why-animals-do-the-thing:

I’m coming in late to this conversation because I wanted to take a lot of time to read and listen. I’ve watched the videos, listened to the news reports, read eyewitness accounts, and read responses by or spoken to zookeepers, exhibit designers, primatologists, attorneys, and dangerous animal response team members. Here is what I have for you: the incident at the Cincinnati Zoo was a tragedy. Once the child was in the moat, what had to happen could not have been prevented. Actions need to be taken on all sides to ensure that such a perfect storm of a bad situation can never happen again. I am glad the child is alive and I grieve with the zoo staff for the loss of their beloved and rare companion. I do not believe in continuing to point fingers and lay blame – those who deserve it are well aware at this point, and while it is natural and human to seek vengeance and justice it does no good to protect future children and future gorillas. So, with that said, let’s talk about what happened.

On the event:

Here is the best sequence of events I can piece together from eye-witness reports. The boy involved had mentioned he wanted to get into the water with the gorillas. His mother said no, but was also responsible for several other young children at the time. Another woman present at the scene noticed the boy after he had “flopped through over the fence” according to her social media post, and was crawling so quickly through the bushes towards the moat that the woman and her husband weren’t able to grab him. The mom, who had been taking a photo when her son left her side, was looking for him and was heard calling for him around when he went over the edge of the moat.

The Dangerous Animal Response Team (DART) – a fixture of any AZA accredited facility’s plan for any situation involving a dangerous animal – attempted to coax Harambe out of the exhibit. All three female gorillas on exhibit shifted out easily, but Harambe was unwilling to leave. As seen on the videos spread around the internet, over about the next ten minutes Harambe became agitated – quite possibly exacerbated by the noise from the panicked crowd – and began dragging the boy through the water of the moat by his leg and throwing him around. At times he stopped and seemed to pick the boy up, examining him, before rushing off again. He eventually climbed back up into the exhibit out of the moat, bringing the boy with him. The DART team made the hard call at that point to shoot Harambe to save the child’s life, and when the kill shot was taken, the child was held between the silverback’s legs.

On the choice to kill:

Nobody is happy with the DART team’s decision, but those intimately knowledgeable of ape behavior and management understand why it had to occur.

Gorillas are often considered the gentlest of the great apes, but they’re still capable of intense displays of aggression with very little provocation. They’re considered highly dangerous animals in the internal zoo classification system – on par with big cats and bears – and are always worked with in protective contact situations. They’re highly protective of their territory and their group and use their extreme strength and size to challenge any threat. Silverbacks deal with stress by strutting and displaying their strength – often by dragging vegetation, rocks, or other animals around.  

In the videos, we see Harambe standing over the child in the corner of the moat. He takes off suddenly, dragging the child across the moat by his leg before standing over him again. He picks him up carefully, examines him, repositions him… and then grabs him again for the next drag. The behaviors Harambe is displaying towards the child are not affiliative actions, they’re displays of agitation that are familiar to any veteran primate keeper. Just as wild their wild counterparts, the intimidation / threat behaviors of captive gorillas often involve dragging and throwing large branches or exhibit fixtures around to make noise and show off their strength. Harambe is obviously agitated, and it’s likely that it was exacerbated by the noise and intensity of the crowd. So he’s not trying to help the kid when he repositions him – he’s just getting a better grip.

A hard thing to say here is that, to Harambe, it’s likely the child in his exhibit was more a novel stimulus than something he felt any goodwill towards. Despite seemingly misguided claims from Franz deWaal and Jane Goodall (whose statements to that end have people all over the world shaking their heads), Harambe is not protecting the child. He’s not trying to kill him, either – if he was, the boy would have been dead in an instant. But that doesn’t mean the kid was safe. To Harambe, the child was a novelty – basically new enrichment – and then becomes useful for his displays as the screaming crowd sets him on edge. At this point, there’s no way to separate the kid from Harambe without risking serious injury to the child – he is not going to give up the most interesting thing to ever fall into his exhibit, and certainly not after being worked up into a frenzy by the reaction of the visitors.

Tranquilizing Harambe was never a viable option, unfortunately. It’s a really hard thing to accept. The sad news is that tranquilizers don’t work like they do in the movies – the animal never just slumps over, immediately asleep. The drugs take 10-15 minutes to work, and the efficacy of a dose is easily modified by stress or adrenaline. There’s a good chance that even if they did dose Harambe with a tranquilizer, it might not have worked completely – at which point you have to guess and use more and risk killing the animal.

