection.
One persistent anthropomorphic theme is ape-as-artist.
Apes’ propensity for imitation encouraged artists to use them
to comment on originality, creativity and representation: just as

Annibale Carracci
(1560–1609),
Monkey on a Man’s
Back, drawing.

100
apes mimic human behaviour, artists imperfectly mimic nature
or a supernatural creator. Niccolò Boldini’s woodcut Ape
Laocoön (1545), after Titian’s drawing, parodies the ancient
Greek sculpture of Laocoön and his sons attacked by serpents.
Seventeenth-century painter David Teniers the Younger, who
depicted monkeys smoking, drinking and playing cards, revised
an earlier work by Frans Franken (1615) to produce Interior of an
Art Gallery (1650), where an apple-eating monkey appears both

Jean-Simeon
Chardin, Monkey
as Painter, 1840.
Apes were fre-
quently depicted
as artists and art
critics, as com-
ments on creativity
and imitation.

101
Alexandre-Gabriel as an exotic collectable and as a comment on processes of pro-
Decamps, Monkey
as Ape, 1833.
ducing and collecting art. Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Le Singe sculp-
teur (1711) depicted the monkey as artist, as did Jean-Baptiste-
Siméon Chardin’s Le Singe peinture (1739); Chardin depicted a
monkey-scholar in Le Singe antiquaire (1726). William Kent’s
monument (1736) in Stowe’s gardens for playwright William
Congreve features a monkey atop a pyramid, staring into a
mirror. The inscription ‘Comedy is the imitation of life and the
mirror of society’ suggests the ‘aping’ activities of monkeys
while mocking human society. Francisco Goya’s Caprichos from
the 1790s includes two engravings of apes as portrait painter
and musician respectively, appealing to the vanity of a pompous

102
ass. Gabriel von Max kept a menagerie of monkeys and used
them in several paintings, commenting on the art world in
Monkeys as Critics (1889), in which the animals examine a paint-
ing. Alexandre-Gabrielle Decamps used the same theme in The
Experts (1837), although his more anthropomorphized monkeys
wear human clothing. More recent ape-as-artist paintings
include Peter Zokosky’s Ape and Model (2002) and Diligent Ape
(2002). Paula Rego’s Red Monkey Drawing (1981) depicts her
husband, artist Victor Willing, with whom she had a conflicted
relationship, as suggested by Red Monkey Beats His Wife and
Wife Cuts Off Red Monkey’s Tail (both 1981).
Australian Lisa Roet cites Frans de Waal as her inspiration
and has studied apes in zoos, at Georgia University’s Ape
Language Center and in Borneo. Her installation Political Ape
(2001) consists of seven bronze busts of chimpanzees accompa-
nied by sounds recorded at London Zoo and edited with music
to emphasize apes’ use of vocalizations to communicate and
establish social order. Her photographic work Berlin Kiss (1995)
features a chimpanzee in a cage with a digitally inserted image
of the ape–human kiss from Planet of the Apes. In the film this
scene suggests not simply bestiality but possible cross-species
respect, empathy and emotional intimacy, all of which contrast
with the isolation and sterility of zoo imprisonment. Roet’s
Beauty and the Beast series (1999) digitally inserts onto the zoo
wall 1950s pornographic photographs of naked women cavort-
ing with a man in a gorilla suit; chimpanzees seem to examine
these images and react with interest, consternation, laughter
and open-mouthed stares. Although in reality the chimpanzees
did not see these images, Roet was inspired by a Berlin zoo-goer
who displayed pornography to chimpanzees.
Roet’s Ape and the Bunnyman series (1998) was inspired by
residency at Atlanta’s Ape Language Center where, she claims,

103
Lisa Roet, Ape and researchers wear bunny costumes while teaching American
the Bunnyman
Part 1, 1998,
Sign Language because this makes apes more comfortable. Roet
Cibachrone print. makes the situation more bizarre by digitally altering photo-
graphs. In Part 1 Hasidic Jewish men peer through a window at
the chimpanzee staring back at them, observed by a person in a
bunny suit: humans are costumed while the ‘natural’ chim-
panzee is displayed as the curiosity. In Part 2 a chimpanzee
squats on a platform, seemingly apprehensive as Bunnyman’s
ominous shadow looms over him. These photographs suggest
both sinister and absurd aspects of scientific research, while in
Roet’s Napoleon (2000) and The Shadow (2001) orangutans loom
ghostly over the forest, evoking their imminent extinction.
Other artists have expressed concern about apes. Describing his
print Intrusion – Mountain Gorilla (1992) Canadian realist and

104
wildlife artist Robert Bateman notes the risks these animals face
from humans and suggests metaphysical aspects that may be
lost along with them: ‘In an almost spiritual way, the gorilla rep-
resents some ancient, primitive wisdom.’6 Another Canadian,
Daniel Taylor, paints apes in high realist style, donating sales
proceeds to the African Conservation Foundation, and has orga-
nized workshops with Cameroonian artists at Limbe Wildlife
Centre, which shelters primates rescued from the pet trade.
Some artists emphasize apes’ personal identity to attract sympa-
thy for their plight, exemplified by Peter Zokosky’s 2004 series
The Order of Primates, with its named portraits of apes and mon-
keys. Photographer James Mollison’s close-up portraits of apes
rescued from illegal bushmeat and pet trades and sheltered in
sanctuaries were exhibited at London’s Natural History Museum
in 2005, accompanied by captioned biographies that express the
unique identity and personal suffering of each individual.
Transpositions of ape and human cultures are a favourite
literary theme. Sometimes they are used for satirical purposes,
as in Thomas Love Peacock’s Melincourt (1817), which drew on
Lord Monboddo to describe the success of Sir Oran Haut-Ton,
an ape purchased in Africa and brought to England, where he
plays the French horn, appreciates opera, rescues distressed
damsels and becomes an mp. In other cases these hybrids and
border-crossing creatures provided thrills. For example, Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle subjected his explorers of The Lost World (1912) to
capture by ‘missing link’ ape-men, as well as the presence of
dangerous dinosaurs. Serge Voronoff ’s xenotransplantation
experiments probably inspired Doyle’s The Adventure of the
Creeping Man (1923), in which Sherlock Holmes detects a monkey-
derived rejuvenation drug as the cause of Professor Presbury’s
strange habit of perambulating on all fours; simian-like villains
(possibly embodiments of Cesare Lombroso’s atavistic theory

105
that criminals could be identified by their more primitive facial
features) confronted Holmes in other cases, such as The
Adventure of the Norwood Builder and The Adventure of the Six
Napoleons. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes appeared
in 1912, inspiring dozens of sequels, films and imitations. After
his parents are marooned in Africa and die there, young Lord
Greystoke is adopted by apes and integrated into their society.
Later, contacted by explorers, he returns to civilization. Lord
Greystoke’s heredity makes him superior in both ape and human
society but he scorns the latter’s corruption and cowardice and
returns to the jungle where he indulges his violent instincts
throughout numerous adventures that further demonstrate the
triumph of species, race and class. In Eugene O’Neill’s play The
Hairy Ape (1922), the thuggish worker Yank is also alienated
from human society and only senses a connection with a gorilla
in the zoo but, unlike Tarzan, he finds no place in ape society
and is killed when he frees the animal. Whether in satire, adven-
ture stories or tragedies, apes provide a means to comment on
human society.
In Franz Kafka’s ‘Report to an Academy’, published in
Zionist magazine Der Jude in 1917, the ape Red Peter explains
how he adopted human behaviour. Captured, brought to Eur-
ope, facing the music hall or zoo, he decides to jettison his old
life and become a great performer to survive. Having perfected
his role, he can no longer recall his ape-hood but expresses con-
tentment with his situation. The story is often interpreted as a
comment on European Jewish identity and assimilation but J.
M. Coetzee incorporates it into The Lives of Animals (2001) to
comment on human cruelty, using Holocaust analogies to show
animals as endlessly victimized.
Novels such as Peter Hoeg’s The Woman and the Ape (1996),
Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael (1992) and Will Self ’s Great Apes (1997)

106
put apes in human roles to satirize human behaviour. Hoeg
and Quinn both depict apes as more civilized and intelligent
than humans. In Hoeg’s novel the woman’s romantic relation-
ship with the ape is more satisfactory than with her husband.
John Collier’s His Monkey Wife or Married to a Chimpanzee
(1930) also depicts an ape as a more suitable partner. In Alice
Walker’s novel In the Temple of My Familiar (1990) the charac-
ter Lissie recalls a previous incarnation as a ‘pygmy’ girl who
spent her happiest moments with her serene and progressive
chimpanzee cousins, until their harmonious idyll was shat-
tered by violent colonial intrusion that imposed patriarchy
and property relations.
Comic books emphasized apes’ gigantic size and ferocity. Most
superheroes – Animal Man, the Avengers, Batman, the Flash,
Lorna the Jungle Queen, Sheena Queen of the Jungle, Spider
Man, Tarzan and many others – encountered giant apes, usually
gorillas. Giant apes such as Congo Bill, Congorilla, King Kong,
Kona and Konga had their own comic books, and in the 1950s
comics seemed obsessed with apes, using them regularly on
their covers.
Popular culture finds border zones between apes and humans
fruitful territory, inhabited by creatures who are dangerous
monsters but also innocent victims of evil scientists, and haunted
by obsessive retellings of the Beauty and the Beast mythology.
The original King Kong (1933) film and its numerous remakes
featured a giant ape who is both a terrifying menace and a
sympathetic victim whose death is linked to his love for a human
female. Some versions of this myth explicitly emphasized racist
images and themes of bestiality.
Apes and ape-men populated many low-budget Hollywood
films. For example, King Kong was partially inspired by Ingagi
(1931), originally promoted as a documentary about a tribe of

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King Kong (1933),
film poster.

naked black women who sacrifice their members to the gorillas

who eagerly seek sexual intercourse with them; although
profitable, the film was pulled from distribution after it was
found to be a mixture of stock footage and scenes of actresses
in black-face make-up at a California zoo. The all-black cast of

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Son of Ingagi (1940) depicted the bride-seeking adventures of
an ape-man created by a mad scientist.
When not frightening audiences as a vampire, Bela Lugosi
became involved with menacing apes or ape–human hybrids in
The Gorilla (1939), The Ape Man (1943), Return of the Ape Man
(1944) and Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952). Many
horror films depict sinister results of mad scientists’ projects to
‘discover man’s primal nature’ or ‘prove evolutionary theory’
by venturing across animal–human boundaries. Although Edgar
Allan Poe’s original story The Murders in the Rue Morgue in-
volved a homicidal orangutan, the 1932 film depicted a scientist
who kidnaps women and injects them with ape blood to prove
theories about evolution. In The Monster and the Girl (1941) a
scientist inserts an executed gangster’s brain into a gorilla, which
promptly embarks on a killing spree. Dr Renault’s Secret (1942)
involved creating an ape-man. Universal Studios’ Ape Woman
trilogy began with Captive Wild Woman (1943), concerning a

Arthur Rackham,
illustration of
homicidal orang-
utan for Edgar
Allan Poe’s Murders
in the Rue Morgue,
1935.

109
scientist’s transplantation of a woman’s glands into a gorilla,
turning the ape into a beautiful woman with the tendency to
revert under stress. Burnu Acquanetta, ‘The Venezuelan Volcano’,
reprised her role as Paula the Ape Woman in Jungle Woman
(1944) but was replaced by another actress for Jungle Captive
(1945). A Mexican film, Doctor of Doom (1965), deployed female
wrestlers to enact a story of a scientist who kills women and
transplants their brains into gorillas’ skulls to create powerful
but obedient slaves.
Low-budget films repeatedly used apes to stir anxieties
about race and sexuality, as in White Gorilla (1945), in which a
white ape overcomes ostracism by black apes and fights their
leader to become king. In the same year White Pongo featured a
dangerous white gorilla, possibly a ‘missing link’, who becomes
enamoured of the daughter of the scientist seeking him in the
African jungle. Ape-men sought human mates among the Wild
Women of Wongo (1958). Film posters depicted huge, dark goril-
las abducting human females, usually blondes. In Savage Girl
(1932) ‘A wild goddess rules the jungle!’ protected by a giant
ape. Zamba (1949) promised ‘All the devastating destruction of
a blood-maddened giant!’, although Zamba turned out to be a
friendly ape who rescues a boy lost in the jungle. Bride of the
Gorilla (1951) places ‘A blonde and a savage beast . . . alone in
the jungle!’ when a plantation manager kills his employer to get
his wife but finds himself inconvenienced by a voodoo curse that
transforms him nightly into a giant gorilla. In Blonde Venus
(1932) Marlene Dietrich was not chased by a gorilla but wriggled
out of her own gorilla suit to warble ‘Hot Voodoo’, surrounded
by Afro-wigged jungle dancers. In The Beast That Killed Women
(1965) a gorilla terrorizes a Florida nudist colony. Species-cross-
ing sexuality went further in The Bride and the Beast (1958) writ-
ten by Ed Wood, Jr, often described as the worst film director of

110
all time. In this story Laura and Dan marry but Laura is sexu-
ally drawn to Dan’s gorilla, Spanky. One night Spanky enters
her bedroom and begins caressing her as she dreams of him.
Dan bursts in and shoots Spanky. Later, hypnosis reveals that
Laura is actually the reincarnated Queen of the Gorillas and
Spanky’s bride in a previous life.
King Kong inspired many remakes, sequels and imitations
such as Son of Kong (1933), Mighty Joe Young (1949 and 1998),
Konga (1961), Kong Island (1968), Ape (1976), King Kong (1976),
Queen Kong (1976), King Kong Lives (1986) and King Kong (2005).
A giant ape menaced medieval Japan in King Kong Appears in Edo
(1938) and modern Tokyo in King Kong vs Godzilla (1962) and
King Kong Escapes (1967). The giant gorilla became an iconic
image in global culture, appearing in seemingly endless film
sequels as well as in advertising, political cartoons, video games,
pachinko parlours (Japanese gambling halls) and other texts,
such as Jennifer Shiman’s online animated version of King Kong
in 30 Seconds (and Reenacted by Bunnies).7
Much of King Kong’s continuing appeal grows from linked
anxieties about ‘race’ and sexuality. Racist ideologies deploy
animal imagery in which despised groups are portrayed as sub-
human and often caricatured as apelike. Again, the ape strad-
dles the boundary of legitimate humanity. In King Kong racist
themes are obvious: the dark, human-like creature is brought in
chains from his jungle home to provide entertainment on stage
in New York City, until he goes berserk, breaks free and must
be subdued by military force. The ape’s passion is stirred by
Beauty, embodied by a white woman who awes him as well as
the natives of Skull Island. Crowds thrilled to the plight of the
white woman threatened by the huge, dark animal. King Kong
arrived on movie screens at a point in us history when growing
immigration of black people from rural to urban areas was

111
followed by fears of miscegenation, violence and escalating Ku
Klux Klan activity. Stereotypes of black people as singing,
dancing entertainers were accompanied by anxiety about dan-
gers of black uprisings and Communist menaces.8
However, King Kong is not only an allegory of racist fears.
While a racial subtext operated, at least some audiences took the
film at face value as the story of cross-species infatuation. The
filmmakers intended this meaning but anxious censors cut scenes
suggesting this too explicitly. While Fay Wray’s Ann Darrow was
a damsel in distress, the 2005 King Kong made the attraction
mutual, with the couple enjoying the sunset on Skull Island and a
romantic interlude cavorting on a frozen pond in Central Park.
Reviewers worried that it endorsed bestiality. While the film does
show Kong as a serial killer of humans (dismembered sacrifices
on Skull Island, murdered sailors, an unsatisfactory woman
hurled aside in the search for Ann Darrow), he is mainly depicted
sympathetically and at least one reviewer found echoes of Dian
Fossey and her beloved murdered gorilla, Digit.9
Sexual themes in Kong Kong extend much further back than
to Ingagi. They clearly echo the Beauty and the Beast fairy-tale,
first published in the eighteenth century. In 1859 Emmanuel
Frémiet employed the theme at the Salon de Paris in his sculp-
ture Gorilla Carrying off a Woman. Considered shocking and
offensive, it was exhibited separately, behind a curtain. Frémiet
was fascinated by the theme and at the 1887 Salon won first
prize for an updated version; in 1893 he exhibited another large
work, Orangutan Strangling a Native of Borneo. We may trace
these images to medieval manuscripts and paintings, where
hairy, libidinous Wild Men of the Woods worried Christians,
and further back to nymph-chasing fauns and satyrs of classical
mythology. Variations continue to the present, including a tele-
vision series, Beauty and the Beast, and pop songs by David

112
 Emmanuel
Frémiet, Gorilla
Carrying Off a
Woman, 1859.

Bowie, Stevie Nicks and Pete Doherty. Gilbert and Sullivan’s

Lady Psyche in Princess Ida (1884) outlined the complications of
the match:

A Lady fair, of lineage high,

Was loved by an Ape, in the days gone by.
The Maid was radiant as the sun,
The Ape was a most unsightly one,
The Ape was a most unsightly one
So it would not do

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His scheme fell through,
For the Maid, when his love took formal shape,
Express’d such terror
At his monstrous error,
That he stammer’d an apology and made his ’scape,
The picture of a disconcerted Ape.

With a view to rise in the social scale,

He shaved his bristles and he docked his tail,
He grew mustachios, and he took his tub,
And he paid a guinea to a toilet club,
He paid a guinea to a toilet club
But it would not do,
The scheme fell through
For the Maid was Beauty’s fairest Queen,
With golden tresses,
Like a real princess’s,
While the Ape, despite his razor keen,
Was the apiest Ape that ever was seen!

He bought white ties, and he bought dress suits,

He crammed his feet into bright tight boots
And to start in life on a brand new plan,
He christen’d himself Darwinian Man!
He christen’d himself Darwinian Man!
But it would not do,
The scheme fell through
For the Maiden fair, whom the monkey crav’d,
Was a radiant Being,
With a brain farseeing
While Darwinian Man, though well-behav’d,
At best is only a monkey shav’d!

