Editor's Note: Peter Singer is professor of bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. His books include Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, The Ethics of What We Eat, and The Life You Can Save. For more from Singer, visit Project Syndicate's website, or check it out on Facebook and Twitter.
MELBOURNE – 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.
The views expressed are solely those of Peter Singer. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011.
© 2011 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Apes are intelligent animals! Maybe we could learn from them!
Like the one in office...
You are a stupid racist bigot. To compare you to a chimpanzee would be to insult the chimp.
WT??? I swear I'm gonna meet one of you racist bloggers and whoop ur f$$$ng a$$!! Funny how the comment moderator doesn't ban mutha#u@kers like this!!
All the anti-evolution idiots unwilling to admit they're genetically closer to a chimp than a modern man
hmmmmmmm I guest you are looking in a mirror.. you idiot.
We ARE Apes
Doug is right. We are apes. We are the smartest and most successful – the ramifications of that are out there for all to see.
It is always, in any culture, unethical to involve any sentient being research without his/her informed consent. If a person doesn't speak your language, you must get a translator. If a person doesn't hear, you must get a sign language interpreter. If a person is developmentally challenged in some way, he must have an advocate or he cannot participate at all.
If we, as humans, are too challenged to learn the language of the great apes in a way to obtain informed consent, then it follows that it is unethical to allow them to participate in research projects without adequate advocacy.
The challenge is not whether they will ever be "human" but whether we can ever be "ape"
Both of these movies are important (as well as entertaining)! What is especially noteworthy about the Rise of the Planet of the Apes is the way the movie brings in several big issues: bioinvasive research on chimpanzees (we still do it!), the need for sanctuaries, and the inanity of keeping primates as pets. I've given a quickie primer with links to reliable info on these issues, at my blog http://chimptrainersdaughter.blogspot.com.
Hi,
thanks so much for these tips! My blogs usually do bring readers and responses. One thing I do is engage with the readers.
Is this the same Singer that thinks killing children (even after birth) is ok? De-humanize people and humanize apes. That's liberalism.
Why does not killing make us more human than something else? It is not a lack of violence that makes one good or bad, I think, but rather, knowing when violence is truly necessary.
Yes, this is the same Peter Singer. He reasons that since there is no fundamental difference between a fetus and a new born that it should be ok to practice infanticide up to a certain age. His position, if followed rigorously would actually ban not just great ape experimentation, but probably most primate experimentation, as well as experiments on dogs, cats, etc.
Frankly his influence in the world shows how far Western Culture has declined in the last century.
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Peter Singer, thank you for all you do for the apes. They are an intelligent and close kin to humans. They deserve the best of kindness and care in the most natural settings possible. To those who want to tie my sentiments to "liberalism" then that makes me a proud liberal. Compassion. Something Republicans don't understand.
"To those who want to tie my sentiments to "liberalism" then that makes me a proud liberal. Compassion. Something Republicans don't understand."
In my everyday life, I am surrounded by liberals and the vast majority of whom would never consider stopping a behavor like consuming animal products due to the behavior causing vast, needless suffering.
Taste like Chicken.
This is the planet that odopey and libs are from.
Newsflash – Animals do not have rights. Period. There are practical reasons to censure unnecessary cruelty to animals, largely because it can desensitize humans to cruelty against humans and therefore lead to human on human violence. However, all non-humans should properly be regarded as natural resources to be exploited as needed.
Howie, you're truly an evil individual with no compassion for the species that you, in fact, are a member of.
Uh – apes aren't a species. They're a superfamily comprised of several genera. Humans are a species.
Actually, his statement is a strict Kantian interpretation of the place of animals and animal cruelty in society. If you weren't aware, the Kantian ethic is the preferred ethical system in the United States and much of Western Europe. His last statement is a strictly utilitarian point of view, which is also valid, if somewhat out of place.
Basically, he's more ethical than you are in your own society's chosen systems, despite how much you try to deny and sugercoat it.
Your statement that Howie is "more ethical" has no logical basis, without knowing either poster. What you're basically saying is that someone believing that species other than humans should have some rights is somehow 'less ethical' than someone who believes that anything other than a human is nothing more than a 'resource', to which any type of cruelty is permissible. There's really no rational–or ethical–basis whatsoever for your ludicrous statement.
@Cliff – I never said animal cruelty was permissible. The reasons it is not permissible have nothing to do with the flawed concept of 'animal rights'. Yes, Kantian ethics do form the basis of my view here. Allowing animal cruelty will cause pervasive desensitization against violence in general, which will lead directly to a breakdown of human society. Therefore, wanton cruelty is NOT permissible. However, a use that some may categorize as cruelty, which is shown to be of value to human society is not only permissible, but required. Our 'duty' is to promote human society, expand human knowledge, and continue the life of the species. Any creature or object that we can use to these ends is a resource we can and should exploit.
