Who Am I and If So How Many? (19 page)

If we factor human feelings into the equation on the issue broached at the beginning of this chapter, the question becomes: is it defensible for us to eat animals that we could not bring ourselves to kill with our own two hands? Western civilization today has many of us feeling that it would be very difficult to make ourselves slaughter a pig or a calf – assuming we even knew how to do it. Many people do not have the same aversion to killing fish, and most people seem to have no qualms about ‘killing’ chicken eggs. People evidently agonized less over the issue of killing animals in the past, and this is still the case in many less industrialized nations today. Morality is more a reflection of our cultural sensibility than an outgrowth of an abstract definition. And the West appears to be experiencing an unprecedented resistance to killing animals at this time, which is why the meatpacking industry packages a knuckle of veal to make it look as unlike a calf as possible. We aren’t horrified by the idea of eating packaged meat because we haven’t experienced the suffering of the animals directly. Our mirror neurons fire at the sound of a calf bellowing in the slaughterhouse, but they do not react at the sight of a packaged cutlet in the supermarket.

It is up to each individual to decide whether logical arguments should dissuade him or her from eating meat. If we think it over
rationally, we are likely to conclude that the case against eating meat – both utilitarian and moral – is more persuasive. The choice to forgo steak, hamburgers, and roast chicken altogether or simply to eat meat less often depends in large part on how strongly we are sensitized or are open to being sensitized on this issue.

This is the opening passage of a report by legal scholar Steven Wise, who teaches animal rights law at Harvard Law School and other universities, about the laboratory chimpanzee Jerom, who was one of eleven great apes kept in isolation in a windowless cell made of steel and concrete in the Chimpanzee Infectious Disease building of the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center at Emory University, where he died. Wise, who is president of the Center for the Expansion of Fundamental Rights in Boston, has
championed
the cause of extending three essential human rights to the great apes: the inalienable right to life, the right to bodily integrity, and the right to free personal development.

The call to grant chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans fundamental human rights began seventeen years ago, in a movement initiated by Peter Singer and the Italian animal rights activist Paola Cavalieri in 1993, when they published a book that functioned as a manifesto of a newly formed organization:
The
Great Ape Project
. Their view of primates is clearly formulated in their book: Apes have a social and emotional life similar to that of man, and their intelligence closely approaches ours, yet they do not enjoy full legal protection.

Were Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri onto something? Do we need to change our relationship with the great apes? Back in the eighteenth century, Carl Linnaeus of Sweden, the inventor of scientific nomenclature, had initially classified man and chimpanzee,
Homo sapiens
and
Homo troglodytes
, as members of the same genus. Two hundred thirty years later, it turned out that he was not entirely wrong. In 1984, Charles Sibley and Jon Ahlquist, both molecular biologists at Yale, published the results of their long-term DNA studies of humans and apes, results that are still considered core scientific knowledge. The genetic makeup of orangutans and humans, the studies found, differs by about 3.6 percent; gorillas and humans by about 2.3 percent; and
chimpanzees
and humans (and also bonobos and humans) by about 1.6 percent. These abstract numbers really jump out when we consider that the difference between chimpanzee and gorilla is more than 2 percent and that the two gibbon species under examination differ from each other by about 2.2 percent. The likely genetic difference between
Homo sapiens
and
Pan troglodytes
(as the chimpanzee is called today) is astonishingly small: 98.4 percent of the human DNA is chimpanzee DNA. The two species are about as closely related as horses and donkeys. On a biomolecular level they are closer than mice are to rats or camels are to llamas. In light of these results, the evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond at UCLA has advocated a new classification system for the apes. ‘Now, future taxonomists may see things from the chimpanzees’ perspective,’ Diamond argues, ‘a weak dichotomy between slightly higher apes
(the
three
chimpanzees, including the ‘human chimpanzee’) and slightly lower apes (gorillas, orangutans, gibbons). The traditional distinction between ‘apes’ (defined as chimps, gorillas, etc.) and humans misrepresents the facts.’ The significance of the biological facts seems overwhelming. Can there be any doubt that great apes and humans are nearly identical and hence must be treated in more or less the same way?

Doubts do exist, and they come from evolutionary biology itself. Genetic proximity is not the only biological criterion that comes into play. From a phylogenetic point of view, crocodiles and pigeons are more closely related than crocodiles and tortoises. Even so, biologists include crocodiles and tortoises in the reptile family, but not pigeons. These classifications factor in adaptation to the environment and way of life as well as the degree of relationship. But to what degree do apes and humans differ in this respect? Maybe the German zoologist Alfred Brehm was right when he commented in the mid-nineteenth century, ‘Our aversion to the apes is based on both their physical and their mental abilities. They resemble man both too much and too little.’

