Peter Singer
Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. His books include Practical Ethics, One World, and, most recently, The Life You Can Save.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations. It was founded on 16 October 1945 in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada. In 1951 its...
Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. His books include Practical Ethics, One World, and, most recently, The Life You...
Arnaud Gossement is a lawyer at the Paris Bar for environmental law and energy. He has a PhD in Law from Paris I University Panthéon-Sorbonne and he is a lecturer at Sciences Po Paris. He has also...
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Dr. Ahmed Djoghlaf is the Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity established by the United Nations. An Algerian national, Dr. Djoghlaf has pursued a impressive diplomatic...
George Monbiot is a well-known investigation reporter and columnist for the British newspaper “The Guardian” as well as a member of the BBC Wildlife magazine’s advisory board. He is also the author...
Susan Lieberman is Deputy Director of The Pew Environment Group and head of the Cites Pew Delegation at the CITES summit in Doha.
Julia Marton-Lefèvre is the Director General of International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).Photo: IUCN
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Carl Zimmer travaille comme journaliste spécialiste des questions scientifiques et environnementales. Il a rédigé 6 livres et s’intéresse à des domaines aussi variés que la recherche dans les...
Silvia Ribeiro et Kathy Jo Wetter travaillent toutes deux en tant que chercheuses pour l'Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC Group).
New Scientist was founded in 1956, this internationally-focused weekly British magazine aims at giving readers exhaustive information on recent worldwide developments in science from a scientific,...
Brendan Moyle is a conservationist from New Zealand. Long ago, he used to study tiny pseudoscorpions as a zoologist. He got a PhD in economics because it was rather obvious that a lot of conservation...
New Scientist was founded in 1956, this internationally-focused weekly British magazine aims at giving readers exhaustive information on recent worldwide developments in science from a scientific,...
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Jean-Michel SEVERINO has been CEO of France’s international development agency (AFD) since 2001. After graduating from the Ecole Nationale d’Administration and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de...
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François RAMADE, an agricultural engineer who holds a doctoral post-graduate degree in science, is a professor emeritus at the Université Paris-Sud (Orsay). He is a former President of the Société...
New Scientist was founded in 1956, this internationally-focused weekly British magazine aims at giving readers exhaustive information on recent worldwide developments in science from a scientific,...
Solenn Honorine holds degrees from Sciences Po (Bordeaux), the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and the Ecole Supérieure de Journalisme in Lille. Ms. Honorine is a French freelance...
Janet LARSEN is the Director of Research at the Earth Policy Institute (a non-profit environmental research organisation) and holds a degree in Earth Systems from Stanford University. Formerly a...
A Planet for All Apes
11/08/2011 8:40 am
Two new movies released this month – one a science-fiction blockbuster, the other a revealing documentary – raise the issue of our relations with our closest non-human relatives, the great apes. Both dramatize insights and lessons that should not be ignored.
Rupert Wyatt’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes is the seventh film in a series based on Pierre Boule’s 1963 novel, Planet of the Apes, about a world populated by highly intelligent simians. Publicity for the new film claims that it is “the first live-action film in the history of movies to star, and be told from the point of view of, a sentient animal.” Yet no live apes were used.
Instead, “performance capture technology,” originally invented for the movie Avatar, enables a human actor, Andy Serkis, to play the role of the chimpanzee Caesar, not by dressing in a chimp suit, but by having every gesture and facial movement, even the twitch of an eyebrow, transformed into the movement of an ape.
When I spoke with Wyatt last month, he acknowledged that there were practical reasons for not using real apes in his movie. But he also understood the ethical issue. “There are things I didn’t want to be involved in,” he told me. “To get apes to do anything you want them to do, you have to dominate them; you have to manipulate them into performing. That’s exploitative.”
Wyatt’s reluctance to join in the exploitation of great apes is understandable, given that the film itself tells the story of apes rising up in response to oppression from dominant humans. The central human character, Will Rodman (played by James Franco), is a scientist seeking a cure for Alzheimer’s disease who experiments on apes.
Many films would have glorified a scientist seeking such a goal, and treated the use of animals for that purpose as obviously justified. Rise of the Planet of the Apes, however, portrays Rodman as, in Franco’s words, “a cold, isolated person.” Only when Rodman’s superiors cancel his experiments and he takes home Caesar, an infant chimpanzee, does the scientist begin to care about others. The plot then takes another turn when Caesar becomes too big and aggressive to live in a human home, and is taken to what is supposed to be a primate sanctuary, but is in fact a dumping ground for unwanted apes, run by humans who display cruelty to the captive animals.
As far as the treatment of apes is concerned, much of the film is firmly grounded in reality, as a viewing of Project Nim, a documentary based on Elizabeth Hess’s book Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would be Human, clearly demonstrates. Nim was born in 1973, in a primate research facility in Oklahoma, and was taken from his mother when he was only ten days old, to be used in a sign-language experiment.
Reared as part of a human family, he learned to use more than 100 signs from American Sign Language, the language used by Deaf Americans. But he was taken from his first human family and handed over to other teachers with whom he did not have the same kind of bond. He grew stronger and more aggressive and began biting his teachers.
Herbert Terrace, the Columbia University psychologist who was directing the project, decided to end it and sent Nim back to the primate facility in Oklahoma. There, the pampered chimpanzee – who, when asked to sort photos of humans and apes, put his own photo among the humans – was locked in a cage with other chimps. He demonstrated his view of that situation by signing “out” to passing humans. Nim suffered various other vicissitudes – and narrowly escaped being infected with hepatitis as part of a medical experiment – until he was eventually released to an animal sanctuary, where he died in 2000.
In 1993, Paola Cavalieri and I founded The Great Ape Project, an organization dedicated to the idea of recognizing that great apes have a moral status befitting their nature as self-aware beings who are capable of thought and have rich and deep emotional lives. At a minimum, they should have the rights to life, liberty, and protection from torture that we grant to all members of our own species, regardless of their intellectual abilities.
In the intervening years, that idea has made steady progress. Since 2010, the European Union has essentially banned the use of great apes in experiments. Experiments on great apes are now either banned or severely restricted in New Zealand, Australia, and Japan. In the United States, a bipartisan group of members of Congress is supporting legislation to end the use of chimpanzees in invasive research. In Spain in 2008, a parliamentary resolution urged the government to grant some basic legal rights to great apes, but the Spanish government has yet to implement it.
Perhaps the release of these two very different films will lead to a further push to bring great apes within the circle of beings with moral and legal rights. In that way, our closest relatives could serve to bridge the moral gulf that we have dug between ourselves and other animals.
Peter Singer
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011.
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