Task:
In 700 to 800 words, assess environmental issues from various ethical perspectives in order to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the situation, its causes, and possible remedies, also create 3 power point slides to summarize this assignment.
The Extended Family
The Saga of the Great Apes
INTRODUCTION:
"In a clearing in the jungle of the Congo river basin," Laura Spinney writes, "local hunters hold an illegal market twice a month with workers from a nearby logging concession to trade bushmeat for ammunition, clothes and medicine. Among the carcasses that change hands are chimpanzees, gorillas and bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees), all of which are protected species." That is not the only market. All over the tropical forests of West and Central Africa, Latin America and Asia, increasing numbers of commercial hunters are slaughtering the primates, especially the great apes, for food and also for export. Conservationist Jane Goodall, the world's foremost expert on the chimpanzee, has stated that unless this hunting is stopped, "in 50 years there will be no viable populations of great apes left in the wild."
THE TRADITIONAL FOOD OF THE INDIGENOUS POPULATIONS
It is not easy to tell people in poverty not to hunt monkeys and apes. They are traditional food in Central Africa, and to the hunters, "They're just animals."
A hunter will get $60 for an adult gorilla, and a full-grown chimpanzee would bring almost as much. (Since gorillas bring a better price than chimpanzee, chimpanzee meat is often sold as gorilla.) Concerned observers in the area often have reservations about the practice but end by defending the hunting. As David Brown of the British government's delegation to the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species put it, bushmeat is "a major component of the economies of much of equatorial Africa. It is a primary source of animal protein and the main export commodity for the inhabitants." He therefore thinks that the "industry" should be "managed, not stigmatised and criminalised."
Hunting is now a greater threat than habitat loss to ape populations already strained to the breaking point. "The World Wide Fund for Nature estimates that there are no more than 200,000 chimps, 111,000 western lowland gorillas, 10,000 eastern lowland gorillas and 620 mountain gorillas left in the wild." With respect to bonobos, their "numbers are thought to have halved in the past 20 years."5 Why has the hunting of primates increased so dramatically, especially in Africa? In all probability, the hunting has been triggered by the African population explosion of the last 20 years, which has increased the density of human population all through the forest and countryside and left a hungry population in the burgeoning cities. The pygmies, for instance, in Congo and Cameroon, used to eat anything that moved in the forest with no fear of impacting the species: there was one pygmy for every 10 square kilometres, and with their poisoned arrows, at that density, they could do no real harm. They would probably do no harm at ten times that density, at one person per one square kilometer.6 But now there are many more people than that, not only pygmies but participants in the new extractive industries. The mainspring for the crisis was clearly the logging industry. In efforts to pay off their debts and develop their nations, governments in West Africa have contracted with foreign companies to log the remaining rainforests. According to Jeff Dupain of Belgium's Royal Zoological Society in Antwerp, the companies usher hunters into previously inaccessible forest land when they make the logging roads; they "make it easier for hunters to get to the wildlife and transport carcasses back to towns, often using the loggers' lorries and boats."7Worse yet, as it happens, is their technique of driving roads deep into the bush to divide the forest into sectors to be worked. Where the forest is fragmented, the ability of a forest species to reconstitute itself after hunting is severely compromised, probably destroyed. As if to ensure the maximum destruction of wildlife, the companies issue the loggers rifles ("to protect themselves"), and don't send in enough food, expecting the workers to live off the land.
In one logging camp alone, in one year, according to a report released by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), more than 1,100 animals were killed, totaling 29 metric tons, and the hunting of wild game is three to six times higher in communities adjacent to logging roads. The WCS estimates that the annual harvest of bushmeat in equatorial Africa exceeds 1 million metric tons.
In 1998, a coalition of 34 conservation organizations and ape specialists called the Ape Alliance estimated that in the Congo, up to 600 lowland gorillas are killed each year for their meat. Although the initial exchanges of that meat
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Take place in the bush, the bulk of the meat is sold in the cities. The railway station at Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon, houses a bushmeat market that does not close; one ton of smoked bushmeat, largely chimpanzees and gorilla, is unloaded there on a daily basis.
It is no secret. "It's a 500-foot stretch of sidewalk only a few blocks from the presidential offices and the $200-a-night Hilton Hotel. . . ." Behind the antelope stalls are "piles from which long arm bones protrude, obviously those of chimpanzees and gorillas. At the fetish stalls, you can buy chimpanzee hands, gorilla skulls, round slices of elephant trunk or the bright red tails of endangered gray parrots.