114
 Punk band The Ramones imagined a more murderous ape-
man suitor in Ape Man Hop: ‘At night he’s gonna sacrifice his
beloved apeman girl, tie her to the altar, pull out her heart and
eat her flesh’. (In Bonzo Goes to Bitburg, they used the chim-
panzee character from Ronald Reagan’s Bedtime for Bonzo film
to criticize his 1985 presidential visit to a German military ceme-
tery, although right-wing guitarist Johnny Ramone demanded a
title change to My Brain is Hanging Upside Down.)
The scandal created by Fremiet’s work resurfaced in April
2008. Celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz’s cover of Vogue
magazine, featuring white ‘supermodel’ Gisele Bündchen
clutched by black basketball-player LeBron James, was a direct
visual quote of Fremiet’s work, of King Kong and his many imi-
tators and of H. R. Hopps’ famous World War One recruiting
poster (‘Destroy This Mad Brute – Enlist’) featuring the Kaiser
as a rampaging gorilla abducting a swooning blonde woman.
Linking the image to the King Kong myth, Stuart Ewen finds:

The image of the menacing black man (or gorilla) run-

ning off with the blonde beauty . . . has reverberated . . .
throughout the history of Western civilization since the
18th century. A keystone of racial science, such images
have provided scientific and artistic justification for
lynchings and other murderous habits.10

Accused of racism, Vogue representatives called the cover a ‘fun’

image that ‘celebrates diversity’.11
Although, as noted, associations of black people and apes
persist in American society, such blatant imagery as featured on
the Vogue cover is less frequent now. Just as Hollywood’s revised
images of racialized minorities reflected social changes achieved
by political activism of the 1960s, representations of apes

115
Ape of the Sea,
World War One
poster.

shifted somewhat from monsters or clowns. As Jane Goodall’s

chimpanzee studies became widely known through National
Geographic magazine and films, apes were portrayed more sym-
pathetically, although these images also bore postcolonial racist
connotations.12
In Planet of the Apes (1968), adapted from Pierre Boule’s 1963
novel Monkey Planet, Charlton Heston played an astronaut who
crashes on what turns out to be a future Earth where intelligent,
speaking apes rule and humans are considered inferior and cap-
tured as slaves. This echoes the popular eighteenth-century lit-
erary genre of ‘Man in Ape-Land’, in which authors used an ape
civilization in some remote area to satirize European culture.13
Although the film portrayed most apes as cruel and oppressive,

116
several were sympathetic characters willing to consider improved
welfare or even rights for humans. Thus the film deployed images
of both savage and sympathetic apes. By turning the tables on
the human characters Planet of the Apes invited audiences to
reconsider domination of other animals. The film was a com-
mercial hit, generating several sequels, two television series and
various merchandise.
These films offered allegories about racism, although polit-
ical content was subordinated to entertainment and commer-
cial priorities.14 Released during the Vietnam War and the peak
of the Civil Rights movement, the films depicted power strug-
gles between dominant and oppressed groups and reflected
America’s racist hierarchy: distinct ape ‘races’ are ordered, with
orangutans on top, chimpanzees occupying mid-level positions
filled by quotas and gorillas consigned to menial, low-status
jobs, while hostility towards humans is expressed in racist
stereotypes familiar to American culture. By using Charlton
Heston, an iconic conservative actor whose roles frequently
involved fighting racist wars to defend empire, and dislocating his
character in a context where white superiority is given ‘animal-
like’ qualities, the filmmakers suggested a critique of racism.
The film’s pivotal inter-species kiss (enacted in the same year as
television’s first ‘inter-racial’ kiss, on Star Trek, between a couple
controlled by telepathic aliens) challenged miscegenationist
anxieties. Nevertheless, filmmakers perpetuated stereotypes they
sought to critique. For example, gorillas were depicted as strong
but stupid and aggressive. Not only were these same stereo-
types associated with African-Americans but they misrepre-
sented real gorillas, who are usually placid. Given that racism
intentionally demeaned African-Americans through animal
imagery, the film’s liberal message is undercut by its problem-
atic basic metaphor. The final scenes of Tim Burton’s 2001

117
 remake are even more questionable: ape police surround the
human astronaut at Washington’s Lincoln Memorial, now depict-
ing ape leader General Thade, warning about black dominance
of American society.
Other late twentieth-century films used apes to critique West-
ern culture. Rather than threatening civilization, apes suggested
positive alternatives. Congo (1995) aligned good, humanized asl-
using gorillas against bad, savage apes. Apes were featured
sympathetically in Greystoke (1984), a version of the Tarzan story.
Greystoke depicts Tarzan interacting with apes in intimate,

The film Greystoke

presented a
sympathetic
depiction of
ape society.

118
 Gorillas in the Mist,
based on the life
of Dian Fossey,
helped to create a
sympathy for the
gorillas’ plight.

considerate ways. Whereas Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novels left

no doubt about the superiority of human society, especially its
white, upper-class manifestation, Greystoke suggested life among
apes was preferable. Burroughs depicted apes mainly as savage
beasts; for example, Tarzan’s adoptive ape father is a treacher-
ous brute, whom Tarzan eventually kills. The film depicts this
ape sympathetically: Tarzan is saddened to watch him leave the
troop when he can no longer maintain his position and out-
raged when he re-encounters the old ape in England, imprisoned

119
and facing vivisection. Although Tarzan frees him, police kill his
ape father. Convinced he cannot adapt to human civilization,
Tarzan rejoins the apes.
In 1988 Sigourney Weaver played Dian Fossey in Gorillas in
the Mist, which depicted gorillas as peaceful innocents and
inspired conservationist impulses in audiences moved by the
murder of the apes and of Fossey herself. Fossey’s life was
echoed in Instinct (1999), which portrayed gorillas as enigmatic
noble savages. Primatologist Ethan Powell ‘goes ape’ in Rwanda
and joins some gorillas, who teach him to embrace his primal
self and achieve harmony with nature. When the gorillas are
shot by African rangers trying to rescue him, he kills some of
them and is committed to an asylum for the criminally insane.
An ambitious psychiatrist plans to build a career by penetrat-
ing Powell’s silence but becomes a better person by accepting
the lessons imparted by the gorillas. Both films portray pri-
matologists leaving human society, integrating into gorilla
society and creating new identities and families among apes,
and both depict primatologists attempting to protect gorillas
but failing, with dire consequences for the animals and for
themselves. Like Tarzan in Greystoke, Powell abandons human
society and returns to the apes at the film’s conclusion, while
Fossey is murdered by a human killer and buried beside the
gorillas she loved.
When apes did not figure as frightening monsters, they
served as comical sidekicks. Gorillas and chimpanzees were
humorous devices in many films, joining Abbot and Costello,
Laurel and Hardy, the Bowery Boys, the Ritz Brothers, Buster
Keaton and Bob Hope. Popular routines included the gorillas’
romantic infatuation with humans or a sequence in which a
human in a gorilla suit encounters a real gorilla. Usually, apes
were portrayed by humans in costumes that now seem entirely

120
unconvincing. Nevertheless, these were complex creations,
sometimes involving aluminium skeletons and jaws, covered
by leather skins into which wig-makers wove hair. Actors
George Barrows, Steve Calvert, Ray Corrigan and Charles
Gemora specialized in these roles, often performing uncred-
ited to promote the illusion that real gorillas were involved.
Various real chimpanzees did portray the mischievous but some-
times helpful Cheeta in a series of Tarzan films. In Bedtime
for Bonzo (1951), inspired by actual cross-fostering experiments,
a chimpanzee helped actor Ronald Reagan get the girl.
Increasingly, images of apes as clowns replaced depictions as
dangerous monsters.
In 1999 tbs television network debuted The Chimp Channel,
an all-chimpanzee situation comedy in which apes parodied
other television programmes and films. After animal advocates
demanded a boycott, the show was cancelled. However, many
programmes and advertisements still use apes, featured as buf-
foons and mimics. These images contend with other represen-
tations of apes as our friends or kin. In 1998 the ‘talking’ gorilla
Koko appeared on the popular children’s television programme
Mister Rogers’ Neighbourhood.
Curious George (2006), an animated version of the popular
1941 children’s book by H. A. Rey, depicted the capture of a
chimpanzee by a white Man in a Yellow Hat, who brings the
ape to his New York apartment, where he causes trouble until
placed in a zoo. Perceiving historical equations of ape and
African, some found the film and the book redolent of colo-
nialism and cultural imperialism in which ‘the white man
shackles the black man and takes him on a slave ship to
America’.15 When high-school teacher Robin Roth suggested
that awareness of the illegal wildlife trade and the plight of
primates imprisoned in laboratories might make audiences

121
critical of the story, journalists ridiculed her ‘political correct-
ness’.16 Mike’s America blog denounced ‘Lefties’ seeking to ban
‘something wholesome, that people enjoy’, rejecting sugges-
tions that decades-old stories might contain assumptions and
attitudes no longer acceptable, that ideologies saturate all
cultural products and that children’s stories are filled with
political messages.17
While Hollywood films stop far short of advocating animal
rights, many portray experiments on animals, especially apes,
negatively. The mad scientist is a recurring figure in horror
films and those whose laboratories imprison primates are often
portrayed as evil megalomaniacs whose activities create disas-
ter, exemplified by the rampaging ape-men of the 1940s. In 28
Days Later (2002) and its sequel 28 Weeks Later (2007) the ‘rage
virus’ developed by scientists in captive primates destroys most
of England’s population and then spreads to Europe. These
films reflect the ambivalence that many feel about vivisection,
which in turn explains why animal-exploitation industries need
massive public relations campaigns to portray their activities as
useful and necessary.
Although films now portray more sympathetic images of
apes, the film business itself is rife with abusive treatment.
Two well-known cases demonstrate Hollywood’s brutal use of
animals. In two comedies, Every Which Way But Loose (1978)
and Any Which Way You Can (1980), Clint Eastwood’s character
shared adventures with Clyde, an orangutan, played in the sec-
ond film by Buddha, rented from an exotic-animal company
called Gentle Jungle. As the second film was concluding,
Buddha’s trainers allegedly beat him so badly that he died soon
after because he helped himself to some doughnuts on the set.
Another orangutan was rented to make promotional appear-
ances for the film.18

122
 Clint Eastwood’s
orangutan co-star
was allegedly
beaten to death
by his trainers,
drawing attention
to the abuse of
animals in
Hollywood.

Project x (1987) was based on actual us Air Force experiments

on rhesus monkeys that blasted them with radiation to deter-
mine if human pilots could continue bombing missions in a
nuclear war. The film replaced monkeys with asl-using chim-
panzees and encouraged audiences to empathize with their
plight and question military experiments on animals. While the
film depicted apes sympathetically, animals used in making it

123
were allegedly abused by their trainers, who beat the terrified
chimpanzees every day on the set. Although an investigation
showed that cruelty was involved, no charges were laid. The
problem persists: in 2008 peta protested against the film Speed
Racer, claiming that a chimpanzee was beaten on set and had
almost bitten an actor.
Apes who entertain us in circuses, films and commercials
seem energetic and happy but most perform because they are
terrorized into obeying orders. The ‘smile’ on the faces of
chimpanzee entertainers is not an expression of enjoyment
but a fear grimace they must reproduce on command. To meet
demands for performing apes, businesses offer chimpanzees
who can skateboard, roller skate, ride other animals, do acro-
batic routines, operate appliances and perform other stunts.
Most performing chimpanzees are bred or purchased and sep-
arated from their mothers at an early age. Since apes normally
have prolonged relationships with their mothers and learn
important skills during infancy, separation is traumatic for
infants and for their mothers, some of whom repeatedly have
offspring stolen from them. Breaking this important mother-
and-child bond creates serious stress and long-term psycho-
logical effects. Infants become fearful, unable to interact with
others, and do not learn normal behaviours. Isolation in a cage
compounds this stress. Although trainers claim to use positive
reinforcement, violent methods ensure that expensive produc-
tions are not delayed by animals who become distracted from
their duties.
Some trainers punish apes not only for perceived misbehav-
iour but also beat them regularly with fists, baseball bats, clubs,
hammers and shovels to keep them afraid and, thus, compliant.
Apes have their teeth removed and jaws wired shut when per-
forming and wear powerful remote-controlled electric shockers.

124
In 2002 primatologist Sarah Baeckler spent fourteen months
undercover at Sid Yost’s California training company Amazing
Animal Actors and saw violent, abusive training methods. She
reported ‘sickening acts of emotional, psychological, and phys-
ical abuse every single day on the job’19 and said:

They punch them they kick them . . . They use weapons

such as a sawed-off broom handle that they called the
ugly stick . . . they used them to threaten the chimps but
also to strike them. They throw rocks and locks and other
hard things at these, these are baby chimpanzees . . . 20

The Animal Legal Defense Fund and The Chimpanzee Collabo-

atory sued Yost, who was forced to surrender his chimpanzees
to sanctuaries and stop using animals. Essentially, the life of an
ape in the entertainment industry is one of confinement, cruel-
ty and forced labour. Despite this, Hollywood continues using
chimpanzees as comic characters or even in pictures that
engage audiences’ sympathies and ostensibly promote compas-
sion for animals. Surveys at Iowa’s Great Ape Trust indicate that
comic images of chimpanzees mislead the public about their
conservation status.21
The seemingly unending satisfaction people derive from
watching apes raises the question: why look at apes? Ape actors
are terrorized slaves. Many animals imprisoned in zoos are
bored, depressed and listless and visitors pass by briefly if they
cannot stimulate them by hammering on their cages or hurling
objects at them. However, some apes are quite mobile and
interact in ways that keep people’s attention. Their activities seem
comical, particularly when the apes are trained to emulate
human behaviour. Why is this amusing? Apes are like us but
not us; they mimic our behaviour but they do so incompletely

125
or imperfectly and, reaffirmed in our superiority, we can enjoy
their clumsiness. Laughing at inferiors reaffirms our own abilities.
The joke becomes less funny when we recognize that training
animals to act like humans involves forcing them to overcome
their own natural behaviour and when we understand the brutal
methods used to make them perform for our amusement.

126
5 Models for Human Behaviour

While religious imaginations used apes as symbols of human

morality and popular culture is fascinated with transgres-
sions of the border between humans and other apes, scientists
study apes, seeking insights into fundamental human char-
acter, and primatologists often justify their research with
claims that observing apes helps us understand humans.
Insights vary by which apes are selected and reflect observers’
political views and ideas about human nature. As in popular
culture, scientific research frequently highlighted sexuality
and violence.
We project our preoccupations onto behaviour we purport
to observe. For example, collecting specimens for the American
Museum of Natural History in 1908, taxidermist Carl Akeley
killed gorillas whose corpses could be mounted to display nu-
clear family units, even though he did not actually see such
groups.1 Similarly, primatologists long believed that gibbons
resembled stereotypical 1950s Western nuclear families: mono-
gamous, stable, enclosed and rather boring. However, studies
of white-handed gibbons in Thailand show their societies are
more complex, with more social interaction between groups and
migration of individuals from one group to others. Rather than
showing hostility to other groups, gibbons readily engaged in
friendly interactions with their neighbours.2

127
Apes fascinate us
because they seem
to transgress the
human–animal
border.

In the 1970s, while feminist anthropologists challenged

‘Man the Hunter’ models and emphasized ‘Woman the Gatherer’
in our evolutionary past and in contemporary non-Western
societies, primatologists shifted focus from male dominance
to mother–infant relationships. Both non-Western and non-
human societies were seen more positively. Influential studies
emphasized proximity between apes, especially chimpanzees,
and humans, describing apes as our kin, or friends, and recog-
nizing them as individuals with names and distinct personalities.3
Jane Goodall forced re-evaluations of apes’ and humans’ place in
nature, challenging prevailing wisdom by showing chimpanzees’
personalities, intelligence, complex social relationships and use

128
 ‘Head of Troglo-
dyte calvus’ (bald
chimpanzee),
1895.

of tools. In the 1970s Goodall’s observations of chimpanzee

aggression altered these images again. Until then, chimpan-
zees were assumed to be vegetarians, like most apes. Humans
were considered unique in murdering members of their own
species. Goodall overturned these assumptions, revealing that
chimpanzees sometimes hunted and killed various animals.
She observed apes not only eating flesh but also distributing it
to cement alliances or to attract mates. In January 1974 Goodall
reported another shocking observation: a deliberate, murder-
ous attack by chimpanzees on another of their species. Later
reports described warfare, males attacking female chimpanzees
and infanticide.

129
 Goodall’s reports encouraged ‘killer ape’ theorists. Raymond
Dart had posited aggression as the impetus for human evolu-
tion and presented violent urges as essential to human
psychology.4 If sexual coercion, dominance hierarchies and
murderous violence existed among chimpanzees, perhaps these
activities were ‘natural’ among humans. Although discredited
by archaeological evidence, Dart’s theories were modified by
anthropologists who emphasized hunting in human evolution.
In popular books, journalist Robert Ardrey ignored contrary
evidence and used images of aggressive, male-dominant baboons
to promote his own killer-ape theory of human evolution,
inspiring Social Darwinists and American Nazis like George
Lincoln Rockwell.5 Killer apes appeared in Stanley Kubrick’s
film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which begins with an early hominid
‘At the Dawn of Man’ inventing the first tool, a bone used to kill
an enemy.
Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson argued that humans’
warlike tendencies evolved from aggressive, male-dominated ape
groups and that males have been sexually selected for violence.6
Citing chimpanzee behaviour, they link aggression to the drive
for status and reproductive success and say that in human soci-
eties pride, patriarchy and patriotism allow males to control
females. Barbara Smuts considers male aggression toward
females among apes a way of laying claim to females and training
them not to resist sexual contact.7 She thinks social factors that
determine differences in sexual coercion between non-human
primates also operate among humans. Where females leave their
birth groups and join groups where they have no close female kin
they are more likely to experience sexual coercion. Craig Stanford
links hunting and flesh-eating among apes to evolution of human
behaviour, and compares chimpanzee dominance hierarchies
with political leadership in human societies.8

130
 Primatologist Frans de Waal sees more desirable qualities
among apes, portraying bonobos as the ‘make-love-not-war’
apes.9 Others call them ‘hippie chimps’, playful, innocent and
uninhibited.10 De Waal says bonobos resolve social conflict
through frequent and varied sexual activity, including homosex-
ual behaviour. De Waal uses bonobos to reject images of humans
as savages, whose violent behaviour is barely controlled by cul-
tural practices and morality. Images of peaceful bonobos living
in egalitarian, female-centred groups and resolving social
conflict through sexual contact resonated in popular culture.
Seeking to demolish ‘the bonobo myth’ in the New Yorker,
Ian Parker mocked a Bonobo Conservation Initiative benefit,
catered for by a raw-food vegetarian restaurant named Bonobo’s
and featuring New Age music,11 and sex educator Dr Susan
Block’s television programme The Bonobo Way, which suggests
bonobos hold ‘the erotic key to peace’ and that humans should
emulate their behaviour by making love, not war.12 Parker
quotes rival primatologists who say de Waal’s understanding
is simplistic and distorted, based on observations of captives,
that he exaggerates differences between bonobos and chim-
panzees, and that behaviour such as mutual genital rubbing is
not really ‘sex’. Dinesh D’Souza of the Hoover Institution used
Parker’s article to denounce sexual freedom, environmental
concerns, women’s emancipation, animal rights and liberal-
ism generally.13
De Waal thinks criticisms reflect prudishness and homo-
phobia among American primatologists embarrassed by sexual
activity, and reluctance to acknowledge behaviour that chal-
lenges established ideas of violent human nature.14 While
recognizing that power struggles are important in chimpanzee
soceties, de Waal says that aggression is over-emphasized while
cooperation is overlooked.