Even if the DART team was able to dose Harambe correctly for his excited physiological state, being darted often elicits a violent reaction from animals. To some degree, this is a reaction to the pain and general unpleasantness associated with previous incidents of darting (normally vet visits). Another, less known fact is that the second stage of most anesthesia drugs taking effect is a ‘excitation’ phase – animals often become more animated for an incredibly short period before it begins to work. The zoo couldn’t risk Harambe hurting the child more as the drugs kicked in.

Another important factor to consider is that the DART team didn’t know if the child had internal injuries from either his fall from a height into a shallow concrete moat, or from his treatment at Harambe’s hands. It’s possible that their choice to shoot Harambe was influenced by the length of time it would take to reach and treat the child if they did not. 

On the controversy:

When a tragedy like this occurs, it’s hard for people to not ask who is to blame. There aren’t any clear answers, the ensuing debates are getting increasingly nasty. 

At first, everyone started crying negligence on the part of the mother. Some zoo staff certainly feel that way, considering
how much of their working hours are spent forcing guests to follow the clearly
stated safety regulations. Parents of small children, though, know how easy it
is for a moment’s inattention to turn into something horrible. We don’t really know enough to say how long it took the child to get through the barriers while his mother was taking a photo. The Cincinnati police are reviewing the situation and the family and have stated that they’ll determine if charges should be brought against the mother in due time. 

Meanwhile, the USDA and AZA are investigating the Cincinnati Zoo side fo things. While the AZA investigation doesn’t have any legal standing, the USDA is finding out if the facility was in violation of the Animal Welfare Act at the time the tragedy occurred. 

The question of if the zoo is at fault for not having a more secure
exhibit is a really hard one to answer. The photo above is from the Cincinnati Zoo’s Facebook page, showing the fence that the child crossed. It is not a huge barrier to an adult, but could easily be considered a substantial barrier (even without the hedge) to a child young too young to consciously understand why crossing fences is not okay. 

Now that this has occurred, there’s an obvious flaw in the safety of the exhibit that needs to be rectified- but let’s talk history. Gorilla World at the Cincinnati Zoo opened in 1978 and was one of the first exhibits of it’s kind. Moated exhibits became extremely popular in the late 20th century as public opinion pushed for exhibits where guests could see animals in naturalistic habitats without visual reminders of their confinement, e.g., fences, and can still be seen at many facilities across the country. This Gorilla World yard passed all USDA inspections for 38 years and the design adhered to all federal regulations for the containment of dangerous animals (such as primary and secondary containment). Millions of guests have passed in front of the exhibit in the four decades it has existed and there has never before been an incident. This leaves the Cincinnati zoo in a hard spot they did it by the book, and according to zoo safety rules nobody should ever go past that barrier  – but now it’s happened, and it ended horribly. The design of the enclosure definitely needs to be re-assessed – even if something works 99.99% of the time, if it fails horribly 0.01% it needs to be looked at. Nobody disagrees on that. Hindsight is always 20/20, though, and it’s hard to say if this should have been able to be prevented from ever happening. 

On what to take away:

There are a lot of conversations that this incident has engendered. None of them are easy. Some require zoological facilities to re-examine their exhibits for problem spots. Some require people to really consider what is appropriate behavior in a zoo and why the rules and regulations that people so often ignore exist. Everybode needs to do a little bit of navel-gazing so we can all move forward from here. 

Harambe turned 17 the day before he was shot. He was a valuable ambassador for a highly endangered species, named after a rallying cry in Swahili: ‘pull together’. We can look for vengeance after this tragedy, or we can learn from it. We need to do the latter to protect the children and the gorillas of the future. 

A friend said it best in a private conversation:

“As a former zookeeper, and a curator, exhibit designer, I have plenty of background on the subject. I know how dumb people can be around zoo exhibits. And I’m also extremely aware of zoo safety, almost to a fault. Fact is, given the things that have been happening in zoos the past few years, significant precautions need to be taken around exhibits (…) [and] there is a place where aesthetics and safety can coexist. People ARE dumb, but it’s more about ignorance than intentional stupidity. We as zoo professionals know exactly what our animals are capable of, but the general public really does not. We tune into to zoo tragedies every time they happen, but I’m betting most people still have no idea of any of the recent events over the past decade. It really is the duty of zoos to be safe and not rely on the assumption that visitors know how to be safe around very dangerous animals.  (…) That doesn’t make it okay, nor should we all blow it off as a simple mistake – it was a terrible mistake with tragic consequences. But rushing to a conclusion based on our emotions leads to witch hunts and mob justice. That won’t bring Harambe back, nor will it even make things better for other zoo residents. It’s just us looking to place blame and project our pain onto others. Instead, we should reassess zoo safety protocols, exhibit design, visitor traffic flow, and safety communication/education in zoos. That’s what we should be taking from all the recent tragedies in zoos – turning them into something positive to make zoos better, safer places.”