(If you boil the finger of a gorilla, the people believe, and add the water to the baby's bath, the baby will be strong like a gorilla.) Thousands of chimpanzees are killed each year. Chimpanzees reproduce at the rate of one baby every four years, gorillas usually more slowly than that. The apes do not have the reproductive capacity to bounce back from this kind of assault.
There can be no doubt of the reaction of the developed nations to the facts. A World Wide Web query on the subject of "bushmeat" yielded "about" (the search engine's word) 26,300 entries in 0.42 seconds, and all that were sampled were linked to organizations determined to stop the slaughter and protect the apes. In April 1999, the same month that the WCS report came out, 28 organizations and agencies, led by the Jane Goodall Institute, issued a major statement on the protection of the apes. It enumerated the measures that would have to be taken immediately if the apes were to survive, calling on educators, governments, corporations in general and above all the logging, mining, and other extractive industries to take immediate action to protect the apes.
A year later, the situation had not improved. Writing in the Washington Post, Jane Goodall estimated that the number of chimpanzees had declined to 150,000 from the million and more that roamed the wild when she began her chimpanzee research in 1960.15 Six months later, the 2,500 delegates to an eight-day environment meeting in Amman, Jordan, ended with a request to IUCN-The World Conservation Union to put all possible pressure on governments to take steps to curtail the trade in bushmeat. By that time the hunting was "a commercialized industry where automatic weapons have replaced bows and arrows," an industry worth $350 million a year in Ghana, $121 million annually in the Ivory Coast.16 The directors of the represented environment groups talked grimly of "strong conservation solutions" that had to be adopted immediately.
Yet there is clearly no unanimity with the developing world. The sense of revulsion that attends the contemplation of the market in ape hands and fingers, shared by so many in the nations of Europe and North America, is obviously not shared by the hunters, by the loggers, or even by the African and Asian governments nominally in charge of the hunting grounds. How come we feel it? Before we go any further in examining this controversial subject, let us take a closer look at the great apes and see if we can discover, first, who these apes are, and second, based on that information, possibly, the source of the conviction that the bushmeat harvest is fundamentally wrong.
CHAPTER: THE QUARRY IN THE GREAT BUSHMEAT HUNT
Who are the great apes? At one point a variety of species of large tailless apes lived in large numbers in equatorial Africa and Southeast Asia, but those populations have been reduced to fragmented pockets. As noted earlier, we know that the individuals in the four remaining species number only in the hundreds and thousands and that a new virus could wipe them all out. In our generation, we may see the end of the wild apes. Let us find out who they are- quick, before they are gone.
First of all, as is commonly known, the apes are our relatives. Furthest from us on the family tree are the "lesser apes," the gibbons (Hylobates) of Southeast Asia, who show amazing dexterity and acrobatic skill but who are distinguished from monkeys only by their tendency to walk upright. The "great apes," our closest relatives, are the orangutan, the gorilla, and the chimpanzee. We will take a quick look at them before exploring the enormous ethical dilemma they pose for us.
The orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus), native to Borneo and Sumatra, live in solitary splendor in the canopy of the Asian rainforest, from which they rarely descend to the ground. They are not bipedal (disposed to walk on two feet) at all but rather bibrachial-their major mode of locomotion is swinging through the trees. About twice the size of females, males command overlapping territories of about 40 square kilometers. They do not tolerate each other, tending to harass and kill any males they meet in the course of a day's foraging.18 Normally they have little use for humans. However, as their habitat withstood the impact of war, agriculture, and logging and their numbers fell to 20,000 in 1992 and ever further with the passage of time, they cannot survive now without human help. According to a
National Geographic report on orangutans published in August 1998, the apes may reproduce only once in an eight-year interval; the mothers nurse their infants for about six years, and older siblings can hang around for several more years. As habitat shrinks, male violence increases, and the death rate of males rises. The prospects for the survival of the species in the wild are not good.