131
 Cultural assumptions influence the direction of scientific
research.15 Primate studies might have developed differently if
bonobo social organization had been known earlier and har-
monious aspects of ape societies might have encouraged more
consideration of human altruism and cooperation. De Waal says
that emphasis on aggression as the organizing principle of non-
human primate life corresponded with dim views of human
nature after World War Two: those who considered humans
naturally aggressive, selfish and violent emphasized killer-ape
images. In societies that encourage competition and selfishness,
such findings apparently confirmed the essential correctness of
such behaviours and legitimized them.
Performing apes
who mimic human While we seek insights into human nature by observing
behaviour provide apes, much effort goes into policing the border between them
us with confir-
mation of our
and us. Various attributes have been suggested as markers of
special status. human uniqueness. Tool use was emphasized until 1960 when

132
Goodall’s observations of chimpanzees creating and using tools
to fish for termites prompted Louis Leakey’s famous response:
‘Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chim-
panzees as human.’16
Defenders of the ape–human boundary say culture is uniquely
human, while all members of other species act in instinctively
programmed ways. Yet evidence indicates socially learned trad-
itions among animals. Describing behaviors present among
some orangutan groups but not others, Carel van Schaik thinks
orangutans learned these practices from others and passed them
down through generations. Orangutans who had more social
interaction showed greater variety of activities, supporting claims
for learned behaviour.17 A 2006 study of 370 captive gorillas in
us zoos described tool use and cultural differences, even among
separate groups in the same zoo.
Self-awareness was another marker of human uniqueness.
However, in 1970 psychologist Gordon G. Gallup, Jr applied dye
to faces of sedated chimpanzees and recorded their behaviour
before a mirror when they awoke. Those used to seeing them-
selves in mirrors inspected the spots on their faces while animals
unaccustomed to their reflections did not. Gallup believed using
mirrors to inspect changes in appearance indicated a concept
of self, awareness of their own mental life and empathy, the
ability to understand others’ mental states, abilities that formed
a theory of mind. At first, researchers thought only chim-
panzees, orangutans and humans had these abilities. Except for
one species, monkeys did not display this behaviour, treating
reflected images as other animals. Gorillas seemed uninterested
in the entire process. Further research found bottle-nose dolphins
displayed mirror self-awareness and a 2007 experiment showed
elephants had this capacity too. A striking example was suggested
in October 1978 when National Geographic’s cover featured Koko,

133
the American Sign Language-trained gorilla, photographing
herself by aiming the camera at a mirror. (National Geographic
paid Koko its standard fee to photographers; in 2005 the
American Society of Magazine Editors named this among the
top 40 magazine covers of the previous 40 years.) It is unlikely
that apes understand photography and Koko’s self-portrait
probably was an accident. Psychologist Clive Wynn thinks some
apes have self-recognition but no theory of mind in the sense of
understanding other individuals’ mental states. He asserts that
because apes cannot use human language, they lack conscious-
ness.18 Extreme claims from both positions are unconvincing.
Mirror tests, laboratory experiments and human standards are
not the most appropriate measures of consciousness in animals;
we should understand their development of self-awareness
through their own normal social interactions.
Michael Tomasello at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology devised an experiment involving
food retrieval, visual perspective and assessments of what other
animals might know but took into account dominance hierarchies
and found that responses varied according to those relationships.
Experiments by Tetsuro Matsuzawa at Kyoto University in Japan
involved pairs of chimpanzees, one who knew where food was
hidden and a second who did not. The second chimpanzee fol-
lowed the ‘knowledgeable’ animal, suggesting awareness that the
latter had valuable information. Sometimes the first chimpanzee
attempted to deceive his follower. Studies at Yerkes National
Primate Research Center suggest chimpanzees have a sense of
equity. If one received a better reward (grapes, rather than
cucumber) for performing the same actions, the unfairly treated
ape refused to continue. More inequity was tolerated if the two
were from a familiar social group and had a relationship than if
they were only recently acquainted.19

134
 When tool use was observed among apes, language replaced
it as the defining criterion of being human. When apes were
acknowledged to use symbols, syntax then became the signifi-
cant marker. As more became known on apes’ language abili-
ties, consciousness became the defining frontier. Arguments
that apes and other animals lack subjective experiences are
efforts to maintain a division between them and us. In 1917
Wolfgang Kohler described experiments on apes’ mental pro-
cesses. Although Goodall’s observations forced serious rethinking
of ape–human boundaries, Kohler made earlier observations of
chimpanzee tool use. He found chimpanzees displayed pur-
poseful problem-solving behaviour, based on observations of
how they stacked boxes or used sticks to obtain food placed
out of reach.20 Citing Kohler’s experiments with the chim-
panzee Sultan, novelist J. M. Coetzee questions tests of apes’
cognitive abilities:

At every turn Sultan is driven to think the less interesting

thought. From the purity of speculation (Why do men
behave like this?) he is relentlessly propelled toward
lower, practical, instrumental reason (How does one use
this to get that?) and thus toward acceptance of himself
as primarily an organism with an appetite that needs to
be satisfied. Although his entire history, from the time
his mother was shot and he was captured, through his
voyage in a cage to imprisonment on this island prison
camp and the sadistic games that are played around food
here, leads him to ask questions about the justice of the
universe and the place of this penal colony in it, a care-
fully plotted psychological regimen conducts him away
from ethics and metaphysics toward the humbler reaches
of practical reason.21

135
 Doubtless, many would dismiss any idea of apes’ metaphysical
speculations on the ‘justice of the universe’ but Coetzee’s point
about the limitations of tests of apes’ intelligence and cognitive
abilities is relevant.
In 2007 Jessica Cantlon, a neuroscience researcher at Duke
University, teamed two chimpanzees, Boxer and Feinstein, against
university students, asking them mentally to add dots flashed on
a computer screen and to pick answers rapidly from a different
screen. The groups achieved similar results. Researchers conclud-
ed that both had similar non-verbal mathematical abilities and
Intensive language suggested that language in humans explained their ability to do
training has placed more complicated calculations.22
some apes in a
peculiar space
Ape language studies remain controversial. Psychologists
between species. exploring relationships between genetics and environment in

136
human development, the so-called nature–nurture debate,
promoted them. Interested in environment and early learning,
particularly among ‘feral’ children, Winthrop Kellogg believed
the best approach would be to raise children outside human
society but recognized that some would object. No such ethical
concerns seemed to arise in the alternative he devised: remov-
ing apes from their own societies and raising them as human
children. In 1931 he and his wife Luella obtained a seven-month-
old chimpanzee named Gua from Robert Yerkes’ institution
in Florida and raised her alongside their own son, Donald,
treating them identically. Gua and Donald developed mutual
attachment and displayed numerous similarities, with Gua often
developing abilities (such as recognizing herself in a mirror or
showing interest in pictures in a book) sooner than Donald.23
The Kelloggs believed that, although Gua could not speak, she
did comprehend human language. However, after nine months,
they worried that Donald was developing chimpanzee-like
behaviours and terminated the experiment.
Interest in apes’ acquisition of human language encouraged
more ‘cross-fostering’ of chimpanzees, who were raised as human
children in private homes. In the 1940s psychologists Keith and
Catherine Hayes raised a chimpanzee named Vicki and attempt-
ed to make her speak. Although Vicki understood English, she
could articulate only four words: ‘mamma’, ‘papa’, ‘cup’, ‘up’.
Psychologists took decades to realize that chimpanzees’ vocal
tracts are unsuited to spoken human language. (However, in
2003 Jared Taglialatela and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh claimed that
after studying hours of video-taped activity by Kanzi, a bonobo,
they detected four distinct sounds consistently associated with
particular actions: ‘banana’, ‘grapes’, ‘juice’ and ‘yes’; William
Field of the Great Ape Trust suggests Kanzi may be speaking
English words but too high and fast for us to understand.)24

137
 In the 1960s Allen and Beatrice Gardner began teaching
American Sign Language to chimpanzees. Shaping her gestures
into correct signs, they trained Washoe to use about 150 sym-
bols, indicating objects and abstract concepts and to use them
in different contexts. Washoe taught signs to Loulis, a young
chimpanzee she adopted. Video showed Washoe signing when
humans were not present, to comment on activities around her.
The Gardners claim that Washoe was the first non-human ape
to acquire language and use it creatively, combining signs in
novel ways to produce imaginative and sensible messages.
Inspired by Project Washoe, David Premack taught a chim-
panzee named Sarah to construct sentences using plastic sym-
bols. Duane Rumbaugh designed a keyboard to facilitate ape
communication, a tool adopted by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh in
her work with the bonobo, Kanzi. Kanzi learned through obser-
vation rather than direct training, as he watched his adoptive
mother Matata being drilled in keyboard lexigrams. Although
Matata was uninterested in the process, Kanzi developed an
extensive vocabulary with these symbols and understands hun-
dreds of spoken English words.
In the 1970s Francine Patterson attempted to teach language
to gorillas Koko and Michael, using signs and spoken words.
Patterson says that Koko acquired a 1,000-sign vocabulary
while Michael learned half that; they combined signs into sen-
tences, used them to describe their experiences and refer to
external objects, and initiated conversations with humans. An
orangutan, Chantek, raised as a human child by Dr Lyn Miles,
is also noted for language-using skills.
Critics say apes receive unconscious cues from trainers and
do not really use language. Language experiments fell from
favour in 1979 when psychologist Herbert Terrace described as
a failure his efforts to teach language to the chimpanzee Nim

138
 Some believe that
gorillas have
acquired extensive
vocabularies and
can use symbols to
communicate with
humans.

Chimpsky. Unlike those who raised apes in human homes,

hoping they would acquire language as human children did,
Terrace used strict Skinnerian training in a barren, window-less
cell. Terrace initially believed Nim knew over a hundred signs
and could combine them in sentences, but later decided Nim
was being prompted by his teachers and simply imitating
gestures. Terrace’s criticisms were adopted by linguist Thomas

139
 Sebeok, who organized a 1980 conference at the New York
Academy of Sciences to denounce ape-language experiments as
‘The Clever Hans Phenomenon’ (citing the famous German
horse who reportedly solved mathematical problems at the
turn of the twentieth century but was actually responding to
his trainer’s inadvertent cues). Later, double-bind tests by
other researchers undermined Terrace’s criticism. Also, when
released from Terrace’s imposed deprivations and allowed to
socialize with others, Nim increased spontaneous signing.25
Some claims may seem exaggerated. For example, in a 1998
cyberspace chat in which Koko responded to online questions
translated into Sign Language, transcripts suggest that Francine
Patterson was generous in interpreting the gorilla’s responses.26
Patterson’s interpretations of Koko’s gestures came under addi-
tional scrutiny in 2005 when two former employees of Pat-
terson’s Gorilla Foundation sued her. They claimed Patterson
interpreted Koko’s signs as requests to undress and show their

Although apes
can clearly
communicate
amongst them-
selves and can
convey their
wishes to humans,
some claims for
their linguistic
abilities may be
exaggerated.

140
breasts and repeatedly demanded compliance. The Gorilla Foun-
dation said the women were angry over employment issues and
invented the story to attract publicity.27
Linguist Noam Chomsky rejects ape-language experiments,
arguing that since apes do not use syntax they do not have lan-
guage. Roger Fouts proposes gradations of linguistic abilities
among apes, rather than the gap linguists perceive. Clearly, if
one defines ‘language’ as ‘human language’, then non-human
apes will not display all its features. Nevertheless, apes engage
in symbolic communication in ways that demonstrate that they
do have consciousness and a complex inner life.
If the ape language question remains unresolved, the studies
themselves convey important lessons. In the 1970s psycholo-
gists Maurice and Jane Temerlin raised the chimpanzee Lucy as
their ‘daughter’. Temerlin describes their experiences in his book,
significant less for observations of Lucy’s behaviour than for
unintended revelations about how humans use apes to satisfy
their own desires.28
The Temerlins adopted Lucy on the advice of her legal owner
Dr William Lemmon, a psychoanalyst, former head of the
University of Oklahoma’s clinical psychology programme and
director of the Institute for Primate Studies. Lemmon prescribed
cross-fostering of apes to his patients, including Maurice
Temerlin. Temerlin presents a bizarre portrait of his relation-
ship with his psychoanalyst, one that undoubtedly influenced
his later work on psychoanalytic cults. Roger Fouts, who trained
Lucy in American Sign Language, also describes Lemmon’s
authoritarian behaviour and mistreatment of apes: control-
ling them through force, keeping them in chains, beating
them and shocking them with an electric cattle prod, tech-
niques learned from circus trainers. (Some laboratory scien-
tists still consider such sources useful.29) Fouts compared

141
Lemmon to the deranged scientist in H. G. Wells’s The Island of
Dr Moreau.30 Lemmon pursued cruel maternal deprivation
experiments and other unethical practices, including removing
chimpanzee infants from their mothers and putting them in his
patients’ homes.
While Lemmon’s practices were ‘grotesque’ and ‘bizarre’,31
the Temerlins’ behaviour was also reprehensible. Before acquir-
ing Lucy, they kept another chimpanzee, Charlie Brown, who
accidentally hanged himself when left unsupervised. Three
weeks later, learning that a circus chimpanzee had given birth,
Jane Temerlin flew across America, drugged the mother and
stole her baby. Maurice Temerlin believed:

the airplane flight and the act of taking Lucy away from
her mother had been for Jane the symbolic equivalent of
the act of giving birth, and formed between them as close
a union as the bond between any baby and its mother.32

He claims: ‘Jane felt about her as though she were her own off-
spring, the natural product of her body, rather than an adopted
child from another species.’33 Proclaiming ‘unconditional love’
for Lucy, Temerlin notes that chimpanzees are ‘enormously
dependent’ on their mothers ‘throughout a long childhood’,
that separation from a mother creates ‘anaclitic depression’ in
the animals, and that this may have influenced Lucy’s develop-
ment.34 Despite all this, Temerlin does not demand halting
such research.
In the Temerlins’ home Lucy wore human clothes, used silver-
ware at the table, drank gin and tonic, smoked cigarettes, browsed
Playgirl magazine and had a pet kitten. Identifying himself
as Lucy’s father, Temerlin is fascinated by her sexuality, driven
to discover if her sexual interests were directed towards

142
humans. Unwisely disregarding numerous primatologists
who have lost fingers to biting chimpanzees, Temerlin des-
cribes Lucy ‘attempt[ing] to mouth my penis whenever she sees
it, whether I am urinating, bathing, or have an erection’.35 He
regrets not photographing Lucy masturbating with a vacuum
cleaner, masturbates in front of her and has his wife do the
same ‘to see what would happen’36 and fantasizes about his
adopted daughter:

I even had fantasies of copulating with Lucy and had

cracked jokes about it, teasing Jane about how our
daughter would be a perfect subject for an experiment in
cross-species sexuality, and that no marital infidelity
would be involved since Lucy was ‘in the family’ and a
chimpanzee anyway.37

Apparently, Temerlin was not alone in his sexual fixation with

Lucy. Elizabeth Hess describes another of Lemmon’s patients
who adopted a chimpanzee, Ally. Seized by ‘fierce religious con-
victions’, the woman raised Ally as a Catholic, although this did
not discourage her from having a sexual relationship with him.
Hess says Lemmon ‘encouraged a sexually charged atmosphere
to flourish around his chimps’.38
Temerlin’s astonishing book reveals persistent emphasis on
sexuality but also our contradictory and hypocritical attitudes
towards other apes. Although Temerlin rejects the idea of
owning Lucy, comparing it to human slavery, he has already
demonstrated that Lucy is a possession that can be removed
from her own mother to satisfy human curiousity.39 When they
are cute, and when it suits us, apes may be imported across the
species border and treated as pseudo-children, but they are
easily deported back to inferior animal status if they become

143
inconvenient. After a decade raising Lucy as their human child,
the Temerlins decided they wanted ‘normal lives’ and disposed
of their ‘daughter’.40 Unlike other chimpanzee owners, they did
not give Lucy to a biomedical laboratory. Recognizing his
betrayal, Temerlin compared this with

Jewish intellectuals of Germany who were honoured citi-

zens of the most culturally and scientifically advanced
nation in Europe one day, and found themselves without
friends, property, or personhood the next, as they were
herded behind the barbed wire of the concentration
camp.41

Their solution – releasing her in Africa – was naively romantic,

providing more comfort to them than to Lucy, a ‘middle class
Oklahoman’ who had never met another chimpanzee until just
before her departure.42 Although the Temerlins accompanied
her to West Africa in 1977, they returned home almost immedi-
ately, leaving a graduate student, Janis Carter, to help Lucy adapt
to life in the forest, which they assumed would take only one or
two weeks. Carter’s commitment is remarkable. Expecting to
stay a few days, she spent years in Gambia. Lucy was first placed
at Abuko Reserve, where tourists paid to see her. Carter finally
moved Lucy and several other chimpanzees to Baboon Island
(River Gambia National Park), where Carter herself lived in a
cage that soldiers built to protect her from other animals. Afraid
and alone with the chimpanzees, Carter encouraged Lucy to
eat wild foods and to act like a natural chimpanzee. Totally un-
prepared, Lucy was terrified, starving and miserable, begging
Carter for food and desperate to be allowed into the cage. Eventu-
ally, she could survive on her own but in 1988 Carter found
Lucy’s skeleton near their former camp. Hunters may have killed

144
her and cut off her hands and feet to sell as trophies, although
Stella Brewer suggested she died accidentally and was partially
eaten by other animals.43
Researchers raised apes in their homes for experimental
purposes and abruptly abandoned them when they developed
other interests or when the apes became difficult to manage.
The apes’ suffering renders these experiments unethical and
their fates are heartbreaking. Chimpanzees who lived with
human families for years, enjoying attention and affection,
were sold to biomedical laboratories. Even when efforts were
made to avoid those institutions, apes suffered betrayal and

Many apes were

removed from
their own families
and raised as
human children
but abandoned
when humans
grew tired of the
experiment.

145
abandonment.44 Among the exploitation and violence that
characterize human relationships with other apes, the aban-
donment of Lucy and other cross-fostered chimpanzees has
particular poignancy. Nevertheless, their betrayal should not
mask the pain and terror felt by other animals trapped in bio-
medical laboratories simply because we have not ‘raised’ them
temporarily to human status.
While ape language studies reveal our willingness to manip-
ulate other beings even when this produces psychological dam-
age, other uses of apes as models for humans are even more sin-
ister. Their similarity to humans encourages us to use apes as
models in situations where we find it unethical to experiment
on people. In the past we did consider it acceptable to conduct
painful and deadly experiments on humans, especially those of
subordinate status (women, minorities, soldiers, etc.), and phar-
maceutical corporations still conduct trials among the world’s
poorest, most vulnerable people. Animal advocates, however,
argue that it is also unethical to experiment on non-humans
who are sentient, have their own interests and whose lives should
be protected. It is impossible to provide ‘humane’ conditions
for imprisoned animals, which endure prolonged isolation and
boredom, anxiety, terror and pain in captivity. Many tests are
conducted for trivial purposes, create suffering and death for
animals with questionable benefits for humans, and could be
replaced with alternatives. Dr Hadwen Trust notes that 180
million animals are used in experiments each year involving
‘poisoning; disease infection; wound infliction; application of
skin/eye irritants; food/water/sleep deprivation; subjection to
psychological stress; brain damage; paralysis; surgical mutila-
tion; deliberate organ failure; genetic mutation and associated
physical deformity; burning; electric shock, forced inhalation
and death.’ Much of this involves cosmetics, cleaning products,

146
pharmaceuticals (often copying existing drugs), chemicals and
pesticides, alcohol, tobacco and military testing. Even where
primates are used to investigate medical issues, results have
been disappointing, as in the failure of aids and hepatitis c
research on primates. Groups like the Dr Hadwen Trust fund
alternative methods, including human cell research, molecular
biology and computer imaging.
Even the uk’s Boyd Group (often considered a public rela-
tions group for vivisectionists), composed of researchers, funders

Dan Piraro’s
cartoon indicates
our contradictory
attitude towards
other primates.

147
 and welfarists, called for banning research on great apes. In
2005 the Fifth World Congress on Alternatives and Animal Use
in the Life Sciences (also sponsored by corporations engaged in
animal testing) called for ending use of primates in biomedical
research. Animal activists support a ban but do not limit their
concern to primates and seek to abolish all vivisection.
Vivisectionists say animals are well treated. Of the 1,400
chimpanzees in us research facilities, Jonathan Marks claims:

They live in stimulating social environments and are

tended by sensitive, compassionate, and knowledgeable
caretakers. Their well-being is constantly monitored by

Despite claims of
providing good
treatment for apes,
laboratories and
zoos imprison
them in bleak
conditions.