Japanese ethologists in the 1950s and 1960s claimed to have found evidence of cultural activity in monkeys when they observed a colony of red-faced macaques on Koshima Island. Without human guidance, several juvenile macaques learned behaviors that had never been observed among apes living in the wild. Highly publicized studies reported that the macaques washed sweet potatoes before eating them, removed sand from wheat by floating the mixture in the water, and tapped new food sources, such as seaweed and shellfish. Significantly, these practices were copied by other members of the colony and passed on to future generations ‘culturally.’ And great apes have exhibited still more evidence of cultural behavior. The famous British primatologist Jane Goodall reported in the late 1960s that chimpanzees in nature use crumpled leaves to suck water from narrow crevices, fish for termites with blades of grass, and even strip the leaves from twigs to fashion tools. When Jane Goodall reported these findings to the
paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, she received a now legendary telegram in reply: ‘Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.’

The most striking and significant difference in comparing man and ape is obviously human language. No one seriously disputes that apes use a complex system of sounds to communicate. Apes also have Wernicke’s area in the temporal lobe, which is linked to understanding words, and Broca’s area in the prefrontal cortex, which is used to produce language and grammar. But why aren’t they able to use a sophisticated oral language to communicate the way humans do? The answer is quite simple. As we saw earlier (in ‘The Fly in the Bottle,’ p. 78), the secret of human language lies in the larynx, which is situated several centimeters lower in humans than in all other primates, including the great apes. Most likely there was a reciprocal influence between the changes in the laryngeal area of the early
Homo sapiens
and the subsequent development of the brain centers for symbolic communication, a process that did not occur in the other primates.

Even so, there have been some successes in language
experiments
. In the 1960s, Beatrice and Robert Gardner at the University of Nevada made headlines when they taught two chimpanzees, Washoe and Lucy, Ameslan, an American sign language used by the hearing-impaired. The Gardners reported that the two young chimpanzees learned a vocabulary of several hundred words. Great apes are capable of using abstract symbols for objects, situations, and actions, and associating them with specific people, animals, and items, as the psychologist Sue
Savage-Rumbaugh
noted in the 1980s while experimenting with a bonobo named Kanzi. Within the space of two years, Kanzi mastered a keyboard with 256 word symbols and used it routinely to make requests, confirm facts, re-enact events, choose among options, or express feelings. Moreover, Kanzi reacted to several hundred words of spoken English. Experiments by Lyn White Miles at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga yielded comparable results for orangutans.

All these achievements, though, are far surpassed by Koko, a female gorilla in Woodside, California, south of San Francisco. After twenty-five years of intensive training, Koko has mastered more than a thousand American Sign Language concepts and understands about two thousand English words. In 1998, the Internet carried the first live chat with Koko. Her sentences ranged between three and six words long, included references to time, and even featured jokes. Koko’s IQ, which has been professionally tested, falls between 70 and 95. (One hundred points is considered normal human intelligence.) Koko can rhyme words – ‘do’ and ‘blue,’ ‘squash’ and ‘wash’ – and invent metaphors, such as ‘horse tiger’ for a zebra and ‘elephant baby’ for a Pinocchio doll. She responds to the question ‘Why Koko not be like other people?’ with this clever and accurate reply: ‘Koko gorilla.’ In more than three decades of regular training, Koko, who is now advanced in years, has acquired a greater virtuosity in human language than any other nonhuman living being to date. Learning from Koko means learning something about the psychology of gorillas in general, according to the zoologist and animal rights activist Francine ‘Penny’ Patterson. For example, what might gorillas say when they are happy? ‘Gorilla hug.’ And how might gorillas retaliate when someone scolds them? With the insult ‘dirty toilet devil.’

Koko’s successes are possible only under isolated laboratory conditions. Gorillas living in the wild or the zoo have other things to do besides worry about human grammar. Still, to all
appearances
, gorillas are more intelligent than their natural orientation to their habitat and finding food would require. As with humans, primate intelligence arises from the needs and necessities of social behavior. Of all the challenges in the primate world, the rules governing hordes are the most complex. The intelligence of the great apes arises from a social structure, which shows why any language experiments involving great apes are problematic. Only the meanings that occur within or in reference to their realm can be learned; everything else remains beyond their range by nature, just as people are stymied by much of what great apes do.  
Intelligence is thus closely tied to species-specific social interaction. Still, experiments with great apes measure their achievements not by their own yardstick but by the yardstick of the human species. Seen in this way, their linguistic prowess approximates that of a two-year-old, and their mathematical abilities, as shown in an in-depth study of the female chimpanzee Ai in Kyoto published a few years ago, can rise to the achievement level of preschool children. It became evident that when great apes learn to use language and the numerical system, they forgo many of their normal species-specific forms of behavior and communication.