The African apes are more closely related to us humans. The bonobos (Pan paniscus), native to central Congo, are simply smaller chimpanzees, recognized as a separate species only since the 1930s.The chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) is probably our closest relative, sharing 98.5 percent of our DNA. (Does that make the consumer of bushmeat 98.5 percent cannibal? Karl Ammann would contend that indeed it does.) The gorilla (Gorilla gorilla, as named by a biologist fresh out of imagination) is the largest of the apes, the male averaging 400 pounds. None of the apes is truly bipedal, suggesting to some anthropologists that bipedalism made the 1.5 percent difference between the ape and the human.The mechanisms by which the change occurred are still under scrutiny. The extensive similarities between us and the apes raise serious moral questions about the great bushmeat hunt. The chimpanzees, for instance, use tools. They extract termites from their mounds with straws and sticks, and they crack
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nuts with hammers. They pick out "anvils," depressed knotholes of harder wood where a nut can be positioned securely; find "hammers," pieces of hard wood or stones for the tougher cases; bring their piles of nuts to the anvils; and start hammering. The behavior is in no way instinctive. It is learned, taught to each new generation by the last. Further, it is cultural; in different areas, different groups of chimpanzees have learned different ways of cracking nuts and use different sets of tools to catch termites. In contrast to the gorillas, who live in foraging tribes much like those of our own hunting-gathering forebears, in which dominant males protect and lead the troop and gentle females painstakingly rear their infants, widely spaced by birth, chimpanzees hunt in groups. They communicate complex messages, we know not how. Spoken language as we know it is impossible for chimpanzees because of the placement of the structures of their throat-they cannot guide air over a voicebox as we can- but they can learn language: chimps have been taught American sign language, lexigrams, and token languages. They can communicate with us when we are willing to use these languages, not at any high intellectual level, but at least at the level of a young child.
How do we know what we know about the apes? Because of their similarities to us, they have attracted many of the best students to observe and inform us of their ways. Louis Leakey, the great anthropologist of early humanoids, sent three of his best students into the wild to study the apes.
The careers of those students-all women (Leakey thought that women would develop better rapport with wild apes)-are instructive. "Leakey's Angels," as they were called, followed identical paths. They each studied the apes on site, seeking to advance the science of zoology by collecting and publishing data on these fascinating animals. Later, graduate students came to join them, also to study. Then, as they became alarmed at the pressures on the habitat and on the shrinking numbers of their "subject matter," the researchers turned their emphasis to public education, hoping to effect more enlightened policies that would be to the longterm benefit of both animals and humans. Then, no doubt as a consequence of that 98.5 percent identity with their subjects, inevitably they became advocates for them, setting up orphanages and hospitals for the surviving victims of the bushmeat and black-market rareanimals trade. By this time, they had dropped all pretense of seeing the apes as mere beasts. Having originally taken up their posts in Africa simply to study the apes, they stayed on to protect them.
Dian Fossey, who chose the mountain gorillas, achieved the dubious and quite unexpected fame of martyrdom. She arrived in Africa in 1963 determined to study the mountain gorillas of Rwanda. With the support of Louis Leakey and financial help from the National Geographic Society, she set up permanent residence in the Karisoke Research Center in Rwanda in 1967. During her 18 years of studying the mountain gorillas at Karisoke, she became, effectively, part of a gorilla group. She was able to watch youngsters be born,
mature, and become responsible adults in the group. Proudly she observed as one of her favorites, Digit, became the head of a family. When Digit was killed by poachers (his head taken as a totem, his hands cut off to be made into ashtrays), Fossey was galvanized into action. She wrote a book, Gorillas in the Mist, to popularize her cause, and turned her research center into a refuge. As a crusader for the protection of the gorillas she eventually made herself sufficiently bothersome to become a murder victim-killed (in 1985) by the poachers whose prey she was trying to protect. Two years later a movie was made of her highly readable book to recount her career and (not incidentally) to publicize the cause of protection of the animals who had become her friends. It is through that movie that most of us know of her.
Biruté Galdikas, possibly the least known of the Angels, chose the most remote setting for her work-Borneo, one of the last habitats of the orangutan. She met Leakey in 1968, and with his support and that of the National Geographic Society she set up a research camp in Borneo (Camp Leakey, of course). She has been there ever since. In 1995 she published her autobiography, Reflections of Eden: My Years with the Orangutans of Borneo,23 which describes her education, scientific career, and the establishment of Camp Leakey. By then the camp had become not so much a research center as a refuge, where wild orangutans, rescued from the poachers, are rehabilitated and integrated eventually back into the wild. With a co-author, she published another book in 1999, rich with photographs of the orangutans, for the sole purpose of raising money for her center.
But for the dramatic movie about Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall, who has spent 40 years studying the chimpanzees in Gombe National Park in Tanzania, would surely be the best known. Goodall spent the first 30 years following a mid-size group of chimpanzees as they hunted, socialized, and squabbled on a mountain within the park. Eventually they got used to the zoologist following them around, and she was able to document their lives in some detail. As she studied she wrote, presenting to the world a picture of omnivorous and versatile personalities of animals very like ourselves; it was she who first documented the use of tools and the possibility of culture among the chimpanzees.25 She went through the same mutations as the other Angels: once spending time in Africa to study the chimpanzees, she now spends most of her time on the lecture circuit trying to raise money for them.