148
 veterinarians and primatologists; they have better health
care than most American people. These apes are in no
way being tortured, imprisoned, or murdered; the med-
ical research they undergo is actually far more similar to
your annual checkup than it is to anything at Auschwitz.45

Organizations such as Canada’s Fauna Foundation and the

New England Anti-Vivisection Society present a different pic-
ture. Biographies of apes who survived years of biomedical
tests and are now in sanctuaries make grim reading. They
endured hundreds of chemical ‘knockdowns’ and punch biop-
sies after being infected with deadly diseases. Isolated in bar-
ren cement cages, they suffered nervous breakdowns, exhibit
extreme anxiety and fear, refuse to eat and suffer from self-
inflicted wounds. Those used as breeders saw their infants
stolen from them; mothers who resist are subdued with anaes-
thetic-dart guns. The emotional trauma suffered by mothers
and infants is evident. To claim that apes used in biomedical
research ‘have better health care than most American people’
stretches the meaning of ‘care’ beyond recognition: these ani-
mals are maintained and monitored after being deliberately
infected with diseases and subjected to painful procedures that
damage and terrify them. For example, Pepper, a chimpanzee
now living at Canada’s Fauna Foundation Sanctuary was previ-
ously known as ch-454 as a breeder and research tool at lemsip,
where she endured ‘307 knockdowns, 36 punch liver biopsies,
1 open wedge liver biopsy, 6 cervical biopsies, 10 lymph node
biopsies and 4 bone marrow biopsies. She spent most of her
“free” time blankly staring out of her cage.’ Although Regis,
only endured three studies as research tool ch-645, he suffered
anorexia, depression and severe stress, chewing off a finger-
nail, refusing to eat or drink. Fauna Foundation reports: ‘When

149
he is particularly stressed he suffers from anxiety attacks dur-
ing which he nearly stops breathing – so badly is he gagging
and convulsing. It took over an hour for this very stressed, very
anxious chimpanzee to leave his transport cage and enter his
sanctuary home.’46 To characterize the agony endured by these
traumatized individuals as comparable to ‘your annual check-
up’ is misleading.
Vivisectionists say their work will overcome diseases such as
aids, cancer and hepatitis. In reality, much vivisection is not
conducted for life-saving reasons but involves testing mundane
commercial products such as cosmetics, deodorants and floor
polishes. Much research is redundant, repeating studies done
by others because corporations want to preserve trade secrets
and profits. Even where apes are used in medical studies much
research makes no significant contribution to human health.
For example, one study investigated chimpanzee research in
overcoming human disease, analysing a random sample of 100
studies. The authors found ‘no studies of captive chimpanzees
that made an essential contribution . . . [to] prophylactic, diag-
nostic or therapeutics methods for combating human dis-
eases’.47 Only rarely did data correlate from chimpanzee and
human experiments. The authors argue not only that reliable
extrapolation of data from chimpanzee experiments is impossi-
ble but that it also represents potential hazards to human
health. They conclude that, rather than being useful, chim-
panzee experimentation has been ‘largely incidental, peripher-
al, confounding, irrelevant, [and] unreliable’, diverting research
funding better spent elsewhere.48
The full extent of primate experimentation is unknown;
animal research is kept a closely guarded secret by those who
conduct it and profit from it. Vivisectionists restrict access to lab-
oratories and information, citing terrorist threats or trade secrets.

150
Most toxicity testing data remain unpublished. Statistics do not
reveal the true extent of experimentation, since they do not
show if animals are used in multiple procedures.
In the United States research on chimpanzees began during
the 1920s with Robert Yerkes, a founder of primatology. Yerkes
started his own laboratory with two animals he thought were
chimpanzees. Later, it was realized that one was a bonobo and
what Yerkes considered sex-linked behavioural differences
were actually species differences. Yerkes provided some of the
first scientific descriptions of chimpanzee behaviour, discussing
cognition, emotions and intelligence. In 1930 his laboratory was
relocated to Florida and then in 1965 to Emory University in
Atlanta, where it now operates as Yerkes National Primate
Research Center. By the 1940s Yerkes’ laboratory had changed
its focus from studying primates themselves to studying in-
fectious diseases, using primates as models for humans. Yerkes’
researchers conducted maternal deprivation experiments,

Beginning in the
1950s, many apes
suffered in military
research and
space-flight
testing.

151
Chimpanzee Ham
was the first ape
launched into
space.

basically repeating procedures done by psychologist Harry

Harlow, who separated infant monkeys from their mothers to
demonstrate what was already well known: after prolonged sep-
aration and isolation infants are traumatized and dysfunctional.
Celebrated in his field, Harlow was notorious for cruel experi-
ments and efforts to destroy these infants psychologically. He
left some in a stainless-steel prison jokingly called the ‘pit of
despair’ and invented mechanical surrogate mothers that re-
jected desperately clinging infants by violently catapulting them
away or stabbing them with barbed spikes. Yerkes’ researchers
conducted similar deprivation experiments, tearing infant

152
chimpanzees from their mothers and isolating them in wire
cages for years, then dosing them with lsd and amphetamines
to see the results or testing traumatized animals’ responses to
stress or food deprivation.49
In the 1950s the us Air Force captured 65 chimpanzees in
Africa and shipped them to Holloman Air Force Base in
Alamagordo, New Mexico, where they began breeding them for
their space programme and to test equipment such as ejection
seats. Apes were subjected to various torments in decompres-
sion chambers and centrifuges to simulate space flight. Many
were severely injured or killed. In 1961 two chimpanzees, Ham
and Enos, were launched into orbit on separate flights, during
which they had to perform various mechanical tasks. Ham,
whose name was derived from Holloman Aero Med, was cap-
tured in West Africa in 1957, probably after seeing his mother
killed. Trained by electro-shocks to operate a control panel in a

Space chimpanzee
holds hands.

153
Space chimpanzee
preparation.

small capsule, Ham was shot into orbit on 31 January 1961. Mal-
functioning equipment caused the overheated rocket to veer off
course on re-entry and crash into the Atlantic Ocean far from
the recovery ship and water began filling the capsule. Although
Ham was rescued, he refused to re-enter the capsule for pho-
tographers waiting at a nasa news conference to document his
eager participation, despite his past experience of electro-
shocks for disobedience and the efforts of four men to push him
in. In 1963 Ham was released from the space programme and
sent to a zoo, where he lived in isolation until he died prema-
turely aged 26.50
On 29 November 1961 a second chimpanzee, Enos, was sent
into orbit. Due to malfunctioning equipment Enos continu-
ously received electric punishments for correctly carrying out
actions he was trained to perform. Shortly after his flight he
died. While human astronauts were considered national heroes,

154
chimpanzees in the space programme were used to test seat
belts, ejection seats and deceleration equipment. Strapped into
sleds that roared down tracks at supersonic speeds and suddenly
braked, they died from severe burns, broken necks or massive
trauma as their heads collided against windshields or headrests
or as their brains were smashed against their skulls.51 The Air
Force stopped using chimpanzees for its space programme in
the 1970s. This did not end the apes’ suffering, since most were
rented out for biomedical research and infected with diseases.
Breeding programmes received government funding after
the 1975 restrictions on importation of wild-caught chimpanzees
were imposed by the Convention on International Trade in
Endangered Species (cites). New interest in biomedical
research on chimpanzees was encouraged by the spread of aids
in the 1980s and most primate research in the next decade
focused on aids. Molecular biologist Paul Sharp and medical
professor Beatrice Hahn believe hiv originated in chimpanzees
simultaneously infected with two simian viruses contracted
from monkeys they killed and that a hybridized virus passed to
humans. Most assume the virus was contracted by hunters who
butchered and consumed chimpanzees, but Edward Hooper
rejects Sharp’s theory and suggests hiv originated during polio
vaccine testing in Africa in the 1950s; the vaccine was cultivated
in chimpanzees infected with siv, contaminated and then given
to humans.52
After years of infecting chimpanzees with hiv, researchers
were unsuccessful in creating aids symptoms (although Frank
Novembre of Emory University announced in 1990 that he had
finally developed aids in a chimpanzee). The fact that chim-
panzees do not develop aids as humans do made them poor
models for understanding the disease. Chimpanzee research
was unlikely to save human lives. Even ignoring ethical issues,

155
the fact that animals who are so genetically similar to humans
do not respond to diseases as we do raises questions about the
validity of experimenting on less closely related animals.
Nevertheless, researchers persisted in studying a related virus,
siv, in macaques. Meanwhile, hiv-carrying chimpanzees
remained infectious and most were isolated in sterile surround-
ings, lacking any ‘environmental enrichments’ and suffering
loneliness and despair. Despite aids research failures, vivisectors
continued using chimpanzees for Hepatitis c research, along
with other testing for vaccines and drugs, at Yerkes National
Primate Research Center, Southwest National Primate Research
Center, New Iberia Primate Research Center and the md
Anderson Cancer Center Science Park.53
Most biomedical research on primates involves monkeys,
including several infamous cases. In 1981 peta exposed cruelty
in Maryland’s Institute of Behavioural Research, where brain-
damaged monkeys endured filthy conditions with open sores
and untreated wounds. Psychologist Edward Taub was charged
with 119 counts of cruelty, involving restraints, electro-shock
and withholding food. In 1985 the Animal Liberation Front res-
cued Britches from the University of California, Riverside; iso-
lated shortly after birth, his eyelids were sewn shut and sensors
implanted in his brain to test sensory-substitution devices for
blind humans. The British anti-vivisection group Uncaged
exposed gruesome suffering inflicted by Imutran (Novartis) as
they transplanted hearts and kidneys from genetically modified
pigs to abdomens, chests and necks of higher primates from
1994 to 2000. In 2004 undercover video at Covance, Europe’s
largest primate-testing facility, showed staff abusing animals.
Columbia University researchers induce strokes in baboons by
removing their eyeballs and clamping blood vessels. Others
(studying stress and women’s menstrual cycles) implant metal

156
pipes in monkeys’ skulls to inflict stress and give nicotine and
morphine to pregnant baboons; peta says Columbia fails to
provide post-surgical care, that animals suffer without
painkillers and severe infections go untreated.54
Biomedical demand for primates from Africa, China and the
Philippines endangered wild populations, threatening entire
species, such as India’s rhesus monkeys. In the 1970s Sierra Leone
was a major exporter of chimpanzees to European biomedical
institutions. That, along with the bushmeat and pet trades, deci-
mated ape populations. Vivisectionists responded by demanding
more captive breeding. Jonathan Marks claimed this would
help endangered species, including great apes.55 However, such
arguments are not based on the inherent value of animals’ lives
or ethical concerns for their well-being but are motivated by
desire for a steady supply of animate research tools to serve vivi-
sectionists’ needs. Despite endangering other primate species,
and horrors inflicted on individual animals, vivisection is not
the main threat to the survival of ape species. Due to their rarity,
the expense of obtaining and maintaining them, and public oppo-
sition, apes are used less extensively than other animals in bio-
medical research. However, chimpanzees were popular research
tools throughout the twentieth century and many suffered terri-
bly. The centre of chimpanzee research is now the United States,
which also consumes tens of thousands of other primates in vivi-
section. Research on chimpanzees has been phased out in Europe
and is banned in Australia, Austria, Netherlands, New Zealand,
Sweden and the uk, although experiments involving other pri-
mates continue. European laboratories, mainly in the uk, use over
10,000 primates annually. A huge European chimpanzee labora-
tory was planned but, at the European Parliament, on 24 April
2007 (World Lab Animal Day), Animal Defenders International
and the National Antivivisection Society, sponsored by meps

157
from various parties, launched a Written Declaration opposing
the use of apes and wild-caught monkeys in scientific experi-
ments and a timetable for ending primate experiments. In an
historic decision on September 2007, the European Parliament
adopted the Declaration.
However, European bans on vivisection involving certain
primates will not in themselves end exploitation of these animals
since biomedical and pharmaceutical corporations can move
their laboratories to locations where governments will not bother
them with regulations. Even where bans exist, groups such as the
uk Medical Research Council in 2006 demanded increased
primate use, following its 2004 endorsement of the Ministry of
Defence’s expanded primate research. Military research on ani-
mals, perfecting technology to kill humans, seems even less
defensible than exploiting them for testing cosmetics and other
trivial products. Furthermore, increased availability of primates
itself would stimulate more research, without necessity.
In June 2006 Colin Blakemore, head of the Medical Research
Council in the uk, opposed the ban on using apes, saying it made
no moral sense and degraded a division between humans and
animals. Another vivisectionist, Oxford University neurosur-
geon Tipu Aziz, said he had ‘no qualms’ about using primates.
Supporting the ban, Dr Gill Langley, scientific consultant to the
British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, emphasized apes’
mental and emotional capacities and ability to suffer, arguing
that stress endured by these animals in experiments invalidates
results. Noting the us Food and Drug Administration’s admis-
sion that 92 per cent of all drugs that pass animal testing do not
reach markets due to safety or efficacy issues, she called this ‘an
appalling indictment of 21st-century science’.56
Neuroscientists are eager to use primates because of their
cognitive similarities to humans. In 2002 Cambridge University

158
planned a major neuroscience centre using macaques but faced
opposition because of concern for animals.57 Despite street
protests, opposition from scientists (such as primatologist
Charlotte Uhlenbroek, who stated: ‘I have yet to hear a suffi-
ciently compelling scientific argument that justifies the suffer-
ing inflicted on primates in medical research’), a public inquiry
concluding the proposed centre was unnecessary, and a Motion
signed by 130 mps to stop primate experiments because of the
suffering they cause and their unreliability, the government
continued pushing the project.58 When Prime Minister Tony
Blair endorsed it, the British Union for the Abolition of Vivi-
section released video footage of marmosets bleeding, vomiting
and trembling after brain surgery at Cambridge. Eventually,
soaring costs and financial problems convinced Cambridge to
drop the project.
In the United States the rush to breed chimpanzees in the
1980s and the failure of the chimpanzee model for hiv/aids
research meant that, by the 1990s, laboratories held ‘surplus’
chimpanzees. Also, during that decade several large laborato-
ries closed.
In 1997 the us Air Force terminated its chimpanzee colony.
Although animal welfare organizations volunteered to care for
the apes, most were shipped to the Coulston Foundation in New
Mexico, despite its repeated citations for inadequate veterinary
care, unsanitary conditions, inadequate ventilation and safety
violations and the death of several apes on its premises. The
Center for Captive Chimpanzee Care (now Save The Chimps), one
of the organizations that had offered to take the chimpanzees,
sued for custody and rescued a few animals from Coulston.59
Along with closure of the Holloman colony, in 1995 New York
University shut its Laboratory of Experimental Medicine and
Surgery in Primates. Some chimpanzees went to sanctuaries

159
but half were sent to the Coulston Foundation for further bio-
medical research. In 2002 Coulston itself was forced to close.
Facing numerous animal-welfare violations, Coulston had trans-
ferred 300 chimpanzees to Alamagordo Primate Facility run by
Charles River Laboratories, but in 2001 the National Institutes
of Health terminated funding. Almost immediately Coulston col-
lapsed financially and sold its animals and facilities to Save the
Chimps. While this seemed a victory against animal abuse,
conditions in other laboratories remained grim. Charles River
Laboratories, the world’s largest supplier of lab animals, faced
animal cruelty charges in 2004 after chimpanzees Ashley and
Rex died in 2002 in Alamagordo Primate Facility, where they
supposedly were receiving care under a $42.8 million contract
with the us government. Court documents showed that 24 other
chimpanzees died over a two-year period; the County District
Attorney described the situation as ‘institutional neglect’
and a pattern of sub-standard treatment.60
In 1997 the us National Research Council reported to the
National Institutes of Health on the chimpanzee ‘surplus’.
Bureaucrats proposed killing the apes as the cheapest solution
but the nrc said the public would not accept this and suggest-
ed sanctuaries to house retired chimpanzees. Welfare groups
lobbied for creation of a national system under the Chimpanzee
Health Improvement, Maintenance and Protection (chimp)
Act, signed into us law in 2000. Private sanctuaries were ineli-
gible for government support and the chimp Act was flawed by
a loophole allowing apes to be reclaimed by vivisectionists if
‘needed’ for research. Welfare groups finally closed this loop-
hole in 2007.
In 2002 Chimp Haven in Louisiana was funded to run the
sanctuary system and maintain chimpanzees rescued from
laboratories, entertainment industries and individual owners.

160
However, Chimp Haven’s board of directors included promi- Sanctuaries
provide shelter
nent vivisectionists whose careers involved subjecting animals to endangered
to biomedical and military experiments. In 2007 a lawsuit was species and
filed against Chimp Haven for mismanagement; one incident survivors of
medical
cited was the death of Woodruff, a chimpanzee who died from experiments.
a heart attack after being placed with three aggressive animals.
Keeping captive primates for research is expensive, costing
hundreds of thousands of dollars over the lifespan of animals
who may live 50 or 60 years. Those enormous costs, rather than
any ethical awakening, may be a key factor in ending research on
apes. In 2007, citing financial reasons, the us National Institutes
of Health announced it would stop breeding government-owned
chimpanzees for research. While not helping the 1,300 chimpan-
zees already in captivity in us laboratories, it did mean that in
the future others would be spared decades of suffering. Also in

161
2007 the New York Blood Center closed its Vilab institution in
Liberia and released over 70 chimpanzees used in hepatitis
research to a sanctuary on islands purchased from the Liberian
government. The Center said it no longer considered it ethically
acceptable to experiment on chimpanzees and that new meth-
ods had replaced animal research.61 In 2002 the Netherlands
banned biomedical research on apes and funded lifetime care of
animals in Dutch institutions. Apes went to aap Primadomus,
already sheltering various animals rescued from circuses, the pet
trade and laboratories. The group built a sanctuary in 2005 for
chimpanzees, many infected with hiv and Hepatitis c, and
planned another in Spain in 2008.

162
6 Extinction

As the twentieth century ended scientists warned that the planet

was on the verge of a wave of mass extinctions not seen since a
meteor collision ended the age of the dinosaurs 65 million years
ago. Biodiversity established over billions of years is being
destroyed by human population growth and our voracious
appetites. Estimates of impending losses range up to two-thirds
of all living species, all gone in a few decades due to human
activities that are destroying habitats for animals and plants. In
2006 the un Convention on Biological Diversity warned that a
growing human population was killing other species through
urbanization, pollution, global warming and the introduction
of alien species, much of the last linked to processes of corpo-
rate globalization and neo-liberal ‘free trade’.1 As other species
are pushed into oblivion, most humans will be desperately
poor, crowded in slums, many starving, and suffering critical
water shortages.
All ape species are seriously threatened. Numbers declined
sharply in the last decades; this will continue. Several species
are now extinct in countries where they formerly existed, such
as western gorillas in Congo. Apes have low reproductive rates
with long birth intervals and extended childhoods, making it
difficult to recover from high adult mortality rates. Apes also
require large habitats and their fate is linked to the forests they

163
 inhabit. Globally, forests are being devastated as governments
allow unrestricted commercial logging and promote resettle-
ment, seeing forests as empty spaces to be exploited without
concern for the animals or people who inhabit them.
Corporations derive huge profits from logging and even
where regulations exist corruption allows illegal operations to
continue. Indonesian forests have almost disappeared. Although
African forests remained in relatively better condition because of
their poor-quality timber, decimation of Asian forests means that
since the 1990s, African forests have been increasingly exploited,
and half or three-quarters of the forest is gone from some areas.
Impact on apes is direct as their food supply disappears and they
are driven from their home range. Like human refugees, displaced
survivors come into conflict with now over-crowded neighbours.