Meanwhile, humans are not defined solely by their ability to use language and perform mathematical operations. Babies and adults with severe mental disabilities may display minimal capabilities in these areas, but they rightly enjoy complete moral protection – which is virtually always denied to the great apes. Paradoxically, the fact that chimpanzees and gorillas display mathematical and linguistic prowess in the laboratory is regarded as their ticket of admission to the human moral community, yet humans themselves have no need to prove intelligence in order to receive moral consideration.

Even so, the Great Ape Project harps on the intellectual achievements of great apes, arguing that not only genes but also fundamental qualities of the mind such as self-awareness,
intelligence
, complex forms of communication, and social systems make great apes eligible to join a moral community that comprises ‘humans and non-human great apes.’ The admission criterion is the preference utilitarian concept of the ‘person,’ and because great apes have desires and preferences and pursue interests just as humans do, they are considered ‘persons.’ They are therefore entitled not only to unconditional protection but also to basic rights, such as the right not to be exploited in animal experiments or be put on display in the zoo or at the circus. They also have the right to a natural habitat, somewhat analogously to the rights of an endangered culture. According to the Great Ape Project, the United Nations, rather than wildlife conservationists, needs to step up to protect them.

There are obvious objections to demands of this kind. Does it really make sense to speak of great apes’ ‘rights’ to freedom from bodily harm, freedom to live up to their full potential, and so forth, without at the same time thinking about how they might fulfill their accompanying ‘responsibilities’? How, for example, should great apes, once integrated into the human community, pay taxes or complete their military service? All irony aside, we still need to ask what happens if an ape violates human rights that it did not accept on its own behalf but that were granted to it. How would we judge ‘war’ among chimpanzees or ‘murder’ and ‘cannibalism’ among great apes? What would be done with an ape that injures or even kills a human – would it be sentenced according to the legal guidelines for humans?

A second sticking point in the Great Ape Project is its logical inconsistency. On the one hand, animal rights activists are intent on blurring the distinction between man and animal, which is branded ‘speciesism.’ A criterion of morality, it is argued, is not that man belongs to the human species, but that man has complex sensations and possesses at least a basic set of interests. People, it is claimed, have to learn not to use their own species as a measure, but instead must accept every living creature that fulfills the condition of being a ‘person.’ That is all well and good, but in that case, how can the Great Ape Project argue that great apes are entitled to preferential moral treatment precisely because they are the animals most similar to humans? This is the reason some animal rights activists consider the Great Ape Project far too weak, inconsistent, or ‘anthropocentric.’ Like conservative critics who reject the whole idea of shifting the line between man and animal, they ask what would be gained from setting the new line between orangutan and gibbon instead of between man and chimpanzee.

Advocates of the Great Ape Project stress the symbolic nature of their demands. Peter Singer would like to see the line shifted beyond the gibbon and have rights granted to all animals that experience pain and pleasure. In this view, the call for human rights for the great apes is only the first step, and it has already
enjoyed its first successes. In October 1999, the government of New Zealand granted all great apes there – about thirty in all – an inalienable right to life. Since 1997, Great Britain has also outlawed animal experiments with great apes. Could these developments signal the beginning of a major shift in thinking and the end of the age-old distinction between animal and man? Maybe it is time for cognitive science to take over from traditional ethics. As we have seen, brain research has established entirely new hierarchies in the relationship between impulses and reflexes, reactions and
processing
. We now know that reason is only one limited component of human consciousness. Most things in our world are
prelinguistically
determined, as a result of capabilities that man and other animals have in common. The idea that reason is a distinguishing feature of human behavior is pure fiction. Classifying the great apes as closer to humans or to animals is a question of definition. As the Japanese primatologist Toshisada Nishida sums up this issue: ‘Chimpanzees are charming in their own right. They are inferior to us in some aspects, but superior in others.’ In any case, the current state of knowledge about humans and great apes has forced us to adjust our thinking, whatever the fine print of the law. It is clear that the more we learn from brain research, the nearer we move to our closest living relatives. The results of behavioral psychology are quickly being dwarfed by neurological advances. Perhaps it’s a pity: behavioral psychology has coaxed out wise, witty, and soothing insights like this one offered by Koko, which gives the lie to the common preconception that animals have no notion of death. ‘Where do gorillas go when they die?’ Patterson’s colleague Maureen Sheehan asked Koko. Koko thought it over, then pointed to three signs: ‘Comfortable hole bye.’