Goodall also brought us the most startling and disturbing revelations about the lives of the great apes. She had studied the chimps for years, raised her child among them, learned their social structures, customs, and laws and the distinct and quirky personalities of the troop she chose to follow, when she sent in new and alarming reports, this time of psychosis among the chimpanzees. A female who had no infants of her own had started to steal infants from weaker females. Since she could not care for the infants, she ate them. Other females started accompanying her on her kidnapping raids and begged infant flesh for themselves. A terrible pattern of psychotic murder and cannibalism, hitherto unseen in the animal world, played itself out before Goodall's eyes. Apparently the behavior had a physical origin, for it stopped when the female perpetrator herself became pregnant.
Worse yet were the implications of vicious intergroup violence among Goodall's chimpanzees. After many years of group living, her troop split up, a small band of them taking up residence on the other side of the mountain.
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Then mysteriously the smaller group began to die off, one by one. Troubled, Goodall began closer observations to see what was killing them. To her surprise and horror she found that the killers were bands of raiders from the other half of the group. Chimpanzees were attacking other chimpanzees in a way that she had never seen before. Violence was not unusual among the chimpanzees: males often fought each other for dominance in the group. But in those ordinary conflicts no one died or got seriously hurt. In these new conflicts,
the victim always died or was left for dead. The attacks were planned, organized, and directed for maximal effectiveness, isolating a single member of the victim group and ambushing him. The strongest chimps led the attack; youngsters followed along and gleefully pounced on the victim when he was almost dead.
No reason for the attacks could be determined. There was no rivalry over food-in plentiful supply for all on both sides of the mountain. There was no rivalry over land, females, or any other resource. There was no discernable environmental threat (except to the victims after the raids started). And finally, there was no question that the hunt and the killing were deliberate: the night before a raid, the raiding party would take up their positions in a tree near the normal territory of the other group and spend the night in very untypical silence; then the hunt itself would be carried out in dead silence so that the victim might not have warning to get away. It was deliberate killing by the chimpanzees of another of their own species and acquaintance for no reasonbut that he belonged to a different group. It was, in the words of one observer, a clear case of genocide. And the killers clearly enjoyed it, very much. Far from challenging the notion of human-ape relatedness, the psychotic and genocidal behavior witnessed by Goodall reinforces it. The great apes are alarmingly human. Their lives are much like ours in the foraging period. Their families are much like ours. They sin. They have rituals of forgiveness for individual sin and are totally unconscious of group sin. They are just like us. When we look into the eyes of the ape, we look at our own not-so-distant past. Is it that fact primarily that grounds our conviction that we must somehow protect the apes from slaughter? As of October 2000, even the tightfisted U.S.
Congress had voted $5 million for the Department of the Interior, "to use for grants to organizations involved in efforts to protect the great apes."26 On what is this conviction based? Where, ethically speaking, do the apes stand? Apologists advance different, and occasionally incompatible, arguments for their protection. We will examine these arguments in the following sections.
APES IN THE WILD: THE PRESERVATION OF ENDANGERED ECOSYSTEMS
In the objections to the uses of apes for meat, one of the first points alwaysnoted is that apes, as species, are "protected." What is this "protection"? What is the rationale for "protecting" species?
First, let us be clear that it is not the "species," in the sense of a certain pattern of DNA, that is being protected-in that sense, we could freeze a few tissue samples and preserve the species forever. Nor is it the separate individuals that we propose to save, except perhaps in desperation. The entire ecosystem in which the species operates is and must be the object of conservation activity (in the case of the apes the ecosystem is the tropical rainforest).We may think of every species as a unique tract, a text from nature, a storehouse of information, infinitely valuable, and each species as a chapter in the book of its own ecosystem. The species and the ecosystem evolved together and must be preserved together. We should bear in mind that in the worldwide initiative to preserve the environment the great apes play two roles, roles in tension with each other.
The first role is as a keystone of the ecosystem, the animal near the top of the food chain without whose presence the balance would not be kept. The New England ecosystem was for all intents and purposes destroyed, for instance, when for good and sufficient reason the cougars and wolves were killed or driven out. By now accustomed to the overpopulation of white-tailed deer and rabbits and to the impoverishment of the woods and fields caused by overgrazing, we will never know how that ecosystem functioned when it was in balance. Similarly, the tropical forest cannot be saved unless we can preserve it with all of its species flourishing. And the danger is real: with the slow rate of reproduction of the great apes, these species are under significant threat.