Thomas Landseer,
‘Orang Utan’,
from Landseer
and Barrow,
Characteristic
Sketches of Animals
. . . (1832).

164
Trapped in the few remaining fragments of forest and isolated
from other groups, apes will suffer loss of genetic diversity and be
weakened by inbreeding. Global warming will create additional
problems, as people try to adapt to climate change and place
additional pressures on land use.
Although some apes were once protected by local taboos
against eating them, based on explicit or implicit recognition
of their similarity to humans and anxieties about cannibalism,
such inhibitions are weakened now. Human populations, too,
are under stress from corporate globalization and increasing
poverty. In such circumstances apes are considered suitable for
consumption or as valuable commodities to be captured and
sold, or their fate as collateral damage may be ignored as
humans grapple with their own problems of survival. Many
countries in which apes now live are among the poorest in the
world. It is unsurprising that people on the edge of survival
regard apes as sources of food or income or that they kill apes
who raid their crops.
Superstitions about magical cures derived from animal
body parts and the large-scale trade in body parts for tradi-
tional medicine in Asia endanger apes, along with other species.
For example, the Hoolock gibbon, the only ape found in India,
is threatened because its hands and feet are believed to cure
women’s infertility. In Africa gorilla bones are used as magical
amulets and other ape body parts are used as medicines or sold
as ashtrays or other grotesque trophies. In international cam-
paigns against the killing and smuggling of apes, conservation
groups recognize this and create programmes where local peo-
ple can find other sources of food or income or see their own
advantage in protecting apes. Whether such changes can be
implemented before many species are driven into extinction
remains an open question.

165
 Orangutans are in trouble. Borneo orangutans are consid-
ered ‘endangered’ and Sumatran orangutans are ‘critically
endangered’, among the world’s most threatened animals.
There is little hope for their survival. Numbers dropped 97 per
cent in the last century and they exist now only in fragmented
populations. In 2007 the United Nations Environment Program
(unep) predicted their habitat would disappear in fifteen years
but that degradation would be severe in just three to five years.
In the past orangutans were hunted by indigenous people
who believed that eating their flesh would make them strong
or that their body parts would confer magical powers. Limited
human populations and simple technology limited the impact
on overall numbers of orangutans. Later, more orangutans were
killed by Europeans seeking specimens for scientific collections or
for sport. Now habitat loss is the most serious threat. Indonesia
seems committed to the total eradication of rainforests and

Orangutans
are critically
endangered.

166
 Indigenous groups
such as the Dayaks
hunted orangutans.

replacement with commercial plantations, even in national

parks, and there has been an upsurge in hunting and the trade
in exotic animals as pets. Previously orangutans coexisted with
local farmers who planted rice fields but left most of the forests
intact. Timber companies clear-cut forests and, seeing their un-
restricted actions, some locals abandoned traditional restraint,
although Dayak groups oppose logging since this deprives them
of traditional sources of food and medicine. In Borneo and
Sumatra commercial logging caused massive deforestation, even

167
The rainforests
of Borneo and
Sumatra have
been burned and
replaced by oil
palm plantations,
destroying habitat
for orangutans.

in national parks, and remaining rainforests are being turned into

plantations for palm oil production.
Palm oil is an edible vegetable oil, used in various products
from margarine to cosmetics. After soy, it is the world’s second
most widely consumed oil and is the basis of a global multi-
billion-dollar industry, involving millions of people. Promoted
as a cheap, healthy replacement for other products, it is also a
biofuel, a replacement for fossil fuel and a renewable source of
energy that can reduce carbon dioxide emissions, limit global
warming and decrease reliance on Middle East oil reserves. The
European Union has announced plans to replace 10 per cent of
its transport fuel with biofuels by 2020. While Europe expands
biofuel use, the global South is increasing production. Financial
institutions such as the World Bank and the imf, Asian
Development Bank and un Development Program encourage
production and governments provide cheap land to corpora-
tions. After Asia’s financial crisis the World Bank and imf
imposed new conditions removing all barriers to foreign invest-
ment in the palm oil sector.

168
 Palm oil seems like a miracle crop but production is driving
orangutans and other animals into extinction, while displacing
traditional communities who use land for subsistence agricul-
ture or derive their living from forests. Malaysia and Indonesia
produce almost all the world’s supplies; both are expanding
production. Indonesia’s government provided millions of
hectares to entrepreneurs and foreign investors for industrial-
scale plantations, decimating rainforests. Because it is cheaper
to cut forests than rehabilitate already degraded land, planta-
tions cause major deforestation. Timber brings huge profits
and most palm oil companies are also logging companies, often
logging vast areas and moving on, without bothering to plant
oil palms. Forests covered Indonesia a century ago; they will be
gone completely by 2010. When the forest disappears, so will
orangutans. As monoculture replaces biodiversity many other
animals, now critically endangered, will be lost: gibbons, lan-
gurs and monkeys but also tigers, elephants, rhinos, wild ox,
barking deer, clouded leopards and many bird species.2
Orangutans depend on the forest. For a healthy population
to survive, thousands of hectares of forest are needed. Thus
habitat loss is a deadly threat. As millions of acres of forests
were converted into plantations, orangutan populations
sharply declined; survivors exist in isolated areas that cannot
sustain them and where they are vulnerable to hunting and
can only breed within limited numbers, causing genetic weak-
ness. They are ‘the living dead’.3 Orangutans will be extinct in
nature in less than a decade. Then, they will survive only in
zoos, locked in sad little prisons under the gaze of human vis-
itors who stare at them for a few seconds before moving to the
next attraction.
Some destruction is incidental: habitat is destroyed and
orangutans starve. Orangutans venturing into farming areas

169
are considered ‘pests’ or ‘trespassers’ and are shot or poisoned.
Some are killed accidentally by machines. Others are killed
deliberately to capture their infants for the exotic pet trade.
About a thousand orangutans are taken from Borneo annually
and sold in markets throughout south-east Asia. For every
infant sold, several adults and other infants are killed. Trade in
infant orangutans increased over the last decade and is directly
associated with logging and plantations, which facilitate easier
access to them.
Where no valuable timber exists, plantations are cleared by
burning; sometimes fires get out of control and vast areas of
forest are ‘accidentally’ destroyed. Huge fires that destroyed 5
million hectares of Indonesia’s forests in 1997 were set by palm
oil planters and logging corporations. Although this is illegal,
corporations received only token fines. In Borneo thousands
of orangutans were burned to death or killed trying to escape:
one third of the ape population was destroyed in just one year.
Survivors experienced psychological stress after being crowded
into restricted areas, affecting reproduction. In human terms
we would call this post-traumatic stress disorder among a
refugee population.
Palm oil and logging corporations build roads through
forests, further fragmenting orangutans’ territory while provid-
ing more access for hunters and ‘illegal’ loggers. Roads disrupt
habitat for all animals; seeking to avoid people, they crowd into
remaining forests, which suffer under their concentrated num-
bers. Plantations and logging cause extensive environmental
damage: soil and water pollution, erosion, sedimentation in
streams, unregulated pesticide use, waste and chemicals
dumped into streams and rivers, poisoning fish, destroying
wildlife and contaminating water that villagers use for drinking
and washing.

170
 At the un Environment Programme’s 2007 meetings in
Nairobi, reports indicated that the rainforests of Borneo and
Sumatra had been clear-cut more rapidly than previously
known and that 98 per cent of the forests would be gone by
2022. Illegal logging, driven by international demand, caused
most of this. The United States, the world’s biggest importer of
wood, worsened conditions by refusing to prohibit illegal wood

Orangutans like
this one are under
major threat
from mining.

171
Infant chimpanzee
on sale in a bush-
meat market,
Libreville, Gabon.

imports or to press other governments to curtail the illegal tim-

ber trade, despite a 2005 agreement by the g8 nations to do so.4
Along with being the world’s largest plywood exporter,
Indonesia is a major gold exporter. To extract gold miners use
mercury, polluting streams and rivers. Mining near Borneo’s
Tanjung Puting National Park, one of the few remaining sanc-
tuaries for orangutans, transformed that area into a barren
moonscape. Mining corporations lobby the government to drop
rainforest protection measures so they can clear forests and
extract coal. One giant corporation heading the coal rush is
Anglo-Australian bhp Billiton, which promotes a ‘green’ image

172
and claims to support orangutan conservation. Yet bhp plans to
become the largest coal producer in Indonesia by exploiting the
biologically diverse area known as the Heart of Borneo. The effect
would be to destroy forests and drive orangutans and other
wildlife into extinction.5
At the 2007 un conference on climate change in Bali,
Indonesia’s president acknowledged that tens of thousands of
orangutans had been killed in recent years and announced a
ten-year programme to protect orangutans and 2.5 million acres
of forests from logging, mining and palm oil plantations. The
Nature Conservancy, an international coalition of non-govern-
mental organizations, agreed to contribute $1 million, hoping
to save 10,000 orangutans. Emphasis is on ‘partnerships’ with
timber corporations, not known for conservation efforts, so the
outcome remains doubtful. Even if logging and mining stopped
immediately it would be difficult for orangutan populations to
recover because their reproduction rate is slow.
In West Africa logging, mining and oil extraction have had a
huge impact on ape populations as the ecosystem is devastated

Gorilla hands
may be eaten or
used in traditional
medicine. Brazza-
ville, Congo.

173
and their habitat is destroyed. Logging roads fragment forests
and allow access for hunters, settlers and refugees, who use forest
resources for fuel. Encroaching settlement exposes apes to human
diseases for which they have no immunity.
The thriving bushmeat trade threatens African apes with
extinction. For centuries Africans exploited forest animals for
subsistence but their smaller numbers and less-effective weapons
had less impact. Threats to animals intensified as populations
grew and commercial logging penetrated previously inacces-
sible and protected forests. Logging decimated African forests,
destroying animal habitats and driving survivors into smaller
areas where they become easy targets for local hunters and for
those hired by multinational logging companies. Corporations
consider forest animals a cheap means to feed workers, who are
not otherwise supplied with food. Logging companies hire
hunters, supply weapons and traps and provide transportation,
thus intensifying the exploitation of wildlife and widening the
bushmeat trade. Oil companies are involved in the bushmeat
trade in similar ways. For example, in Gabon Shell Oil encour-
aged hunting outside oil concessions while company flights
distributed bushmeat throughout the country.6
Even where cultural prohibitions against eating apes exist,
these are eroded as new people arrive. More people can afford
to purchase meat and more efficient weapons mean whole
groups of animals are killed. Although profitable in the short
term for companies involved, long-term effects include severe
depletion of biodiversity, collapse of ecosystems and extinction
of many species.
It is illegal to hunt apes in the African states comprising
their habitat but laws go unenforced and thousands are killed
each year. While forests are emptied of live animals, markets
are full of their flesh. Bushmeat is consumed not only by locals

174
and by employees of logging corporations but is also sold as
delicacies in African cities. Markets display identifiable body
parts and consumers are undisturbed by similarities between
apes and humans. While some groups observed prohibitions
on eating apes in the past, others consider it acceptable and
some prize the flesh of apes precisely because of its human-like
appearance, believing that consumption provides especially pow-
erful benefits. Bushmeat is also linked with traditional identities
and cultures. Imbued with symbolic meanings and commodified,
ape flesh has been globalized and is now sold in Europe and North
America. In 2002 up to 10 tonnes of African bushmeat were
arriving in London daily, smuggled past customs and health in-
spections and possibly carrying diseases such as anthrax,
cholera, tuberculosis and Ebola.7 Growing demand has extirpated
animals such as buffalo and elephants in some areas and apes are
endangered. Due to the bushmeat trade numbers of chim-
panzees dropped sharply from several million in the 1960s to
around 200,000 today; soon they will be extinct in Nigeria and
Cameroon. Even where not specifically targeted, apes become
unintended victims of traps set for other animals. Rather than
providing locals with livelihoods, the trade actually undermines
them: taken at unsustainable rates, wildlife soon will disappear.8
When the forests are cut and the animals killed, local popula-
tions will be left with nothing.
Although hunting and capture are illegal, the exotic wildlife
trade also threatens African apes. Typically, intended targets are
infants but capturing them means several adults may be killed,
since they try to protect their offspring. Surviving infants are
sold to zoos and to private collectors. For each ape sold, ten
others die.9 Although these orphans are profitable commodities,
many perish in deplorable conditions. Rescued animals suffer
from dehydration and malnourishment, wounds, infections

175
and broken bones and many have their teeth smashed to pre-
vent them from biting their captors. Possessing mental abilities
much like our own, in captivity apes suffer emotional trauma
similar to what we would experience.
Swiss photographer Karl Amman has documented the
bushmeat trade since the late 1980s, struggling to reveal threats
to wildlife in Africa: rather than acknowledging a crisis, the
mainstream media want beautiful pictures. Using photography
as an advocacy tool, Amman exposes destruction of animals
and their habitat. Amman believes that large, established con-
servation groups like the wwf, the iucn and the Wildlife Conser-
vation Society are not effectively addressing wildlife destruction.
Seeking positive images to ensure continuing donations, these
groups exaggerate their successes and, by not disclosing actual
conditions, mislead the public and increase the problems. Amman
says that major conservation agencies avoid ethical issues and
fail to protect wildlife, sometimes collaborating with timber
corporations to certify ‘sustainable’ logging, even lobbying
governments for reduced taxes for these corporations, hoping
they will contribute to conservation. Dismissing this as cor-
porate ‘greenwashing’, Amman demands a boycott of tropical
timber and independent monitoring of mainstream conserva-
tion groups.10
Major conservation groups are linked to sport-hunting inter-
ests and the corporate-friendly agenda of international financial
institutions such as the World Bank. The Wildlife Conservation
Society and the wwf are said by some to be ‘cheerleaders for a
billion-dollar industry of exploitation’: by working with timber
corporations that destroy forests and endorsing vague schemes
for ‘sustainability’, mainstream conservation groups provide Chimpanzees are
captured for the
those corporations with a ‘green’ image and thereby can con- international pet
tribute to the destruction of the environment and animals trade.

177
 within it.11 Their view of ‘conservation’ can be seen as consider-
ing nature a resource to be exploited for profit, not something
with inherent value to be protected. Some wwf officials opposed
criticisms of the slaughter of African apes, dismissing them as
inaccurate and exaggerated.12
The bushmeat trade is not a matter of rural people surviving
by hunting. Instead, it is a billion-dollar international business
in which hunters receive only small payments, a profitable com-
mercial operation linked to predatory corporations and corrupt
government officials, encouraged by international financial
institutions like the World Bank, which promoted industrial log-
ging without regard for environmental impacts or devastation

Orphan chimp in a
poacher’s hut,
Congo.

178
of biodiversity. Policy-makers distort issues by linking bushmeat
to poverty when the problem is that dysfunctional governments
allow corporations to destroy forests and do not enforce their
own laws. In Cameroon, regularly cited in lists of the world’s
most corrupt countries,13 Amman found government officials
employing personal hunters to shoot apes even where laws pro-
hibit killing them.14 One of Amman’s most famous photographs,
of a female gorilla’s severed head in a bowl, was taken in
Cameroon; the hunter explained that the local police chief had
sent him a rifle so that he could kill a gorilla and that he received
the head and one arm as a reward.15
Throughout the 1990s the world’s only population of bono-
bos and the whole range inhabited by lowland gorillas were
affected by war and struggles for resources in Congo. After dep-
osition of Mobutu’s regime in 1997, Congo was torn apart by
rival armies seeking power. At the height of the conflict nine
African states were involved in a war that killed at least 3 million
people and displaced millions more. Corporations paid private
armies to extract resources such as diamonds, gold, copper,
cobalt and coltan. Rwandan and Ugandan militaries controlled
eastern Congo: resource extraction became a major operation,
involving thousands of troops, military vehicles and Antonov
aeroplanes to remove tonnes of minerals.
The coltan rush devastated gorilla populations. Coltan is a
strategic mineral used in electrical components for mobile
phones, dvd players and missile-guidance systems; key deposits
occur in Congo. Supply shortages, soaring international demand
and speculation on coltan futures in 1999 provided crucial
global factors driving war in Congo, as various groups battled to
control this lucrative business. Rwanda financed its military
operations in Congo through coltan sales. Changes in capacitor
sizes and recession in technological industries reduced demand

179
Karl Amman’s
striking photo-
graphs exposed
the bushmeat
trade, but many
conservation
groups refused to
show them.

for coltan and the resulting over-supply on world markets was

followed by a sharp drop in prices in 2000. However, the short-
lived coltan boom devastated Congo’s wildlife.
A main area for coltan is Kahuzi-Biega national park, home
to mountain gorillas, whose population was decimated. Not
only were forests cut to facilitate mining, meaning loss of food
for gorillas, but gorillas themselves became food. Soldiers, mili-
tia, miners and refugees lived off the bushmeat trade while
scrambling to control resources. This ravaged the gorilla popu-
lation, along with other animals. Within Congo as a whole, the
unep said that numbers of eastern lowland gorillas in eight
national parks declined by 90 per cent in five years and that
only a few thousand remained. Among the dead was Congo’s
most famous gorilla: Maheshe (a symbol of Congo, depicted on
the national currency).
Even after peace accords were signed things remained
bleak. In 2006 over a thousand people were dying daily from
continuing violence or war-related diseases. Hundreds of thou-
sands of refugees and displaced people had to evade militias

180
and armed gangs, known as Mai Mai. All killed gorillas and
other animals to survive. The eastern lowland gorilla population,
all of whom live within Congo, was decimated. Conservation
groups could not protect gorillas and workers were killed attemp-
ting to do so.
Another threat to gorillas came from disease. An outbreak of
Ebola virus jumped the species barrier, spreading from a 2001
outbreak in humans to ravage Congo’s Lossi nature sanctuary.
From 2002 to 2004 Ebola killed almost 95 per cent of the goril-
la population there, about 5,000 animals. The virus killed a
quarter of the world’s gorillas and had the potential to spread
throughout the entire range of the remaining animals, number-
ing only a few hundred thousand. Although gorillas did not
usually contract Ebola virus from humans in the past, humans
have contracted deadly viruses from apes when they eat them
or handle their corpses. Logging and population movements
disrupted the environment and helped to spread such viruses.
Because of greater exposure to humans, apes are increasingly
endangered by their diseases.
Humans are steadily encroaching on gorillas’ shrinking
habitat. In 2004 settlers seeking timber, charcoal and land for
agricultural or pastoralist use illegally clear-cut thousands of
acres of forest within Virunga National Park, recognized by the
un World Heritage Convention as a protected area. The wwf
and the Wildlife Conservation Society called for the settlers’
eviction, park restoration and international funding for patrols.
In May 2007 Mai Mai killed a wildlife officer, wounded several
others and took thirteen hostages, threatening to kill gorillas in
the area if any retaliation followed. In August 2007 four gorillas
were shot in what international media called ‘execution style’.
Because the bodies were left behind, conservation organizations
believed the gorillas were killed by a group seeking to control