So, when can we start to exploit you? We need to explore why humans de-evolve after watching too much of Uncle Rupert's intellectual mush. You are obviously an a$$, and not worthy of normal consideration (according to your own criteria).
If that is truly the only value you place on non-human life, then I feel sorry for you. That makes you heartless and cold inside.
Not heartless – logical. Not cold – rational. I feel, I bleed, I love. I love animals and would never personally cause them pain unless it was necessary for my life or the life of my children. I just cannot sit and listen to people make up concepts like 'animal rights' that have absolutely no rational basis whatsoever. Similar to to the whole god fallacy. If it doesn't pass the logic test, it is not real. Period.
Maybe one of those Greys will catch you and anal-probe extensively you before finding further use for you. Don't complain, because to the Greys you are merely a natural resource meant to be exploited. :-p
Actually, if an advanced being ever arrived on this planet, I'm sure that is exactly how they would view humans. Makes you wonder if maybe the SETI project and all deep space probes are really bad ideas.
Thank you Dr. Singer for bringing this topic to light. As a neuroscientist, I can affirm that we share so many cognitive and emotional abilities with not only the great apes, but also with all mammals, birds and other animals and that we need to seriously rethink what we do to them. As we now recognize (well most of us at least) that we cannot justify the oppression of blacks, women or other vulnerable groups such as the mentally incapacitated simply because they were not considered "intelligent" enough or were not lucky to be born white males, we also cannot justify our abuses of animals simply because they are not human.
@ S1NAgain:
The discussion here is not about the ramblings of a long-dead philospher, but the treatment of great apes. I doubt the viewpoint of Howie is informed by anything other than his own arrogance, and I would suggest you examine whether your ramblings about Kant have any bearing whatsoever on the topic being discussed. Frankly, you are coming acorss as the worst sort of intellectual, one, who waits until the appropriate memoent to demonstrate how well you " understand" Kant. Frankly, its irrelevant. I woudl suggest you embrace Dewey, since its devoted to actual problem solving as opposed to justifying sadistic behavior towards another species.
If believing that humans are the pinnacle of life as we know it is 'arrogant', and believing myself to be human is 'arrogant', then call me arrogant.
It makes no difference whether ape or human – ultimately we are all someone's pet. For the apes the owner is us. For us, it's the state.
My closest non-human relative is my weird Uncle Frank.
Cows are "self-aware beings who are capable of thought and have rich and deep emotional lives."
And Milk
Personally, not a fan of apes, chimps or monkeys. They are kinda creepy. I won't be seeing this film!
Someday we will inherit the earth from you humans. Can't find us, we have morphed into identical looking animals only to wipe you out. Got to go now, the snow is melting due to your climatic warming.
Black folks aren't quite that hairy, but they are getting there!!! Maybe in another couple thousand years!!!
don't these apes have larger diks than white people???
Small actually. We are the most hung of all the apes. Most animals have most their penis inside their body any way.....even humans.
What are we going to learn to do? Beat our chests? Throw leaves in the air? Start wars with rival group.....Ohhhhhh Right...we are just slightly evolved versions of them.
I'm glad that we appreciate these gentle (although sometimes aggressive) animals for what they are. A wonder in nature. Not only, they're gracious, and intriguing, but they have some level of intelligence, that's it's sometimes amazing. What is sad, is that they don't seem to "evolve". They have stayed the same for thousands of years. I wonder why. I wonder, if these atheists in their quest to refute God, they are harming these animals by forcing them to do things they *cannot* do, because they are just animals. They will *never* think like humans. They will *never* evolve. Sorry.
Each animal was created (including the ape) after their own likeness, just as we were created in the likeness of God. We need to get back to the truth that in the beginning God created and that nothing evolved.
Thank you for this excellent article. I wholeheartedly agree with everything said here. I also believe no animal should have to suffer in laboratories. They feel pain as well.
Over half of us own pets – we wouldn't do things to our pets that we would do to primates (and primates are alot smarter). Let's stop viewing animals ONLY in relation to what benefits humans. Peter Singer speaks up for animals apart from their human utility.
All animals deserve life, liberty and freedom from torture. There should be a world wide ban on all animal testing..whether they are mice, rats, dogs or primates.. it makes no difference ... it is morally and ethically wrong. The sob story that people use to justify animal testing does not make it right (animal testing COULD save your child from a horrible disease). Testing on humans accomplishes the same thing, but we wouldn't dream of doing that UNLESS they volunteered. Animals can't volunteer or give informed consent.
Yes there should realize the opportunity to RSS commentary, quite simply, CMS is another on the blog.