The second role played by the apes is as a symbol of the ecosystem, much as the northern spotted owl symbolizes the redwood forest in the battle to save the giant sequoias of California's northern coast. Because they are so like us, the apes garner sympathy on their own. Portraying them as endangered wins sympathy for the effort to preserve the ecosystem as a whole. .The first role is described as part of ecology, the second is frankly part of preservation strategy. This second role can be viewed as strategic (as part of a preservation strategy), the first as ecological. When environmentalists confuse the two roles, the result can be ethically ambivalent.
Consider a case in point. When the forest fires broke out over the West and Central Kalimantan provinces of Indonesia some four years ago, primatologist Barita Manullang, head of the World Wide Fund for Nature's Orangutan Conservation Project in Jakarta, went to Central Kalimantan to see how the orangutans were faring. The result horrified him. In each [village] he found a baby orangutan held in a crude cage. He knew immediately that the animals' mothers were dead: a mother orangutan would never abandon her young. When pressed, the farmers in each village told Manullang the same gruesome tale. A mother with the baby clinging to its long reddish hair had fled from the nearby smoking forest into the village's gardens in search of food. Barking dogs had alerted the villagers to the presence of the animals. As the dogs attacked, farmers wielding machetes and sharpened sticks hacked and stabbed the mothers to death. The babies were taken captive-to be sold for up to $100 apiece as pets or to illicit wildlife traders. The dead mothers were skinned and eaten.
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The habitat problem is particularly severe for the orangutans, who are found only in the wilderness of Sumatra and Borneo. The rich tropical forest in which they make their homes provides abundantly if left alone. But agribusiness is making constant inroads on the forest, and the 1997 fires made their situation much worse. There is strong suspicion that the fires were not accidental. International proposals (including an environmental impact study in 1996) had recommended conserving 70 percent of the Central Kalimantan orangutan habitat as environmental reserve. But Jakarta (including President Suharto's powerful family) saw more profit in a mega-rice project that would require massive deforestation of that habitat. Deforestation went forward regardless of environmental impact, and the burning finished the job. The fires drove the animals out of the woods, making life easier for the poachers, and simultaneously made those areas not worth preserving as forest habitat. Agribusiness and poachers alike profited from the fires.
Yet Manullang found it difficult to condemn the small farmers who had killed the orangutans, even as contemporary observers find it difficult to condemn all killing of gorillas for bushmeat. The farmers have no choice in their approach to the orangutans. They live by subsistence farming, close to the edgeof survival, and cannot afford to let the hungry apes, driven out of the forest, demolish their gardens. Indeed, the meat of the adult orangutans killed in this latest slaughter probably added significantly to the annual protein intake of the farmers.
Ethical ambivalence also attends the situation of the Karisoke gorillas. Rwanda, neighboring Burundi, and several other nations of Central Africa have been involved in terrible civil wars, genocide (especially between theTutsi, or Watusi, tribe and the Hutu, ancient rivals), revolutions, and military coups.The planting cycles have been disrupted, and often the people do not have enough to eat. The wars and the genocide have severely compromised the ability of Rwandans to preserve their gorillas. Their occupations wiped
out, the people occupy the land wherever they can, demolishing the forest for food, fuel wood, and building materials. They have no choice.
How can we tell them, that the gorilla's life is more valuable than their own-even if, in the grand sweep of history, that's true?
APES IN THE LABORATORY: UTILITARIAN BENEFITS AND TROUBLING CLAIMS OF RIGHT
The chimpanzee shares 98.5 percent of our genetic endowment. Then why does the chimpanzee not get asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, acne-or AIDS, even when the virus is clearly present in the bloodstream? Especially HIV and AIDS. How can the apes harbor a similar virus harmlessly? What can we learn about human diseases, now and in the future, from experimentation with these animals? Scientists are calling for sequencing of the chimpanzee genome and for study of the chimps' resistance to diseases.30 But even now, the poachers have lowered the number of wild chimpanzees available, to the point of hindering research. With all the human benefits at stake from a multiyear study of the immune system of chimpanzees, is there no way we can keep them out of the cooking pots?
Beyond the uses of chimpanzees' bodies for medical research, what else may we learn from that overwhelmingly similar genome? Since the great apes can learn language and seem to experience all emotions that we know, they may provide an irreplaceable subject for the study of language acquisition and human psychology. As noted earlier, we also find (or rather, Jane Goodall found) the same psychopathologies in the chimpanzee, even the tendency to genocide. Is that subject amenable to study? We cannot do research at all on sophisticated human criminal behavior, because it becomes impossible to conceal from the subject what is being studied. Yet chimpanzees, who exhibit all the psychopathological behavior that we do, are not able to understand the hypotheses of the research. Perpetually naïve subjects, they may well be able to give us pure results about very impure behavior. Maybe we could even learn to control it ourselves.