181
the illegal but lucrative charcoal trade and drive away park
rangers. Millions of people depend on charcoal for cooking and
heating and gorillas are considered expendable. However, control
of the charcoal trade may not have been the motive for killing
these animals. Armed groups in Africa know they can obtain
media attention and extort resources from conservation groups
by killing endangered animals.
Journalists Georgianne Nienaber and Keith Harmon Snow
denounce media emphasis on gorilla executions while millions
of Congolese have died, calling it a fund-raising tactic by groups
such as the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International, Conservation
International, Wildlife Direct and the Africa Conservation Fund.16
Nienaber and Snow describe these organizations as fronts to
channel millions of dollars ostensibly marked for gorilla con-
servation to armed groups. They claim that these organizations
are linked with Western governments, intelligence services and
mining corporations involved in extracting minerals from
Congo. They see gorillas as tools in a propaganda campaign to
promote militarization and privatization of mineral-rich areas.
The outlook is grim. The un-based Great Apes Survival
Project thinks gorillas will be extinct by the mid-twenty-first
century. As for Congo’s bonobos, their numbers dropped by 90
per cent; they also face extinction. Other animals were victims
too; for example, elephant and antelope populations were almost
exterminated. The impact on the environment and animals can
be described as ecocide.
Even if their fate appears hopeless, we should still try to save
apes from extinction. We can do several things. We can recon-
sider the ape–human boundary and support the Great Ape
Project, which advocates extending the community of equals to
include not only humans but other great apes as well, demand-
ing basic legal and moral rights for them.17 Advocates challenge

182
 The Great Ape
Project proposes
the extension of
basic rights for
apes.

claims of moral significance based solely on species member-

ship, outline apes’ mental, social and emotional capacities,
including the ability to learn and understand human language,
demonstrate their similarity to humans, and argue that recogni-
tion of basic rights for other apes is a logical outgrowth of previous
struggles to extend moral consideration to various oppressed
groups. As for extending the community of equals to include other
non-human animals, gap advocates Paola Cavalieri and Peter
Singer leave that an open question; some gap supporters consider
it only a first step towards animal rights generally.
Advocates urge that certain elementary moral principles
should govern relationships within this community of equals
and be enforced by law. These basic principles include the
right to life, protection of individual liberty and prohibition of
torture. Once adopted, these principles would require impor-
tant changes in our treatment of other apes. Killing apes for
food (or using their body parts as trophies) would no longer

183
be considered acceptable and their habitat would have to be
protected. Apes could not be imprisoned in zoos or in enter-
tainment industries or used in biomedical experiments. Calling
for legal personhood for apes, advocates argued that since apes
cannot voice their interests, human guardians should protect
those interests as they do for human children or humans with
severe intellectual disabilities.
In 2006 the Spanish parliament heard debates over apes’
rights and their status as persons and considered initiatives to
protect their habitat and save them from circuses, where abuses
of these (and other) animals are widespread. In 2007 the parlia-
ment of the Balearic Islands, autonomous communities of
Spain, approved a resolution granting legal rights to great apes.
In June 2008 Spain’s parliament approved resolutions to com-
ply with the gap. Pedro Pozas, Spain’s gap director, described the
decision as ‘a historic day in the struggle for animal rights and
in defence of our evolutionary comrades which will doubtless
go down in the history of humanity’.18 These resolutions make
Spain a leader in animal rights legislation.
In 2007 the rights of non-human apes were raised in an
Austrian court in the case of Hiasl, a chimpanzee captured in
1982 in Sierra Leone by poachers who shot his mother and sold
him to Baxter biomedical laboratory in Vienna.19 Because an
international agreement banned the sale of wild-captured chim-
panzees, Austrian customs officers placed him in a sanctuary.
There Hiasl enjoyed painting, playing hide-and-seek and watch-
ing wildlife programmes on television. After paying a fine, the
laboratory sought to reclaim him; meanwhile, the sanctuary
went bankrupt. A benefactor donated 5,000 euros, conditional
on appointment of a guardian. Advocates argued that Hiasl’s
life depended on the court granting him a legal guardian, a right
granted only to humans. Hiasl was supported by primatologists,

184
 Hiasl was the
subject of a court
case for the rights
of apes in Austria.

who emphasized the biological proximity of humans and chim-

panzees, and legal experts, who endorsed guardianship and
agreed that apes should be considered persons before the law,
as other non-human entities (such as corporations) are consid-
ered persons in legal terms. Although the judge denied Hiasl a
guardian, fearing this would put humans and animals on the
same level, advocates vowed to appeal.
While most objections to the gap simply caricature its
aims, some valid criticisms exist. By postponing questions of
other animals’ rights, the gap constructs a boundary between
the animals most like ourselves, and thus worthy of certain pro-
tections, and all others, which will not be granted them. Activists
agree that apes should not be imprisoned in zoos or used in bio-
medical research but some consider it equally immoral to exploit
rats and mice in laboratories or to send billions of animals to
slaughterhouses. Initiatives such as the gap risk reinforcing the
hierarchical thinking central to speciesism. Nevertheless, as a
first step, they may provide tools for dismantling it.

185
 We should encourage governments to enforce laws, use
rehabilitated land instead of destroying forests, implement
environmental protections and make production more effi-
cient. As consumers we can reduce demand for palm oil by
using other oils or by encouraging more environmentally
friendly production. Rather than accepting ‘green’ images we
must force corporations to protect the environment. We can
support organizations that protect forests and wildlife and
groups like the Primate Freedom Project, which seeks to abolish
use of primates in biomedical and behavioural experiments.
We can support animal sanctuaries. Only a few apes survive
capture for the pet trade or zoos and enter sanctuaries. Even
fewer can return to their natural habitat. That habitat is dis-
appearing and areas for safe released are limited. Many are
maimed or suffer psychological damage from captivity and
cannot survive on their own. Thus, although habitat preserva-
tion is essential, sanctuaries play a valuable role in providing
shelter for some endangered animals.
Sanctuaries are alternatives to zoos, operating with different
philosophies and ethical standards, focusing on animal welfare
rather than public entertainment. Nevertheless, questions arise
about standards and monitoring. Some sanctuaries are indis-
tinguishable from zoos and some are controversial. Described
as ‘one of the usa’s most notorious roadside zoos’, Noell’s Ark
‘Chimp Farm’ changed its name to Suncoast Primate Sanctuary
but was closed to public visits after failing government inspec-
tion in 1999.20 In Texas, Primarily Primates was accused of
animal welfare violations and became the centre of a legal battle
between peta and Friends of Animals as the two groups fought
over custody of apes held there, raising questions about the
status of animals as persons or property.21 Most private sanctu-
aries are in continuous need of funds, which raises issues of care

186
and safety, adequate staffing and management. Nevertheless,
responsible sanctuaries may offer the last chance for those
other apes we have so terribly mistreated.
In 2000 the Pan-African Sanctuary Alliance (pasa) was
formed as an umbrella organization of groups sheltering apes.
By 2006 nineteen sanctuaries in twelve countries belonged to
pasa, which attempts to create professional standards, interna-
tional cooperation and staff training. Apes are rescued from
the pet trade, from public markets, hotels, restaurants and pri-
vate homes. Many require medical attention. Sanctuaries try
to protect habitat and educate people about conservation
issues, research and reintroduction. Some are associated with
zoos and allow public access, generating revenue from tourism,
but all are consistently under-funded. Most provide jobs for
local people and have gained their support. Stella Marsden’s
Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Project started in Gambia in 1974
and protects chimpanzees on three islands in River Gambia
National Park. An early model for other sanctuaries, it employs
local people, sponsors a village clinic, school and hundreds of
students, and assists horse- and donkey-care projects.
Cameroon’s Limbe Wildlife Centre shelters chimpanzees and
other animals. It partnered with other sanctuaries to form the
Cameroon Chimpanzee Reintroduction Group, which will
begin releasing chimpanzees into the forest in 2011. The Centre
organizes student workshops on bushmeat, invites hunters from
distant villages to join debates and organized a theatre group to
create plays about animal protection. In Indonesia the Sumatran
Orangutan Conservation Programme, Orangutan Conservancy,
Orangutan Foundation and International Kalawiet Gibbon
Sanctuary help injured and sick animals and protect them from
hunters, loggers and miners. In the United States Save the
Chimps sanctuary began when anthropologist Carole Noon

187
Rachel was sued the Air Force in 1997 for custody of 21 chimpanzees used in
originally released
space and biomedical research; after the Coulston Foundation’s
from terrifying
biomedical closure in 2002, Noon acquired 266 more.
research and In Canada Fauna Foundation began as a sanctuary for un-
now enjoys life
at Canada’s wanted ‘farm animals’ but now shelters chimpanzees rescued
Fauna Found- from zoos and biomedical laboratories. One such survivor is
ation sanctuary.
Rachel. Born in 1982 at Oklahoma’s Institute for Primate Studies,

188
Rachel was sold for $10,000 to a Florida couple who raised
her as a human child. Rachel wore diapers and dresses, played
with toys, took bubble baths and slept with her human ‘par-
ents’. However, when Rachel was three years old, the couple
could no longer keep her and sent her to lemsip. There, as
Ch-514, she suffered eleven years of biomedical and product
testing, enduring at least 39 punch liver biopsies in hepatitis
research, and testing products for the NutraSweet corporation.
Rescued from the laboratory, Rachel remains traumatized.
She suffers from wounds self-inflicted during repeated anxiety
attacks and experiences ‘phantom hand’ syndrome, in which
she treats her hand as if it is not part of her own body, scream-
ing and biting herself. Although haunted by the terrors she ex-
perienced, Rachel now enjoys interacting with other chimpanzees
and her human care-givers. Noting that many express concerns
for the chimpanzees and desire to meet them, Fauna Foundation’s
Gloria Grow believes the apes act as ambassadors for other ani-
mals at the sanctuary, raising awareness of broader animal rights
issues. Sanctuaries present imperfect solutions to the dilemmas
we have created. They offer a small gleam of hope to the apes
who cannot survive elsewhere and perhaps also to those other
apes who wish to protect them.

189
Timeline of the Ape
65 million years bc 5 mya 5th century bc 1640

Earliest primate Bonobos and ‘Gorillae’ reported First live ape

fossils dated to chimpanzees split in West Africa by reaches Europe
Paleocene Hanno the
Navigator

1940s 1956 1960 1961

Yerkes’ laboratory pg Tips begins Jane Goodall begins us Air Force sends
uses primates to advertising cam- field study of chim- Ham and Enos
study infectious paign featuring panzees, reports tool into space
diseases chimpanzees use

1990 1997 2000 2001

Karl Amman 8,000 orangutans chimp Act signed Ebola virus jumps
exposes bushmeat burned to death in into us law; legal species barrier and
and pet trade fires in Indonesia loophole closed in kills most of Congo’s
2007 remaining gorilla
population
 1758 1847 1859 1933

Carolus Linnaeus Thomas Staughton Darwin publishes Original King Kong

classifies humans Savage makes first On the Origin of film
and orangutans in scientific description Species
same genus, Homo of gorillas

1968 1960s 1970 1974

Planet of the Apes Allen and Beatrice Gordon G. Gallup, Jane Goodall
Gardner teach Jr demonstrates reports attacks by
American Sign self-awareness in chimpanzees on
Language to chim- apes own species
panzees, including
Washoe

2003 2007 2007 2008

Morris Goodman Chimpanzees in us National Spain grants apes’

finds humans and Senegal observed Institutes of Health rights
chimpanzees making spears ends breeding
99.4% identical and using them government-owned
in functionally to hunt chimpanzees for
important dna research
 References

1 natural history
1 Jarrod Bailey, Jonathan Balcombe and Andrew Knight,
‘Chimpanzee Research: An Examination of its Contribution to
Biomedical Knowledge and Efficacy in Combating Human
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2 R. J. Britten, ‘Divergence Between Samples of Chimpnazee and
Human dna Sequence is 5%, Counting Indels’, Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences of the usa, 99(21) (2002), pp. 13633–5.
3 Derek E. Wildman, Monica Uddin, Guozhen Liu, Lawrence I.
Grossman and Morris Goodman, ‘Implications of Natural
Selection in Shaping 99.4% Nonsynonymous dna Identity
between Humans and Chimpanzees: Enlarging Genus Homo’,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the usa, 100(12)
(2003), pp. 7181–8; Randolphe E. Schmid, ‘Chimps May Have
Closer Links to Humans’, Associated Press, 20 May 2003, at
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_links_to_humans/index.html; Tom Paulson, ‘Chimp, Human
dna Comparison Finds Vast Similarities, Key Differences’, Seattle
Post-Intelligencer Reporter, 1 September 2005, at http://seattlepi
.nwsource.com/local/238852_chimp01.html.
4 ‘Chimpanzees “Hunt Using Spears”’, bbc news (22 February
2007), available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/
science/nature/6387611.stm, accessed 2 September 2008.
5 Frans de Waal and Frans Lanting, Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape
(Berkeley, ca, 1997), p. 76.

192
 6 Thomas Breuer, Mireille Ndoundou-Hockemba and Vicki
Fishlock, ‘First Observation of Tool Use in Wild Gorillas’, Public
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2 thinking about apes

1 Tamara Giles-Vernick and Stephanie Rupp, ‘Visions of Apes,
Reflections on Change: Telling Tales of Great Apes in Equatorial
Africa’, African Studies Review, iv/1 (2006), pp. 51–73.
2 Robert van Gulick, The Gibbon in China (Leiden, 1967).
3 Quoted in ibid., p. 46.
4 Quoted in ibid., p. 53.
5 Ibid., p. 54.
6 Kurt Vonnegut, ‘Cold Turkey’, In These Times (10 May 2004),
available at http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/cold_turkey/,
accessed 3 September 2008.
7 Examples at www.bushorchimp.com/, www.metrostate.com/
library/stories/01/sep/SmirkingChimp.htm and www.
dontvoteforgeorge.com/best_bush_chimp_pics.html, all
accessed 3 September 2008.

193
 8 John Dower, War Without Mercy (New York, 1986).
9 L. Perry Curtis, Jr, Apes and Angels (Washington, dc, 1996).
10 Anna Badkhen, ‘Anti-Evolution Teachings Gain Foothold in us
Schools’, San Francisco Chronicle (30 November 2004), available at
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/11/30/ mngv-
na3pe11.dtl, accessed 4 September 2008. us public schools are the
equivalent of uk state schools.
11 ‘Nearly Two Thirds of us Adults Believe Human Beings Were
Created by God’, Harris Poll 52 (6 July 2005), available at
www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?pid=581,
accessed 4 September 2008.
12 ‘Probe into Islamic School Ordered’, bbc news (8 February 2007),
available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/
education/6341595.stm, accessed 4 September 2008.
13 H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages (London,
1952), pp. 34–6.
14 Ibid., p. 35.
15 Ibid., p. 16.
16 Ibid., pp. 18–19.
17 Ibid., p. 33.
18 The Aberdeen Bestiary, folio 12b, Aberdeen University Library, ms
24, available at www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary/translat/12v.hti,
accessed 4 September 2008.
19 Janson, Apes and Ape Lore, pp. 76–89.
20 Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes,
contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells,
by Englishmen and others (London, 1625), available at www.
erbzine.com/mag18/battell.htm, accessed 4 September 2008.
21 Quoted in Birute Galdikas and Nancy Briggs, Orangutan Odyssey
(New York, 2002), p. 8.
22 In Raymond Corbey, The Metaphysics of Apes (New York, 2005),
p. 46.
23 Quoted in Jonathan Marks, What It Means To Be 98 % Chimpanzee
(Berkeley, ca, 2002), p. 19.
24 Corbey, Metaphysics of Apes, pp. 92–120.

194
25 Winthrop Jordan, The White Man’s Burden (New York, 1974),
p. 16.
26 Phillip Atiba Goff et al., ‘Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge,
Historical Dehumanization and Contemporary Consequences’,
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, xciv (2008), pp. 292–306.
27 Huxley’s reply is famous: ‘If the question is put to me would I
rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly
endowed by nature and possessed of great means and influence
for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific
discussion – I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.’
Quoted in ‘Thomas Henry Huxley’, University of California
Museum of Paleontology, available at www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/
history/thuxley.html, accessed 4 September 2008.
28 T. Edward Bowdich, Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee
(London, 1966), pp. 440–41.
29 Quoted in Emma Rodgers, ‘Kiss of the Beast’, Articulate abc News
(15 November 2005), available at www.abc.net.au/news/arts/
articulate/200511/s1507215.htm, accessed 4 September 2008.
30 Paul Belloni du Chaillu, Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial
Africa (New York, 1871), p. 101.
31 Ibid., p. 394.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., p. 85.
34 Ibid., p. 86.
35 Ibid., p. 397.
36 Paul du Chaillu, Wild Life Under the Equator (New York, 1868),
available at www.mainlesson.com/display.php?author=chaillu&
book=equator&story=hunting, accessed 4 September 2008.
37 Du Chaillu, Explorations, p. 86.
38 Ibid., p. 398.
39 Ibid., p. 98.
40 Ibid., p. 242.
41 Ibid., pp. 244–6.
42 Ibid., p. 305.
43 Alfred Russel Wallace, ‘Some Account of an Infant “Orang-utan”’,

195
 Annals and Magazine of Natural History (1856), available at
www.wku.edu/~smithch/wallace/s023.htm, accessed
4 September 2008.
44 ‘Paul Belloni du Chaillu’, available at www.marcusgarvey.com/
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45 Du Chaillu, Explorations, pp. 105, viii.
46 Richard Burton, Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the
Congo (London, 1876), chap. 9, available at www.wollamshram.
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47 Robert M. Sapolsky, A Primate’s Memoir (New York, 2002).
48 Georgianne Nienaber, Gorilla Dreams: The Legacy of Dian Fossey
(New York, 2006).

3 pets, captives, hybrids

1 Albert Goldman, ‘The Party Years’, Rolling Stone, ccclv (21
October 1981), available at www.rollingstone.com/news/
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2 Birute Galdikas, Reflections of Eden (Boston, ma, 1995), p. 135.
3 Kristina Roic ‘Law and Disorder’, Africa Geographic, xiv/10
(2006), pp. 37–43.
4 Ibid.
5 Noor-Jehan Yoro Badat, ‘Famous Primates Receive Warm
Welcome Home’, Star (3 December 2007), available at
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Nolen, ‘A Sad and Convoluted Trail’, Globe and Mail (31 August
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6 Monkey World Ape Rescue Centre, ‘Illegal Wildlife Trade Dossier
Thailand 2001/3’, available at www.monkeyworld.co.uk/topic.
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7 ‘Orangutan Boxing Show’, available at http://safariworld.com/
oran.html, accessed 5 September 2008.

