Great apes are magnificent animals. They are intelligent. They are closest to us genetically. But they are not us.
I bring this up because a professor (of course!) named John C. Matani undercut a perfectly righteous call for us to work harder to protect the world’s threatened apes by descending into cliche anthropomorphizing. From “Fearing a Planet Without Apes:”
I have been lucky to study all five kinds of apes during 33 years of fieldwork in Africa and Asia. When I look into the eyes of an ape, something stares back at me that seems familiar. Perhaps it is a shock of recognition, or a thoughtfulness not seen in the eyes of a frog, bird or cat. The penetrating stare makes me wonder, “What is this individual thinking?”
Nothing. They aren’t thinking anything. They aren’t rational in the way we are. Apes are magnificent animals in their own right. We don’t need this kind of “apes are people too” pap to be persuaded to fund protection efforts.
That got me to thinking of the other times I have read similar nonsense in our supposedly most learned publications. Take, for example, this surreality about the supposed moral sense of hyenas by professor (of course!) Debra Blum, in a book review published in The New Scientist:
I wish they’d attempted to answer that tricky question that nags at me whenever I study a captive animal. As I stand on the unrestricted side of a fence watching a hyena, and it watches me back with deep, wary eyes, which one of us is really the moral animal?
We are. Hyenas are amoral. Even though they often eat their prey alive, there is nothing wrong with that because they are not moral agents.
And this one in which NYT writer and author of, Charles Siebert, has whales pondering the nature of those strange humans published in the New York Times Magazine:
Somehow the more we learn about whales, the more we’re coming to appreciate the sublimely discomfiting reality that a kind of parallel “us” has long been out there roaming the oceans’ depths, succumbing to our assaults. Indeed, when that baby gray calf bobbed up out of the sea and held there that first morning, staring at me with his huge, slow-blinking eye, it felt to me as if he were taking one impossibly long and quizzical look in the mirror.
No it was not.
And we mustn’t forget New York Times science columnist Natalie Angier ludicrously writing about plant ethics:
It’s a small daily tragedy that we animals must kill to stay alive. Plants are the ethical autotrophs here, the ones that wrest their meals from the sun. Don’t expect them to boast: they’re too busy fighting to survive
Please. Apes are not people. Hyenas don’t have a moral sense. Whales don’t ponder the nature of man. And plant photosynthesis has nothing whatsoever to do with ethics. The cause of protecting flora and fauna is not helped by such–and many other examples I could give–sophomoric anthropomorphic assaults on human exceptionalism.
August 22nd, 2011 | 1:06 pm
I find it is very sad and infuriating that so many will anthropomorphize everything except actual human life in its early and late stages. It seems fashionable now to project human qualities onto every other species except our own.
August 22nd, 2011 | 9:00 pm
“They aren’t thinking anything. They aren’t rational in the way we are.”
And of course you know that to be the absolute truth, right? I mean, you’re able to make that definitive statement that apes can’t think. Well, maybe “not in the way we do” — so to your way of thinking that makes it OK to exploit them (as long as we do it painlessly and for a “good” reason, such as human benefit). I think that sums up your position pretty well. Now all you need to do is decide why one kind of DNA is good while another that is 97+% identical isn’t. Without all that mystical BS about “moral sense.” Really, Wesley, taken to its logical conclusion an ape deserves less consideration than Adolf Eichmann because, after all, the Fuhrer was a human with a moral sense, while a mere animal can’t knowingly be complicit in murdering millions of people. Gee, that kind of “speciesism” is barely one cut above the moral code of 19th century slave-owners.
HW
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
August 22nd, 2011 at 9:18 pm
Yes, Eichmann deserved greater consideration than any animal. Like being held accountable for crmes against humanity. A chimp can’t be held to such a reckonilng. For example, when one killed a human baby a year or so ago at a refuge, there was no thought of punishment, only safety. It was not destroyed despite the terrible harm caused.
jesme Reply:
August 23rd, 2011 at 9:03 am
Actually, I agree that Eichmann is worth more than an animal. But I’m confused about Mr. Smith’s flat assertion that apes “are not rational in the way we are.” Yes, that’s clearly true, or they’d be driving BMWs and sipping lattes. They aren’t rational “the way we are.” But mightn’t they, in some sense, be pretty close to rational “the way we are?” Is it a difference of degree or kind? How can we know? How can Mr. Smith claim to know?
Jespren Reply:
August 24th, 2011 at 11:37 am
@jesme, I have to say, to me, the difference between human thought, rational, and sentient in comparision to animal thought, rational, or self-awareness is that humanity understands good and evil while animals do not. More over animals not only don’t understand good verses evil they don’t even have the ability to understand it. Humanity can sit around debating the relative good or ill in an action, thought, or idea while even the most intelligent animals have no such cognisent (sp? Cognacent, cognasent?) ability. To me the pertinent difference between animal and man is the knowledge of good and evil. While certainly some creatures do think rationally, like a raven contemplating how to get at food (if you haven’t read any of the recent studies on how intelligent ravens are you should), the morality of the situation is far beyond them, while humanity in toto is capable of and continually does weigh actions against moral good or ill.
August 23rd, 2011 | 11:09 am
I have to say that you’re unfairly singling out Debra Blum for one comment that she likely meant to be nothing more than thought-provoking. She wrote “The Monkey Wars” which I found to be a remarkably even-handed examination of the conflict between scientists and animal rights activists. I knew she nailed it when she was criticized by both sides.
She also wrote “Love at Goon Park” which extensively covered the work of Harry Harlow, another prime AR target, and took some flack from the AR’s for “glorifying” him.
So please don’t take that remark as representative of her views. In my opinion she’s an excellent and highly objective journalist.
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