angrykoreanwomenunited:

Suzanne Sadedin, Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from Monash University

I’m so glad you asked. Seriously. The answer to this question is one of the most illuminating and disturbing stories in human evolutionary biology, and almost nobody knows about it. And so, O my friends, gather close, and hear the extraordinary tale of:

HOW THE WOMAN GOT HER PERIOD

Contrary to popular belief, most mammals do not menstruate. In fact, it’s a feature exclusive to the higher primates and certain bats*. What’s more, modern women menstruate vastly more than any other animal. And it’s bloody stupid (sorry). A shameful waste of nutrients, disabling, and a dead giveaway to any nearby predators. To understand why we do it, you must first understand that you have been lied to, throughout your life, about the most intimate relationship you will ever experience: the mother-fetus bond.

Isn’t pregnancy beautiful? Look at any book about it. There’s the future mother, one hand resting gently on her belly. Her eyes misty with love and wonder. You sense she will do anything to nurture and protect this baby. And when you flip open the book, you read about more about this glorious symbiosis, the absolute altruism of female physiology designing a perfect environment for the growth of her child.

If you’ve actually been pregnant, you might know that the real story has some wrinkles. Those moments of sheer unadulterated altruism exist, but they’re interspersed with weeks or months of overwhelming nausea, exhaustion, crippling backache, incontinence, blood pressure issues and anxiety that you’ll be among the 15% of women who experience life-threatening complications.

From the perspective of most mammals, this is just crazy. Most mammals sail through pregnancy quite cheerfully, dodging predators and catching prey, even if they’re delivering litters of 12. So what makes us so special? The answer lies in our bizarre placenta. In most mammals, the placenta, which is part of the fetus, just interfaces with the surface of the mother’s blood vessels, allowing nutrients to cross to the little darling. Marsupials don’t even let their fetuses get to the blood: they merely secrete a sort of milk through the uterine wall. Only a few mammalian groups, including primates and mice, have evolved what is known as a “hemochorial” placenta, and ours is possibly the nastiest of all.

Inside the uterus we have a thick layer of endometrial tissue, which contains only tiny blood vessels. The endometrium seals off our main blood supply from the newly implanted embryo. The growing placenta literally burrows through this layer, rips into arterial walls and re-wires them to channel blood straight to the hungry embryo. It delves deep into the surrounding tissues, razes them and pumps the arteries full of hormones so they expand into the space created. It paralyzes these arteries so the mother cannot even constrict them.

What this means is that the growing fetus now has direct, unrestricted access to its mother’s blood supply. It can manufacture hormones and use them to manipulate her. It can, for instance, increase her blood sugar, dilate her arteries, and inflate her blood pressure to provide itself with more nutrients. And it does. Some fetal cells find their way through the placenta and into the mother’s bloodstream. They will grow in her blood and organs, and even in her brain, for the rest of her life, making her a genetic chimera**.

This might seem rather disrespectful. In fact, it’s sibling rivalry at its evolutionary best. You see, mother and fetus have quite distinct evolutionary interests. The mother ‘wants’ to dedicate approximately equal resources to all her surviving children, including possible future children, and none to those who will die. The fetus ‘wants’ to survive, and take as much as it can get. (The quotes are to indicate that this isn’t about what they consciously want, but about what evolution tends to optimize.)

There’s also a third player here – the father, whose interests align still less with the mother’s because her other offspring may not be his. Through a process called genomic imprinting, certain fetal genes inherited from the father can activate in the placenta. These genes ruthlessly promote the welfare of the offspring at the mother’s expense.

How did we come to acquire this ravenous hemochorial placenta which gives our fetuses and their fathers such unusual power? Whilst we can see some trend toward increasingly invasive placentae within primates, the full answer is lost in the mists of time. Uteri do not fossilize well.

The consequences, however, are clear. Normal mammalian pregnancy is a well-ordered affair because the mother is a despot. Her offspring live or die at her will; she controls their nutrient supply, and she can expel or reabsorb them any time. Human pregnancy, on the other hand, is run by committee – and not just any committee, but one whose members often have very different, competing interests and share only partial information. It’s a tug-of-war that not infrequently deteriorates to a tussle and, occasionally, to outright warfare. Many potentially lethal disorders, such as ectopic pregnancy, gestational diabetes, and pre-eclampsia can be traced to mis-steps in this intimate game.