196
 8 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, ‘Stressed Great Apes
Go Stir-Crazy in Zoos’, available at www.wildlifepimps.com/
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9 Martin Weil, ‘Second Gorilla Death in 3 Days Shakes Zoo’,
Washington Post (4 July 2006), available at www.washingtonpost.
com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/03/ar2006070301108.
html, accessed 5 September 2008.
10 ‘Chimp Gunned Down in Ape Escape’, cnn.com/Europe (1 October
2007), available at www.cnn.com/2007/world/ europe/10/01/
uk.chimp.ap/, accessed 5 September 2008.
11 ‘Chimp Quits Smoking at China Zoo’, China View, available at
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13 John S. Allen, Julie Park and Sharon L. Watt, ‘The Chimpanzee
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14 ‘History of pg Tips’, available at www.englishteastore.com/
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15 Allen, Park and Watt, ‘Chimpanzee Tea Party’, pp. 47–9.
16 Bruce Horovitz, ‘You Just Can’t Go Wrong with a Chimp’, usa
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17 The Chimpanzee Collaboratory, ‘Serving a Life Sentence for Your
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18 The Arkansas Roadside Travelogue, ‘Vacuum Store Gorilla’, avail-
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 gorilla-is-no1-ad-98487-20224145/, accessed 5 September 2008.
20 Chris Stephen and Allan Hall, ‘Super-Troopers: Stalin Wanted
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21 Ibid.
22 Kirill Rossiianov, ‘Beyond Species: Il’ya Ivanov and His
Experiments on Cross-Breeding Humans with Anthropoid Apes’,
Science in Context, xv/2 (2002), pp. 277–316.
23 Thierry Gillyboeuf, ‘The Famous Doctor who Inserts Monkey-
glands in Millionaires’, Spring, n.s. (October 2000), pp. 44–5;
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4 looking at apes
1 Michael Weemans, ‘Herri Met de Bles’s Sleeping Peddler: An
Exegetical and Anthropomorphic Landscape’, Art Bulletin
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2 H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages (London,
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3 Bonnie Young, ‘The Monkeys and the Peddlar’, Metropolitan
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4 Margaret A. Sullivan, ‘Peter Bruegel the Elder’s Two Monkeys:
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5 Janson, Apes and Ape Lore, p. 154.
6 Robert Bateman, ‘The Renaissance Editions ii’, available at
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Bunnies)’, available at www.angryalien.com/0206/
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8 David N. Rosen, ‘King Kong: Race, Sex and Rebellion’, Jump Cut,
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 9 Randy Shulman, ‘Great Ape’, Metro Weekly (22 December 2005),
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13 Janson, Apes and Ape Lore, p. 338.
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18 Dale Peterson and Jane Goodall, Visions of Caliban (Athens, ga,
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19 Sarah Baeckler, ‘Campaign to End the Use of Chimpanzees in
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199
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5 models for human behaviour

1 Donna Haraway, Primate Visions (New York, 1989), p. 41.
2 Ann Gibbons, ‘“Monogamous” Gibbons Really Swing’, Science,
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5 Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative (New York, 1966).
6 Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males (Boston,
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7 Barbara Smuts, ‘Apes of Wrath’, Discover, xvi/8 (1995), p. 35.
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(Berkeley, ca, 1997), p. 108.
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Yahoo News (2 March 2006), available at www.msnbc.msn.com/
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11 Ian Parker, ‘Swingers’, New Yorker, lxxxiii/21 (2007), pp. 48–61.
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13 Dinesh D’Souza, ‘Bonobo Promiscuity? Another Myth Bites the
Dust’ (3 August 2007), available at http://news.aol.com/news
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14 Frans de Waal, ‘Bonobos Left and Right’, eSkeptic (8 August 2007),
available at www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/07-08-08. html#feature,

200
 accessed 6 September 2008.
15 Douglas Foster, ‘The Future of Bonobos: An Animal Akin to
Ourselves’, apf Reporter, xx/2 (2002), available at www.alicia
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September 2008.
16 Quoted in Jane Goodall, Through A Window (Boston, ma, 1990),
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17 Gretchen Vogel, ‘Orangutans, like Chimps, Heed the Cultural Call
of the Collective’, Science, ccxcix/5603 (2003), pp. 27–9.
18 Clive D. L. Wynn, Do Animals Think? (Princeton, nj, 2004).
19 ‘Chimps Have “Sense of Fair Play”’, bbc news (26 January 2005),
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20 Wolfgang Kohler, The Mentality of Apes (New York, 1925).
21 J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton, nj, 1999), p. 29.
22 Julie Steenhuysen, ‘Chimps and College Students as Good at Mental
Math’, Yahoo News (17 December 2007), available at www.nzherald.
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24 ‘Ape “Learns to Talk”’, bbc news (1 January 2003), available at
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Own’, National Geographic, ccxiii/3 (2008), p. 57.
25 Roger Fouts, Next of Kin (New York, 1997), p. 277.
26 ‘Koko’s First Interspecies Web Chat: Transcript’, Koko’s World,
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27 ‘“Gorilla Breast Fetish” Women Sue’, bbc news (20 February
2005), available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/
4280961.stm, accessed 6 September 2008.
28 Maurice Temerlin, Lucy: Growing Up Human (Palo Alto, ca, 1975).
29 Lisa Knowles, Marc Fourrier and Steve Eisele, ‘Behavioral
Training of Group-housed Rhesus Macaques (Macaca Mulatta)

201
 for Handling Purposes’, Laboratory Primate Newsletter, xxxiv/2
(1995), available at www.brown.edu/Research/Primate/lpn34-
2.html, accessed 6 September 2008; T. Desmond, G. Laule, and J.
McNary, ‘Training to Enhance Socialization and Reproduction in
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Primates Conference (Boston, ma, 1988), p. 38.
30 Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 117.
31 Ibid., p. 126.
32 Temerlin, Lucy, p. 8.
33 Ibid.. p. xi.
34 Ibid., pp. 4, 31.
35 Ibid., p. 136.
36 Ibid., p. 109.
37 Ibid., p. 134.
38 Elizabeth Hess, Nim Chimpsky (New York), pp. 176–9.
39 Temerlin, Lucy, p. 89.
40 Ibid., p. 216.
41 Ibid., p. 210.
42 Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 213.
43 Stella Brewer, ‘Did Poachers Really Kill Lucy, the Sign Language
Chimp?’ Animal People (November 2006), available at www.
animalpeoplenews.org/06/11/poacherskilllucy1106.html,
accessed 6 September 2008.
44 Fouts, Next of Kin; Eugene Linden, Silent Partners (New York, 1986).
45 Jonathan Marks, ‘Who Really Wants to Save the Apes?’, Journal of
Bioscience, xxxii/2 (2007), pp. 183–4; ‘Save the Apes from the Ape
Rights Activists’, Anthropology News, xxxxvii/9 (December 2006),
pp. 4–5.
46 Pepper’s biography is at www.faunafoundation.org=chimpanzee_
history.php?id=15. Regis’s biography is at www.faunafoundation.
org/chimpanzee_history.php?id=18.
47 Jarrod Bailey and Jonathan Balcombe, ‘Chimpanzee Research: An
Examination of its Contribution to Biomedical Knowledge and
Efficacy in Combating Human Diseases’, in New England Anti-
Vivisection Society (Boston, ma, 2007), p. 22, available at www.

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 releasechimps.org/pdfs/Chimp-ca-main-embed-figs.pdf, accessed
6 September 2008.
48 Ibid., p. 23.
49 New England Anti-Vivisection Society, ‘Maternal Deprivation’,
available at www. releasechimps.org/harm-suffering/research-
history/maternal- deprivation, accessed 6 September 2008.
50 Save the Chimps, ‘The Real Space Chimps’, available at www.
savethechimps.org/chimps_space.asp, accessed 6 September 2008;
New England Anti-Vivisection Society, ‘Air and Space’, available
at www.releasechimps.org/harm-suffering/research-history/
airspace/, accessed 6 September 2008.
51 Ibid.
52 Edward Hooper, The River (London, 1999).
53 New England Anti-Vivisection Society, ‘Chimpanzees in Research
– Current’, available at www.releasechimps.org/harm-suffer-
ing/research-current/, accessed 6 September 2008; Humane
Society of the United States, ‘Chimps Deserve Better’, available at
www.hsus.org/animals_in_research/chimps_deserve_better/,
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54 ‘Columbia Cruelty’, at www.columbiacruelty.com/default.aspx.
55 Marks, ‘Who Really Wants to Save the Apes?’.
56 Gill Langley, Next of Kin: A Report on the Use of Primates in Experi-
ments, British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (London,
2006).
57 Steve Connor, ‘Scientists “Should Be Allowed to Test on Apes”’,
The Independent (3 June 2006), available at news.independent.co. uk/
sci_tech/article624202.ece, accessed 6 September 2008.
58 Animal Aid, ‘History of the Campaign To Stop Cambridge
University Building a Massive Monkey Research Centre’, available at
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accessed 6 September 2008.
59 ‘The Coulston Foundation’, Project R & R Release and Restitution
of Chimpanzees in us Laboratories, www.releasechimps.org/labs/
labs-closed/the-coulston-foundation.
60 New England Anti-Vivisection Society, ‘Charles River Labs (crl)

203
 Charged with Animal Cruelty’, available at www.releasechimps.
org/2004/09/07/alamogordo-primate-facility-apf-charged-with-
animal-cruelty, accessed 6 September 2008.
61 ‘Goodbye Labs, Hello Chimp Island Heaven’, Sunday Times (1 April
2007), available at www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world
/africa/article1596781.ece, accessed 6 September 2008.

6 extinction
1 Simon Stuart, ‘Species: Unprecedented Extinction Rate, and It’s
Increasing’, World Conservation Union (2005), available at
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o_and_news/press/species2000.html, accessed 8 September 2008.
2 Center for Science in the Public Interest, Cruel Oil (Washington,
dc, 2005).
3 Friends of the Earth, The Ape Alliance, The Borneo Survival
Foundation, The Orangutan Foundation (uk) and The Sumatran
Orangutan Society, The Oil for Ape Scandal (London, 2005), p. 27.
4 Environmental Investigation Agency, America’s Free Trade for Illegal
Timber: How us Trade Pacts Speed the Destruction of the World’s Forests
(London, 2006), available at www.eia-international.org/cgi/
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5 Clare Rewcastle and Jon Ungoed-Thomas, ‘Mining Giant to Raze
Apes’ Forest Home’, Sunday Times (15 July 2007); Ape Alliance
News (15 July 2007), available at www.4apes.com/news/
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6 Marc Thibault and Sonia Blaney, ‘The Oil Industry as an
Underlying Factor in the Bushmeat Crisis in Central Africa’,
Conservation Biology, xvii/6 (2001), pp. 1807–13.
7 Alex Kirby, ‘The Cost of Bushmeat’, bbc News World Edition (4
June 2002), available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science
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8 Elizabeth L. Bennett, ‘Is There a Link between Wild Meat and
Food Security?’, Conservation Biology, xvi/3 (2002), pp. 590–92.

204
 9 Bushmeat Crisis Task Force (n. d.), ‘Hunting Methods, Animal
Welfare and Sanctuaries’, available at www.bushmeat.org/portal
/server.pt?open=514&objID=133264&parentname=CommunityPage
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10 Karl Amman, ‘Afterword On Feel-Good Conservation’, in Dale
Peterson, Eating Apes (Berkeley, ca, 2003), pp. 211–29.
11 Peterson, Eating Apes, p. 182.
12 Ibid., p. 192.
13 See Transparency International: www.transparency.org/, accessed
8 September 2008.
14 Karl Amman, ‘The Central African Bushmeat Crisis: A Personal
Perspective from Personal Experience’, available at http://
karlammann.com/personal-bushmeat-perspective.php, accessed
8 September 2008.
15 Karl Amman, ‘Logging Business Means Death for Thousands of
Gorillas and Chimpanzees’, available at http://karlammann.
com/death-in-forest.php, accessed 8 September 2008.
16 Keith Harmon Snow and Georgianne Nienaber, ‘King Kong’,
All Things Pass (2007), available at www.allthingspass.com/
journalism.php?catid=45.
17 Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer, The Great Ape Project (New York,
1993).
18 Lee Glendinning, ‘Spanish Parliament Approves “Human Rights”
for Apes’, available at www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/
26/humanrights.animalwelfare?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront,
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19 Kate Connolly, ‘Court To Rule if Chimp Has Human Rights’,
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20 Betsy Stuart, ‘The Chimp Farm’, in Cavalieri and Singer, Great Ape
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21 Claudette Vaughan, ‘Priscilla Feral from Friends of Animals
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us Private Sanctuary, Primarily Primates’, Abolitionist Online

205
(11 November 2006), available at www.abolitionist-online .com/
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206
 Select Bibliography

Ardrey, Robert, The Territorial Imperative (New York, 1966)

Beck, Benjamin B., et al., eds, Great Apes and Humans (Washington,
dc, 2001)
Burton, Richard, Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the
Congo (London, 1876)
Caldecott, Julian, and Lera Miles, eds, World Atlas of Great Apes and
their Conservation (Berkeley, ca, 2005)
Cavalieri, Paola, and Peter Singer, The Great Ape Project (New York,
1993)
Chaillu, Paul Belloni du, Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial
Africa (New York, 1871)
––, Wild Life Under the Equator (New York, 1868), available
at www.mainlesson.com/display.php?author=chaillu&book
=equator&story=hunting, accessed 12 September 2008
Coetzee, J. M., The Lives of Animals (Princeton, nj, 1999)
Corbey, Raymond, The Metaphysics of Apes (New York, 2005)
––, and Bert Theunissen, eds, Ape, Man, Apeman: Changing Views
Since 1600 (Leiden, 1995)
Curtis, L. Perry, Jr, Apes and Angels (Washington, dc, 1996)
De Waal, Frans, and Frans Lansing, Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape
(Berkeley, ca, 1997)
Dower, John, War Without Mercy (New York, 1986)
Fouts, Roger, Next of Kin (New York, 1997)
Galdikas, Birute, Reflections of Eden (Boston, ma, 1995)

207
––, and Nancy Briggs, Orangutan Odyssey (New York, 2002)
Goodall, Jane, The Chimpanzees of Gombe (Cambridge, 1986)
––, Through a Window (Boston, ma, 1990)
Greene, Eric, Planet of the Apes as American Myth (Jefferson, nc, 1996)
Gulick, Robert van, The Gibbon in China (Leiden, 1967)
Haraway, Donna, Primate Visions (New York, 1989)
Janson, H. W., Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages (London, 1952)
Jordan, Winthrop, The White Man’s Burden (New York, 1974)
Kohler, Wolfgang, The Mentality of Apes (New York, 1925)
Linden, Eugene, Silent Partners (New York, 1986)
Lopez, Barry, Of Wolves and Men (New York, 1978)
Marks, Jonathan, What It Means to be 98% Chimpanzee (Berkeley, ca,
2002)
Peterson, Dale, Eating Apes (Berkeley, ca, 2003)
Purchas, Samuel, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes, con-
tayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells, by
Englishmen and others (London, 1625)
Sapolsky, Robert M., A Primate’s Memoir (New York, 2002)
Singer, Peter, Animal Liberation (New York, 2002)
Stanford, Craig, Significant Others (New York, 2001)
Temerlin, Maurice, Lucy: Growing Up Human (Palo Alto, ca, 1975)
Wise, Steven M., Rattling The Cage (Cambridge, ma, 2000)
Wrangham, Richard, and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males (Boston, ma,
1996)

208
 Associations and Websites

allied effort to save other primates

www.aesop-project.org/index.html
International organization protecting apes

karl amman
www.karlammann.com
Amman’s photojournalism was critical in exposing bushmeat and
wildlife trades

animal defenders international

www.ad-international.org/campaigns/
Opposes use of apes in entertainment and vivisection

ape alliance
www.4apes.com/
International coalition of ape conservation and welfare groups;
many links

borneo orangutan survival international

http://savetheorangutan.org/
Umbrella group for international affiliates

bushmeat crisis task force

http://www.bushmeat.org
Works to eliminate the bushmeat trade

209
centre for orangutan protection
www.orangutanprotection.com
Grassroots protection group

fauna foundation
www.faunafoundation.org
Provides sanctuary for chimpanzees released from biomedical
research

gibbon conservation alliance

www.gibbonconservation.org/index_engl.html
Swiss-based conservation and research group

great ape project

www.greatapeproject.org/index.php
Promotes basic rights for non-human apes

international primate protection league

www.ippl-uk.org
Supports sanctuaries; battles wildlife trade

jane goodall institute

http://www.janegoodall.org/default.asp
Supports primate sanctuaries, conservation and the environment

new england anti-vivisection society

www.releasechimps.org/
Project Release and Restitution opposes use of chimpanzees in bio-
medical research and places them in sanctuaries

orangutan foundation uk
www.orangutan.org.uk
Protects orangutans and their habitat

210
pan african sanctuary alliance
www.pasaprimates.org/
Coalition of African ape sanctuaries

zoocheck canada
www.zoocheck.com/index.html
Protects the interests of wild animals and focuses on problems
of captivity

211
 Acknowledgements

This book was produced with the support of a grant from the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, whose generous
assistance is gratefully acknowledged.
Thanks very much to Rob Laidlaw, from Zoocheck Canada for
his help with collecting images and for his commitment to animals.
Ian Redmond, whose work with the United Nations Environment
Programme and the Great Ape Survival Project has been so important,
was very kind in supplying many images from his personal collection.
More of those images can be seen on the Ape Alliance website, which is
a tremendous resource for those interested in the survival of apes.
Thanks to Karl Amman, whose striking photographs drew international
attention to the bushmeat and pet trade issues. I appreciate assistance
from Frank Noelker, for providing the photograph of the chimpanzee
Rachel; more evocative portraits of the chimpanzees at Fauna Foundation
can be seen on his website. Thanks also to Anne Russon and Nick Brandt
for offering their help with photographs. Raymond Corbey was very
kind to send me information from the 1993 ‘Ape, Man, Apeman’ confer-
ence held in Leiden and, of course, his book The Metaphysics of Apes is
essential. Thanks to Amanda Wagner at Robarts Library, University of
Toronto, who was very helpful with images.

212
 Photo Acknowledgements

The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the follow-
ing sources of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it.
Locations, etc., of some items are also given below.

Courtesy Aeroplastics Contemporary, Brussels: p. 99; photos Karl Amman

(by permission of Karl Amman): pp. 6, 161, 176, 179; Astrup Fearnley
Museum of Modern Art, Oslo (© Jeff Koons, reproduced by permission of
the artist): p. 71; Collection British Arts Council, London: p. 99; The British
Museum, London (photo © The Trustees of the British Museum): p. 35
(foot); courtesy CartoonStock: p. 97; Cleveland Museum of Art: p. 36 (top);
Dahlem Museum, Berlin: p. 95; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge: p. 43;
photo gojo23/morgueFile: p. 9; Guildhall Art Gallery, London: p. 96; from
Cathy Henkel’s 2008 film Burning Season: pp. 82, 167; The Huntingdon
Library and Art Collection of San Marino: p. 22; photo itv/Rex Features:
p. 83; photo kabir/morgueFile: p. 15; photos Rob Laidlaw: pp. 23, 77;
Library of Congress, Washington, dc: pp. 128, 132, 136; photos lightfoot/
morgueFile: pp. 139, 182; photo Scott Lidell/morgueFile: p. 14; Musée du
Louvre, Paris: pp. 101, 102; Museum of the Man, Paris: p. 12; photos
courtesy nasa: pp. 151, 152, 153, 154; photo Frank Noelker: p. 187; courtesy
Dan Piraro: p. 147; photos Ian Redmond/www.4apes.com: pp. 19, 24, 172,
173, 177; photo Roger-Viollet/Rex Features: p. 12; photo Sipa Press/Rex
Features: p. 67; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, dc:
p. 98; photo Verein Gegen Tierfabriken: p. 184; reproduced by permission
of the Woodbury Gallery, Richmond, va: p. 104; photos © Zoological
Society of London: pp. 21, 25, 28, 29, 31, 55, 56, 62, 74, 129, 163, 165.