What limitations affect the use of the apes in the laboratory? A growing movement is afoot to end all animal research or at least regulate it much more strictly. In the past, animals of all kinds have been beaten, tortured (not as part of the research but for the amusement of the staff ), abused, neglected, caged without fresh air or exercise, starved, and left to die of infection in uncleaned cages. Clearly such treatment is wrong, and wrong for reasons that have nothing to do with the special qualities of the apes. Civilized people generally acknowledge an obligation to treat all animals humanely-not humanly, but gently, so as not to cause them pain or distress. That general obligation entails at least that animals be fed and watered properly, allowed adequate exercise and companionship, and kept in clean and well-lighted quarters. The obligation applies to pets, dogs, and cats, and to farm animals, as well as to the monkeys and apes kept in captivity for research or for the amusement of our children. (The imperative for the "humane" treatment of animals actually first applied to horses and was much encouraged by nineteenth-century English books for girls, like Anna Sewell's Black Beauty.) The humane perspective asks only that we show mercy and consideration to creatures who share with us the capacity for pain.
Because of the history of, and propensity for, abuse, scientific research that uses animals for its subjects requires enforcement of specific protocols by federal regulation. Such regulation, however, has not prevented studies of unimaginable cruelty-one of which, Thomas Gennarelli's University of Pennsylvania study on head injuries, came to national attention when the = Animal Liberation Front "liberated" a particularly damaging set of videotapes from the laboratory and gave them national exposure.32
Some of the rules developed in the name of humane treatment undermine the scientific purposes for which certain studies are done. When higher mammals are to be used for experimental surgery, for instance, and there is a strong likelihood that the animal will be in pain should it be allowed to regain consciousness, the rules call for the animal to be humanely killed before it wakes up. However, unless the animal is kept alive, it might not be possible to ascertain whether surgery is a success.
But in using apes as subjects of experimentation, humane treatment is not the only issue. With regard to chimpanzees in particular, their very similarity to us raises questions about the way research is conducted. In the major studies of chimpanzee research, especially Roger Fouts's semi-autobiographical account of his life with the chimpanzees, questions of right and humane treatment tend to overlap. He abhors the "prison-like" setting of most experimental labs, roundly condemns the scientists who do research for their own professional purposes, and ends up suggesting that no matter how useful it is, we ought to abandon animal research altogether.
APES IN COURT: SHOULD THEY HAVE THE RIGHTS OF PERSONS?
We may grant that it is important to preserve ecosystems, for environmental reasons. We may also grant that it is important to preserve animals that are useful for research and to treat those animals humanely. But there seems to be more to the apes question than those provisos. As seen in our earlier discussion, in many respects, they are human: they have culture, they react to suffering as humans do, they display a multitude of similar behavioral traits. Should apes be treated as humans? This is the final and great question. Stories always propel the argument. Anecdotes of ape behavior continually grab us where our human sympathy lives. Eugene Linden tells us one of them: Twenty years ago I met a chimpanzee named Bruno. He was one of a group of chimps being taught American Sign Language to determine if apes could communicate with humans. Last year I went to see him again. The experiment is long past, and Bruno was moved in 1982 to a medical laboratory, but he is still using the signs. . . .
Bruno had learned how to talk in the community in which he found himself. Then, the experiment over, his ability to talk was of no further use to the members of that community, so researchers shipped him off to someplace where he could be used as an oversized lab rat to test vaccines or new drugs. But he still wants to talk, to communicate. He is not content with the secure and well-fed life. He is like us humans, and he wants to reach out to humans as they once reached out to him. What right have we to impose isolation on such an animal?
Given Bruno's humanness, should we extend to him, and to his species, the rights of humans? John Blatchford, a British zoologist, suggested as much in 1997. David Pearson, of the Great Ape Project (a systematic international campaign for rights for the great apes, founded in 1993) took up Blatchford's suggestion in January 1998, calling attention to a "paradigm shift over the past 20 years or so in our understanding of the complex emotional and mental lives of the great apes-a complexity that demands we confer the basic rights of life, individual liberty and freedom from torture on all great apes."37 By 1999, the Great Ape Project joined the New Zealand campaign for full "human rights" to apes: to ensure that New Zealand's Animal Welfare bill contained a "clause making nonhuman great apes the first animals in the world with individual, fundamental rights that will stand up in a court of law: the right to life, the right not to suffer cruel or degrading treatment, and the right not to take part in all but the most benign experiments."38 The campaign failed, voted down in the New Zealand parliament in May of that year. Parliament did, however, recommend an end to all experiments involving apes except for the benefit of the apes themselves.
