AT: “Zoos Key to Research for Animal Welfare”

AT: “Zoos Key to Research for Animal Welfare”

Charles Siebert, Freelance Writer and Director, July 24, 2005, New York Times Magazine, p. 61

In fact, our increasing appreciation of the chimpanzee’s bioevolutionary complexity may be bringing us to the point where the most significant knowledge we can gain from chimps is best obtained simply by letting them be themselves, either in what’s left of their natural habitat or in our best re-creations of it. In a sense, the saga of our keeping of the chimps has now come full circle. The chimps themselves have become the edifying mirror of the old ape houses. They are offering us the best view into our own nature. Indeed, much of the work now being done with chimps is focused on behavioral and neurological science, where researchers from various disciplines, from evolutionary biology to neurology, are often engaged in observational studies in which he healthier and more natural the environment is for the chimp, the more reliable and useful are the results.
RESEARCH ON APES WILL SHIFT TO PARTICIPANT-OBSERVATION IN NATURAL HABITATS RATHER THAN IN LABORATORIES

Barbara Noske, Researcher, Department of Social Philosophy, University of Amsterdam, 1994, The Great Ape Project: equality beyond humanity, eds. Cavalieri & Singer, p. 265

Anthropology is very much the science of the “other”. Instead of a subject-object approach it possesses a pre-eminently subject-subject method: participant observation of, and living with, people in other societies and other cultures. In contrast to laboratory scientists, who are content to register and measure from without, anthropologists will want to study from within, as much as they possibly can. They will have to immerse themselves in the other’s sphere, sharing their people’s daily life, learning their language as well as their habits and views. Ideally they will seek to become Indian with the Indians. Participant observation is virtually an exercise in empathy.

AT: “Kritik of the Term ‘Animal’”

Peter Singer, Professor of Philosophy Monash University, 1995, Animal Liberation, p. xiv

In the popular mind the term “animal” lumps together beings as different as oysters and chimpanzees, while placing a gulf between chimpanzees and humans, although our relationship to those apes is much closer than the oyster’s. Since there exists no other short term for the nonhuman animals, I have in the title of this book and elsewhere in these pages, had to use “animal” as if it did not include the human animal. This is a regrettable lapse from the standards of revolutionary purity but it seems necessary for effective communication. Occasionally, however, to remind you that this is a matter of convenience only, I shall use longer, more accurate models of referring to what was once called “the brute creation.” In other cases, too, I have tried to avoid language which tends to degrade animals or disguise the nature of the food we eat.

**Great Apes Project Aff**

Great Apes Denied Basic Liberty Rights Now

Joan Dunayer, Animal Rights Activist, 2004, Speciesism, p. 32

Jane Goodhall, World Renowned Expert on Chimpanzees, 1994, The Great Ape Project: equality beyond humanity, eds. Cavalieri & Singer, p. 16

If we could simply argue that it is morally wrong to abuse, physically or psychologically, any rational, thinking being with the capacity to suffer and feel pain, to know fear and despair, it would be easy—we have already demonstrated the existence of these abilities in chimpanzees and the other great apes. But this, it seems, is not enough. We come up, again and again, against that non-existent barrier that is, for so many, so real—the barrier between “man” and “beast.” It was erected in ignorance, as a result of the arrogant assumption, unfortunately shared by vast numbers of people, that humans are superior to nonhumans in every way. Even if nonhuman beings are rational and can suffer and feel pain and despair, it does not matter how we treat them provided it is for the good of humanity—which apparently includes our own pleasure. They are not members of that exclusive club that opens its doors only to bona fide Homo sapiens.

This is why we find double standards in the legislation regarding medical research. Thus while it is illegal to perform medical experiments on a brain-dead human being who can neither speak nor feel, it is legally acceptable to perform them on an alert, feeling and highly intelligent chimpanzee. Conversely, while it is legally permitted to imprison an innocent chimpanzee, for life, in a steel-barred, barren laboratory cell measuring five foot by five foot by seven foot, a psychopathic mass murderer must be more spaciously confined. And these double standards exist only because the brain-dead patient and the mass murderer are human. They have souls and we cannot, of course, prove that chimpanzees have souls. The fact we cannot prove that we have souls, or that chimps do not, is apparently beside the point.