213
 Index

aap Primadomus 162 Animal Legal Defense Fund 125

Abreu, Rosalia 70 Animal Liberation Front 156
Abuko Reserve 144 Ape Language Center (Georgia
Acquanetta, Burnu 110 University) 103
Aelianus, Claudius 44 apes
Africa Conservation Fund 182 abused in entertainment
Africa Wildlife Foundation 68 124–6
African Conservation Foundation as pets 70–73
105 as quasi-humans 39–41, 48,
AiAi (chimpanzee) 82 54, 57–9, 61, 84–5, 88–91,
Akeley, Carl 67, 127 95–103, 106–8, 127–50
Alamagordo Primate Facility classification of 13, 49–57
160 culture among 10, 27
Albert National Park 67 distinguished from monkeys
Albertus Magnus 47 6–7
Ally (chimpanzee) 143 evolution of 10–12
Amazing Animal Actors 125 genetic proximity to humans
American Museum of Natural 12–13
History 127 habitat 8–9
Amman, Karl 73–5, 177–79, 180 human hybrids 89–91
Amsterdam 49 in art and literature 92–107,
Angola 48, 49, 52 112
Animal Defenders International in biomedical research
157 146–53, 155–62, 188–9
Animal Haven Ranch 72 in early and Medieval Europe

214
 43–8, 92–5 Beard, William Holbrook 97–8,
in film 107–12, 116–24 98
in non–Western cultures Beeckman, David 52
34–9 Belgian Congo see Congo
in racist imagery 41, 57–62, Bellmer, Hans 100
77–8, 110–12, 115–18 Ben (gorilla) 80
language experiments 136–46 Bertolani, Paco 14
locomotion 7 Blair, Tony 75, 159
social groups 9–10 Blakemore, Colin 158
tool use 10, 14, 132–3, 135 Block, Susan 131
used in us space program Bloemfontein Zoo 83
153–5 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich 55
Ardrey, Robert 130 Boldini, Niccolo 101
Aristotle 44 bonobo 15
Arkansas 87 diet 16
Arkansas State University 41 gender relations 17
Ashley (chimpanzee) 160 social groups 16
Asian Development Bank 168 Bonobo Conservation Initiative
Australia 53, 157 34, 131
Austria 157, 184–5 Borneo 8, 13, 20, 22, 25, 27, 29,
Avianus 45 166–73
Aziz, Tipu 158 Borneo Orangutan Survival
Foundation 79, 86
Baeckler, Sarah 125 Bosman, Willem 53
Bagando 34 Boston Red Sox 88
Baker, Josephine 70 Boule, Pierre 116
Balearic Islands 184 Bowdich, T. Edward 61
Bali 171 Bowery Boys 120
Barnum, P. T. 78 Bowie, David 113
Barrows, George 121 Boyd Group 147
Bartolomaeus Anglicus 47 Brazil 48
Bateman, Robert 105 Breuer, Thomas 20
Battell, Andrew 48 Brewer, Stella 145
Batwa 78 Britches (monkey) 156
Baxter biomedical laboratory 184 Britten, Roy 13

215
British Association for the Reintroduction Group 187
Advancement of Science 60 Camper, Petrus 53
British Museum 66 Canada 53, 146, 188
British Union for the Abolition of Canary Islands 89
Vivisection 158, 159 Cantlon, Jessica 136
British Zoological Society 66 Captive Animals’ Protection
Bronx Zoo 78 Society 86
Brooks (gorilla) 80 CareerBuilders 85, 87
Brueghel the Elder, Pieter 95, Carracci, Annibale 100
95 Carter, Janis 144
Bubbles (chimpanzee) 70–71 Cavalieri, Paola 183
Buckshire Corporation 91 Center for Captive Chimpanzee
Buddha (orangutan) 122 Care 159
Buddy (chimpanzee) 73 Central African Republic 34, 35
Bündchen, Gisele 115 Chad 11
Burnett, James (Lord Chantek (orangutan) 138
Monboddo) 54, 105 Chardin, Jean-Simeon 101, 102
Burroughs, Edgar Rice 106 Charles River Laboratories 160
Burton, Richard 66 Charlie (chimpanzee) 83
Burton, Tim 117–18 Charlie Brown (chimpanzee) 142
Burundi 66 Chimp Haven 160–61
Bush, George W. 40 chimpanzee 14
bushmeat 174–81 classification 13
diet 13–14
Cadbury 87 hunting 14–15
Calgary Zoo 80 social groups 15
California 72, 108, 125 tool use 14, 135
California Institute of used in advertising 83–7
Technology 13 Chimpanzee Collaboratory 125
Calvert, Steve 121 Chimpanzee Health
Calvin, John 48 Improvement, Maintenance
Cambridge University 158–9 and Protection Act 160
Cameroon 34, 75, 76, 77, 105, 175, Chimpanzee Rehabilitation
179, 187 Project 187
Cameroon Chimpanzee China 8, 32–3, 35, 37, 53, 82–3, 157

216
Chomsky, Noam 141 Decamps, Alexandre-Gabriel
Chororapithecus abyssinicus 11 102, 103
Cleveland Metroparks Zoo 80 deforestation 164–5, 166–74, 177
Coco (chimpanzee) 80 Detroy, Gene 84
Coetzee, J. M. 106, 135–6 Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund
Collier, John 107 International 68, 182
Collins, Phil 87 Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund uk 68
coltan 179–80 Dietrich, Marlene 110
Columbia University 156–7 Digit (gorilla) 68
comic books 107 Digit Fund 68
Congo (now drc) 16, 34, 78, 90, Doherty, Pete 113
163, 179–81 Donavan, Edward 26
Congreve, William 102 Doré, Gustave 97
Conservation International 182 Doyle, Arthur Conan 105
Convention on Biological Dr Hawden Trust 146–7
Diversity 163 D’Sousa, Dinesh 131
Convention on International Dubois, Eugene 57
Trade in Endangered Species Du Chaillu, Paul Belloni 63–6,
74, 155 63, 87
Corrigan, Ray 121 Dürer, Albrecht 94–5, 94
Coulston Foundation 159, 160, 188
Covance 156 Eastwood, Clint 122, 123
creationism 41–2, 60 Ebola 175, 181, 190
cryptozoology 53 Egypt 34, 35, 44, 45, 75
Cuba 70 Enos (chimpanzee) 153
Epstein, Teho 88
Dart, Raymond 130 Ethel (chimpanzee) 70
Darwin, Charles 57, 60, 98 European Union 168
Davis, LaDonna 72–3 Every Which Way but Loose 122,
Davis, St James 72–3 123
Dayaks 167 Ewen, Stuart 115
de Bondt, Jacob 49, 49 extinction 32, 163–89
de Buffon, Comte de (Georges-
Louis Leclerc) 54–5, 54 Fauna Foundation 149, 188–9
de Waal, Frans 17, 103, 131–2 Fauna Protection Society 68

217
feral children 54 129, 130, 133, 135, 163, 164
Field, William 137 Goodman, Maurice 13
Florida 189 gorilla
Fossey, Dian 67–9, 67, 112, 119, classification 18
120 communication 19
Fouts, Roger 141 diet 18, 63
France 73, 90 locomotion 18
Franken, Frans 101 sexual dimorphism 18
Frémiet, Emmanuel 113, 115 tool use 20
Freud, Sigmund 88 used in advertising 87–9
Friends of Animals 186 Gorilla Foundation 140–41
Gorilla Organization 68, 89
Gabon 61, 66, 90, 172 gorilla suits 88
Galdikas, Birute 27, 67, 71 Gorillas in the Mist 69, 119
Gallup Jr, Gordon G. 133 Goya, Francisco 102
Gambia 144, 187 Gray, John Edward 65
Gardner, Allen 138 Great Ape Project 182–5
Gardner, Beatrice 138 Great Ape Trust (Iowa) 125, 137
Gargantua the Great (gorilla) 78 Great Apes Survival Project 182
Garner, Richard 66 Great Gorilla Run 89
Gemora, Charles 121 Greystoke 118–20, 118
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Étienne 31 Grow, Gloria 189
Georgia, Republic of 89 Gua (chimpanzee) 137
gibbon 9
classification 29 Haag, Tethard Philip Christian
diet 29–30 81
gender relations 32 Haeckel, Ernst 56, 90
in Asian folklore and Haggard, H. Rider 62
literature 35–9 Hahn, Beatrice 155
locomotion 32 Halfords 86
reaching for the moon 38–9 Ham (chimpanzee) 152–4
social groups 29, 32 Hanno the Navigator 43
vocalizations 30, 35, 37–8 Hanuman 34
Gilbert, William S. 113 Harlow, Harry 152
Goodall, Jane 15, 67, 116, 128, Hartmann, Robert 60

218
Harvard University 27 interpol 73
Hayes, Catherine 137 Isaacs, John 99, 99, 100
Hayes, Keith 137 Isidore of Seville 45
Heba Abdul Moty Ahmad Saad Ito Jakuchu 38–9
75 Ivanov, Ilya 89
Hess, Elizabeth 143
Heston, Charlton 116, 117 Jackson, Michael 70–71
Hiasl (chimpanzee) 184–5, 185 Jacksonville Zoo 80
Hildegard von Bingen 46 James, LeBron 115
Hoeg, Peter 106 Japan 38, 73, 90, 135
Holloman Air Force Base 153, 159 Jardine, William 30, 30, 59
Homo erectus 57 Java 29, 32
Hooper, Edward 155 Johnson, William Henry 78
Hoover Institution 131 Jonnie (chimpanzee) 80
Hope, Bob 120 Jordan, Winthrop 58
Hopps, H. R. 115
Howitt, Samuel 22 Kafka, Franz 106
Hsiao T’ung 38 Kahuzi-Biega national park 180
Huet, Christopher 96 Kano, Takayoshi 16
Huxley, Thomas Henry 60 Kanzi (bonobo) 137, 138
Keaton, Buster 120
Imutran (Novartis) 156 Kellogg, Donald 137
In Defense of Animals 77 Kellogg, Luella, 137
India 157 Kellogg, Winthrop 137
Indonesia 56, 71, 166–70, 173 Kent, William 102
Institute for Primate Studies Kentucky 86
(University of Oklahoma) Kenya 11
141, 188–9 Kenya Airlines 75
International Kalawiet Gibbon King Fahad Islamic School 43
Sanctuary 187 King Kong 107, 108, 108, 111–12,
International Monetary Fund 168 115
International Primate Protection Kohler, Wolfgang 89, 135
League 76, 79 Koko 134, 138, 140
International Union for Kokolopori Reserve 34
Conservation of Nature 177 Kona 107

219
Konga 107 Malaysia 8, 32, 76
Koons, Jeff 71, 71 Marks, Jonathan 148, 157
Kubrick, Stanley 130 Marquis Chimps 84
Kyoto University 134 Marsden, Stella 187
Martin, Don 88
Landseer, Edward 96, 97 Massa (gorilla) 78
Landseer, Thomas 25, 96, 97, 164 Matsuzawa, Tetsuro 134
Langley, Gill 158 Max (chimpanzee) 71
Laos 32 Max Planck Institute for
Laurel and Hardy 120 Evolutionary Anthropology
Leakey, Louis 67, 133 134
Lebanon 75 Medical Research Council (uk)
Lee, James 27 158
Lemmon, William 141 Michael (gorilla) 138
lemsip (Laboratory for Mier, Jason 73–5
Experimental Medicine and Mikey (chimpanzee) 85
Surgery in Primates) 149, 189 Miles, Lyn 138
Liberia 162 missing link 56
Limbe Wildlife Centre 76, 105, 187 Moe (chimpanzee) 72–3
Linnaeus, Carolus 51, 55, 60 Moens, Hermann Bernelot 90
Lintz, Gertrude 78 Mollison, James 105
Lombroso, Cesare 105–6 Monkees (pop group) 90
London Zoo 83, 98, 103 Monkey World 76, 79
Long, Edward 58 ‘monkids’ 71
Lossi nature sanctuary 181 Mori Sosetsu 36
Loulis (chimpanzee) 138 Mountain Gorilla Project 68
Lucy (chimpanzee) 141–5 Mpiemu 34
Lugosi, Bela 109 Mpwongwe 61
Luther, Martin 48
Nairobi 171
M. D. Anderson Cancer Center Nakajima Kaho 38
Science Park 156 Nakalipithecus nakayama 11
Mad Magazine 88 National Antivivisection Society
Maheshe (gorilla) 180 157
Mai-Mai 181 National Geographic 116, 133–4

220
National Gorilla Suit Day 88 gender relations 23–4
National Zoo (Washington, dc) mother-infant bond 21, 23–4,
80 24
National Zoological Gardens sexual dimorphism 21–2
(Pretoria) 76 social groups 21, 23
Natural History Museum tool use 25–7
(London) 105 Orangutan Conservancy 187
Nature Conservancy 171 Orangutan Foundation 187
Neckham, Alexander 44, 47 Ota Benga 78
Netherlands 73, 157, 162 Oxford University 60
New England Anti-Vivisection
Society 149 palm oil 167–72
New Iberia Primate Research Pan-African Sanctuary Alliance
Center 156 187
New York Blood Center 162 Parker, Ian 131
New York University 159 Patterson, Francine 138, 140
New Zealand 157 Peacock, Thomas Love 105
Nicks, Stevie 113 People for the Ethical Treatment
Nienaber, Georgianne 69, 182 of Animals (peta) 91, 124,
Nigeria 76, 76, 175 156, 157, 186
Nim Chimpsky 138–40 Pepper (chimpanzee) 149
Noell’s Ark 186 Pepsi Corporation 86
Noon, Carole 187–8 pet trade 73–7, 170, 175
Novembre, Frank 155 Peterson, Dale 130
NutraSweet 189 pg Tips chimpanzees 83, 84, 86
Nyiramachabelli (opera) 69 Philippines 157
Pierolapithecus catalaunicus 11
Oasis Zoo 82 Pirari, Dan 147
Oktar Adnan (Harun Yahya) 42 Pisanello, Antonio 94
Oliver (chimpanzee) 90–91 Pithecanthropus alalus 56
Ollie (chimpanzee) 73 Pithecanthropus erectus (Homo
O’Neill, Eugene 106 erectus) 57
orangutan 21, 22, 25, 26 Planet of the Apes 116–18
classification 20 Pliny the Elder 43, 45
diet 20, 24–5 Poe, Edgar Allan 109

221
Potter, Paulus 44 Royal Zoological Society 99
Pozas, Pedro 184 Rumbaugh, Duane 138
Premack, David 138 Russia 73
Presley, Elvis 70 Rwanda 66, 68, 120, 179
Primarily Primates 91, 186
Primate Freedom Project 186 Safari World 78, 79
Pruetz, Jill 14 Sambucus, John 97
Pugh, Mike 75 Samutprakan Crocodile Farm 79
Sanaga-Yong sanctuary 77
Qatar 75 Sapolsky, Robert 68
Qinling Zoo 80 Sarah (chimpanzee) 138
Quinn, Daniel 106 Savage, Thomas Staughton 61,
191
Rachel (chimpanzee) 188–9, 188 Savage-Rumbaugh, Sue 137, 138
Rackham, Arthur 109 Save the Chimps 159, 160, 187
Rados, Luigi 31 Scatter (chimpanzee) 70
Raikkonen, Kimi 88 Schaller, George 67
Ramayana 34 Schaller, Kay 67
Ramones (pop group) 115 Scopes Monkey Trial 42
Reagan, Ronald 115, 121 Scotus, John 45
Red Rose chimpanzees 83 Sebeok, Thomas 139–40
Regis (chimpanzee) 149 Self, Will 106
Rego, Pauline 103 Senegal 14
Reichenback, H.G.L. 29 Sharp, Paul 155
Rex (chimpanzee) 160 Shosan (Koson) 37, 37
Rey, H. A. 121 Siamangs 30–31
Ringling Brothers 78 Sierra Leone 157, 184
Ritz Brothers 120 Singer, Peter 183
Rockwell, George Lincoln 130 Snow, Keith Harmon 182
Roet, Lisa 103–4, 104 Solinus, Julius Gaius 43, 45
Rolling Stones (pop group) 100 Solis, Virgil 47
Rosaire Zoppe Chimpanzees 86, Sosetsu, Mori 37
87 South Africa 76
Roth, Robin 121 Southwest National Primate
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 54 Research Center 156

222
Soviet Union 89 Turkey 42
Spain 11, 76, 162 Tyson, Edward 51–3, 51
Speede, Sherry 77
Stalin, Joseph 89 Uganda 179
Stanford, Craig 130 Uhlenbrook, Charlotte 159
Stowe, Buckinghamshire 102 Uncaged 156
Sullivan, Sir Arthur 113 United Arab Emirates 75
Sumatra 8, 13, 20, 24, 27, 29, 32, United Kingdom 73, 157
53, 167–71, 187 United Nations Development
Sumatran Orangutan Program 168
Conservation Programme 187 United Nations Environment
Suncoast Primate Sanctuary 186 Program 166, 171
Sweden 157 United States 40, 41, 53, 71, 72,
Sweetwaters Chimpanzee 171, 187
Sanctuary 75 United States Food and Drug
Administration 158
Tacugama Sanctuary 82 United State National Institutes
Taipang Four 75 of Health 160
Taiwan 73 University of California,
Tanzania 15, 72 Riverside 156
Taub, Edward 156
Taylor, Daniel 105 van der Borcht, Pieter 95
Temerlin, Jane 141–3 van Schaik, Carel 27, 133
Temerlin, Maurice 141–3 Vietnam 32
Tempesta, Antonio 46, 46 Vincent de Beauvais 47
Teniers, David the Younger 101 Virunga National Park 67, 181
Tennessee 42 Vogue 115
Terrace, Herbert 138–40 von Beringe, Robert 66
Texas 91, 186 von Max, Gabriel 57, 103
Thailand 32, 35, 78, 79, 127 Vonnegut, Kurt 40
Thoth 34 Voronoff, Serge 90
Thomas of Catimpré 47
Tomasello, Michael 134 Walker, Alice 107
Topsell, Edward 8, 42 Wallace, Alfred Russel 65, 65
Tulp, Nicholaes 49, 49 Washoe (chimpanzee) 138

223
Watteau, Jean-Antoine 102 Yost, Sid 125
Watteau, Louis-Joseph 96 Yuan Sung 38
Wayne State University 13
Weaver, Sigourney 120 Zaire 67
Wells, H. G. 142 Zokosky, Peter 103, 105
West Africa 43, 53, 89, 144, 153, Zoological Society of London 82
173–4 zoos 23, 77–85, 77
Whipsnade Safari Park 80, 82
Wilberforce, Samuel 60
Wildlife Conservation Society
20, 177, 181
Wildlife Direct 182
Wildlife Friends of Thailand 79
Williams, Joseph 61
Willing, Victor 103
Wilson, Donald Roller 100
Wolf, Joseph 74
Wood Jr, Ed 110
Wood, Lawson 98–9
Woodruff (chimpanzee) 161
World Bank 168, 177
World Heritage Convention 181
World Lab Animal Day 157
World Wildlife Fund 68, 177, 178,
181
Wrangham, Richard 130
Wu Yun 38
Wyenn, Clive 134

Xia Gui 36, 37

Xiyou Ji 37

Yerkes, Robert 70, 137, 151

Yerkes National Primate Research
Center 134, 151, 152, 156

224