The campaign continues, calling for a United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Great Apes. This declaration would include all the above rights as well as the right not to be "imprisoned" without due process. Due process? The language necessarily causes nervousness, not only among the zookeepers but also among those who carry on research designed to protect the welfare of apes. Must they obtain informed consent in the future?
Primatologist Frans de Waal of the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta argues that according rights to the apes puts us on a "slippery slope" toward the absurd. "[I]f you argue for rights on the basis of continuity between us and the great apes, then you have to argue continuity between apes and monkeys," and so on down to the laboratory rats.40 Philosopher Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation, is less worried about rats obtaining legal rights and wonders whether the slippery slope can't be tilted the other way: "[I]f you deny chimps certain rights, then logically you have to deny intellectually disabled children too." Do we?
Insight magazine decided that the topic was worth a debate and just prior to the New Zealand vote, asked Steven Wise, author of Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals, to defend the affirmative, and David Wagner, professor of constitutional law at Regent University, to defend the negative, on the question, "Should great apes have some of the legal rights of persons?" Wagner's opposition rests flatly on the assertion that Humans are nonarbitrarily different. There is a remarkable consensus of both religion and philosophy on this uniqueness. . . . Judaism was the first to proclaim that god made man in His image and that He revealed Himself to mankind. Later on, Christianity proclaimed a radical redemption for all humankind, rooted in the claim that God Himself had taken on human nature . . . Kant . . . taught that the capacity of human beings to give and demand reasons for their actions was the basis of their rights and duties. And finally, our Founding Fathers declared that the American experiment was based on certain self-evident truths, beginning with the truth that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Notice the constant copackaging of certain ideas: human uniqueness, capacity for reason-giving and special divine creation.
The claim is reinforced with abundant quotation from Scripture and Shakespeare. Steven Wise rests his position on the extensive similarities between humans and great apes and on the appropriateness of including rights for apes in the wave of rights-consciousness that has come into being across the world in the last half century. The scope of these rights has expanded inexorably and irreversibly. At one point we (of Western civilization) were willing to confine political rights to a small circle of propertied white men-the "men," by the way, of the quote from Jefferson in Wagner's piece. The natural expansion now includes the whole human race, including those who have no capacity whatsoever for reason-giving. There is no inconsistency, Wise insists, between arguing that the great apes should be accorded certain rights of persons now and claiming that not every life form need be given the same rights. The ultimate limits of equal justice will have to be determined by the legal and political process as the common law and constitutional interpretation evolve. Our inability to know or foresee the ultimate outcome of that process does not force us to tolerate the manifest injustice of denying basic rights to beings for whom we know they are appropriate.
What does it take to make a person? Note that rightful treatment does not presuppose or require "rationality," in any usual sense. Retarded persons, after all, are not "rational," and are not extended all the rights of citizenship, such as the right to vote. But they still have rights, in fact, they are offered even more protections than average citizens because they cannot protect themselves as the able-bodied can.
The jury is still out on the question. We should note that the question of animal rights in this sense-the question of whether the higher mammals, especially the great apes, should be accorded the rights of humans-is rarely debated unemotionally. The people who believe that apes should enjoy the rights of humans tend to get irrational in the presence of people who don't. They come on like John Brown pleading for the African Americans, like Lawrence of Arabia pleading for the Arabs, and very like the "pro-life" faction, the foes of abortion, pleading for the lives of the unborn children. Animal rights proponents honestly believe that they are pleading not for some special interest or loony sentimental indulgence but for the extension in our law of rights to creatures who are fully entitled to them. They will not give up, and there is a strong possibility that this conflict will become violent in the years to come.
ECOTOURISM AND RESPECT
Suppose we decide that apes are, indeed, sufficiently like ourselves to deserve human rights. What follows? Should we treat them the way we treat human beings with limited mental capacities-lock them in homes or institutions, with staff to make sure they dress in the morning, use the bathroom properly, and eat healthful food until they die? God forbid. The central right for any creature with rights is to live according to its own laws with members of its own community, which right the apes surely will never enjoy if we dragoon them into becoming members of human society. (Whether or not they would survive such "care" is another question, one that need not be answered.) That central right alone entails that the apes be left in the wild and left alone, their habitat protected from infringement and their communities respected as we would respect any human community. In short, the implications of full rights for apes are the same as the conclusions of the conservationists.We must work to preserve the forests where the apes live, we must end all poaching of "bushmeat" immediately, and we must structure our encounters with all the apes to reflect the respect owed persons with rights, living according to their own customs and laws.
