Save the Apes From Ape Rights Activists!

Jonathan Marks
U North Carolina at Charlotte

Animal Rights activists started up The Great Ape Project in 1993 with the goal of generating worldwide support for the extension of human rights to the apes, specifically those of life, liberty and freedom from torture.

Of course, no sane person is in favor of death, incarceration and torture for the apes. I still don’t know what a “right to liberty” would actually imply, although it seems rather that they want to shut down all zoos and dump the apes on the streets of Nairobi. While attending two recent conferences (“Chimpanzees in Research: A Vital Resource for Medical Advancements” and “Nonhuman Primate Models for AIDS,” both hosted by the Yerkes Regional Primate Center of Emory University in Atlanta), I learned about the success the Great Ape Project has enjoyed over the last decade, and its consequences are chilling.

Living Conditions in Research Facilities
I don’t work directly with chimpanzees. In fairness, they frighten me, because they are considerably stronger than I am, and are sometimes unpredictably violent in their behavior, both in the wild, and in otherwise cushy captive settings—as the sad case of St James and LaDonna Davis, who were attacked and mauled in a chimpanzee sanctuary in California last year, amply demonstrated. I was grateful, however, for the opportunity to see the chimpanzees in the Yerkes research facility and to see their living conditions. The chimpanzees at Yerkes, and at the few other facilities that keep chimpanzees for scientific research, live in stimulating environments and are tended by sensitive, compassionate and knowledgeable caretakers. The apes are in no way being tortured, imprisoned or murdered. Indeed, the major deficits in the lives of these chimpanzees are coming paradoxically from the activities of the Great Ape Project.

The success that the Great Ape Project has enjoyed in convincing people that these chimpanzees are being maltreated (as of course chimpanzees have been, in other times and in other places) has resulted in budgetary constraints that serve to retard the ambitions of these facilities to upgrade the quality of life for the chimpanzees, which they would actually like very much to do. They are not keeping the chimps in steel shoeboxes, as the Great Ape Project seems to think; they are keeping them in social groups. The research the chimpanzees are being subjected to is far more like the medical treatments I receive today (injections, blood drawing, CAT scans and so forth) than like the treatment people received in Auschwitz.

One significant aspect of both the quality of life and the preservation of the species involves the breeding of chimpanzees in these research facilities. Partly as a result of the agitation of animal rights activists, there has been a moratorium imposed since 1997 on the breeding of chimpanzees in these research facilities. Here is an ingenious paradox then: the Great Ape Project’s work has helped to make it impossible at present for these chimpanzees to enjoy the pleasures of parenthood.

Animal Research and Medical Consequences
There is an even darker side to the working of the Great Ape Project, however. Since there are no chimpanzees in these research facilities below the ago of ten, there are also none with naïve immune systems. Why might it be desirable to have young chimpanzees in medical, and specifically in immunological research? A simple reason: Chimpanzees do not get AIDS.

Mull that over for a second. Chimpanzees do not get AIDS. You can give them the virus, but they don’t develop the symptoms of the disease. Would you like to know why? Do you think that information might be beneficial in developing a treatment for the millions of human beings who have the virus and the disease, or who have the virus and are going to get the disease?

If the answer to either of those questions is yes, then you may consider holding the Great Ape Project accountable for the fact that the research to address that question is currently not being undertaken, while millions of humans are suffering from the disease. Apes and monkeys have indeed died in biomedical contexts, but I am glad to have the vaccines against polio and hepatitis, as well as other diseases, that were thereby made possible. Humans, it occasionally needs to be pointed out, are also sentient, emotionally complex, rational beings, and are persons who merit rights in far less contrived senses than those invoked for the apes.

A chimpanzee baby used in AIDS research is comforted by a doctor. Photo courtesy of Steve Winter/National Geographic/Getty Images

Further, biomedical research on apes has also had salutary medical consequences for the health of ape populations themselves. Without that research, medical care for apes will be severely compromised as well.

What the Real Problems Are
The real problem that apes face is not in research facilities. It is in the wild, where irreversible anthropogenic changes—principally deforestation and economic development, but also disease and hunting—leave very dire predictions for their existence only a few decades from now. As disease decimates ape populations, the Great Ape Project condemns medical research, but offers no alternatives to it.

Couple that fact with the moratorium imposed upon breeding chimps in these research facilities, and it is not too difficult to project that the Great Ape Project may very likely be the ultimate cause of the extinction of the great apes. Philosophers, zoologists, anthropologists and anyone who cares about apes will soon be asking: Were these people flat-out nuts? What the hell were they thinking?
Finally, the Great Ape Project makes its plea for human/ape rights with cherry-picked scientific work, which is unfortunately presented as if its interpretation were unproblematic.

For example, the genetic similarity of apes and humans is irrelevant to rights, unless you believe that the allotment of human rights should be predicated on genetic distances. That view, however, would align you with the losing side of World War II.

The cognitive abilities of apes are also irrelevant to rights. In a modern liberal democracy, stupid people merit the same rights as bright people. The key issue is that they are people, not how smart they are.

The casual comparison of nonhuman primates to disabled or mentally handicapped people is particularly reprehensible, for it serves to dehumanize those very people whose own rights are most consistently and conspicuously in jeopardy.

Primate Welfare and Obligations
Consequently, there is a strange mix of biophilia and misanthropy in the Great Ape Project. Frans de Waal has argued that primate welfare or obligations is a better way to frame the discussion of the future of primate research. I also find that to be a far more sensible cause than talking about “rights.” Indeed, the fact that the great apes are being very explicitly used as a wedge for according human rights to all animals suggests to me that the leaders of the project are not at all lovers of apes, nor even of primates, but are as callously exploitative of the apes and of the challenges to ape welfare and survival for their own demagogic purposes as any circus trainer ever was in theirs.

In short, I do not doubt the good intentions of anyone interested in the improvement of the quality of life for apes in captivity, and for their protection as long as possible in the wild, but confusing apes for people, misrepresenting their treatment and preventing medical research on them is not a productive response to the problems faced by apes today. We all know where the road paved with those good intentions leads.

Jonathan Marks is a professor of anthropology at UNC-Charlotte and a former president of the General Anthropology Division. He is the author of Human Biodiversity (1995) and What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee (2002).