Meanwhile, such respect will carry out the environmentalist agenda of preservation of an endangered species. For the species is complex. We do not really preserve the species by capturing sufficient numbers of the apes and putting them in safe cages to eat and breed. For the apes, like ourselves, do not exist merely as biological organisms but as social animals under evolved systems of governance. We don't want the only apes left to be those in captivity. We want them to be wild, to continue to evolve, to anchor their ecosystems, and to show us a unique way of living.
An agenda of leaving the apes in the forest, protecting the forest by law, and enforcing that law against poachers, satisfies two criteria for sound public policy: it is environmentally beneficial and it is ethically correct. But for such policies to be truly sustainable, they need to be economically viable too. The best way to set up an industry to sustain the apes is through enabling "ecotourism," entertaining tourists who want to visit the apes in the wild. After all, tourists have been traveling to Africa and Asia to see the animals for several centuries. Ecotourists do not come to shoot, but to enjoy and to learn. When ecotourism is established and running well, the tourist dollars support the local economy. For this reason it is in everyone's interest to make sure that the animals are not harmed or frightened, so that the tourists will enjoy themselves and will come back, bringing more dollars. Local officials will also ensure that the habitat is protected for that reason; as noted earlier, the presence of the apes is becoming the best protection a forest could have.
There is some interest now in promoting international policies (debt relief is foremost among them) to encourage nations in the developing world to protect the remnants of the forest where apes may live. Even those who promote such policies acknowledge that under the present system of global sovereignty, it would be up to every nation to decide for itself whether funds allocated to development should be designated to the protection of the forests. The attitude displayed by governments of developing nations is not encouraging on the matter. But there is some hope.
Local experiments have worked well, on occasion. Richard Ruggiero, a wildlife biologist in the Office of International Affairs of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, recounts a tale of a lowland gorilla in a village in the Congo that contains many of the elements of hope and caution that attend the effort to create ecotourism. Named "Ebobo" (gorilla; pronounced "ay-bobo") by the Bon Coin villagers, this solitary male had adopted the custom of frequenting the village, especially on the trail where the children went to school. His apparent motive was curiosity, nothing more. (He was too young to challenge the older males of the area for the right to a territory and a family.) The villagers immediately called for a gun to shoot him. Since they considered gorillas to be at once very dangerous and very good to eat, shooting him seemed the best course of action. Ruggiero, assigned to that village for the purpose of studying the wildlife in a local pond, spent hours-months-talking to various groups of the villagers, trying to keep Ebobo off the menu and out of the gunsights. (The gorilla had survived his first visit only because no one could find a gun.) In the end, the most persuasive protectors were the shamans, who pointed out that since Ebobo was not acting like normal gorillas (who avoid human habitation as much as they can), he might well be a returned spirit of the dead and should be treated with respect. As the villagers got used to him, however, problems arose of a different sort; they started wandering very close to him, teasing him, while the children threw stones at him to see what he would do.As before and with equally patient urgency, Ruggiero had to persuade the villagers at length that although Ebobo was not dangerous unless provoked, he was an accident waiting to happen if teased, and they should leave him alone. At the writing of the article, the villagers had learned to let Ebobo wander where he would, and he was doing no harm-even making his way through cornfields in a way that did not damage the crop. And the village was becoming someplace special because of the resident gorilla-a place worth going to, which it seems, is the minimum precondition for the success of ecotourism. In the case of Ebobo, it took a bit of education, but it worked.
Zoologist John Blatchford points out that without the help of the local communities, no protection will work, but thinks the enterprise possible. A recent experiment in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest of Uganda-home to 300 of the 650 mountain gorillas alive in 1995-has already shown how this might work. Local subsistence farmers were given limited access to the forest perimeter and allowed to harvest some sustainable resources. They were also permitted to keep their bees there and use the mineral springs. . . . In the experiment, an estimated $30,000 per year, 10% of the revenue generated by tourists visiting the park, was given to the communities living around the forest. Given that a Ugandan family of six must manage on $526 per year, the extra income to the farming community represented a great sum of money, and gave the community an incentive to protect the revenue-earning gorillas.
These people were, in effect, being paid by the gorillas for their help in maintaining the park.
Such efforts should be conjoined, Blatchford argued, with efforts to establish protections for apes based on their rights as persons, as discussed in the last section.
Ecotourism will allow apes to stay in their wild habitats and preserve the ecosystem. It will allow, possibly, selective recruitment of individuals from prospering groups for research and possibly (see Concluding Questions, below) for exhibit. The respect engendered by wide experience with apes in their native communities will ensure that to the extent that they are removed from those communities, kept for display, or used in research, they will be treated well. And their fundamental right-the ability to run their own communities according to their own laws-will be honored.