What does all this have to do with menstruation? We’re getting there.

From a female perspective, pregnancy is always a huge investment. Even more so if her species has a hemochorial placenta. Once that placenta is in place, she not only loses full control of her own hormones, she also risks hemorrhage when it comes out. So it makes sense that females want to screen embryos very, very carefully. Going through pregnancy with a weak, inviable or even sub-par fetus isn’t worth it.

That’s where the endometrium comes in. You’ve probably read about how the endometrium is this snuggly, welcoming environment just waiting to enfold the delicate young embryo in its nurturing embrace. In fact, it’s quite the reverse. Researchers, bless their curious little hearts, have tried to implant embryos all over the bodies of mice. The single most difficult place for them to grow was – the endometrium.

Far from offering a nurturing embrace, the endometrium is a lethal testing-ground which only the toughest embryos survive. The longer the female can delay that placenta reaching her bloodstream, the longer she has to decide if she wants to dispose of this embryo without significant cost. The embryo, in contrast, wants to implant its placenta as quickly as possible, both to obtain access to its mother’s rich blood, and to increase her stake in its survival. For this reason, the endometrium got thicker and tougher – and the fetal placenta got correspondingly more aggressive.

But this development posed a further problem: what to do when the embryo died or was stuck half-alive in the uterus? The blood supply to the endometrial surface must be restricted, or the embryo would simply attach the placenta there. But restricting the blood supply makes the tissue weakly responsive to hormonal signals from the mother – and potentially more responsive to signals from nearby embryos, who naturally would like to persuade the endometrium to be more friendly. In addition, this makes it vulnerable to infection, especially when it already contains dead and dying tissues.

The solution, for higher primates, was to slough off the whole superficial endometrium – dying embryos and all – after every ovulation that didn’t result in a healthy pregnancy. It’s not exactly brilliant, but it works, and most importantly, it’s easily achieved by making some alterations to a chemical pathway normally used by the fetus during pregnancy. In other words, it’s just the kind of effect natural selection is renowned for: odd, hackish solutions that work to solve proximate problems. It’s not quite as bad as it seems, because in nature, women would experience periods quite rarely – probably no more than a few tens of times in their lives between lactational amenorrhea and pregnancies***.

We don’t really know how our hyper-aggressive placenta is linked to the other traits that combine to make humanity unique. But these traits did emerge together somehow, and that means in some sense the ancients were perhaps right. When we metaphorically ‘ate the fruit of knowledge’ – when we began our journey toward science and technology that would separate us from innocent animals and also lead to our peculiar sense of sexual morality – perhaps that was the same time the unique suffering of menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth was inflicted on women. All thanks to the evolution of the hemochorial placenta.

https://www.quora.com/what-is-the-evolutionary-benefit-or-purpose-of-having-periods

feferi:

there has been a pretty far-reaching trend on this website to blog about the effects of mental illness and trauma on emotional regulation and an aggressive campaign to get people to not only understand but accept boundary-crossing behavior from people because it is a reflection of their mental illness/trauma, as far as to imply that you are ableist if you are not able to tactfully handle and accept someone else’s dysfunctional coping mechanisms and behavior despite your own discomfort. i see this most often with posts about bpd but there are other topics as well. i haven’t commented on any of it because it’s not a pie i wanted a finger in, but it has over time led me to develop severe discomfort around people who follow that line of thought to the point that i have disengaged, unfollowed, and unfriended many people who agree with it.

the stuff i’m seeing passed around now about “supporting perpretrators” in addition to survivors is the horrifying track down which that train of thought has sped, because what people don’t seem to understand is that mental illness and trauma do no make you an exception to the boundaries of those around you. it is necessary to be aware of the ways that survivors and mentally ill people may lash out emotionally at those they are close to but it is not actually necessary to be “accepting” to the point that it is harmful to you. your emotional boundaries are important, more important than whatever obligation you feel to “accommodate” someone’s trauma.

it is not “okay” that survivors sometimes display manipulative/abusive behaviors towards the people around them and it is important to handle these situations with tact, sure, but not to the detriment of setting your own boundaries and checking the behaviors in question. when friends i know are mentally ill/ trauma survivors have lashed out at me with emotionally manipulation tactics in times of great distress, i have supported them afterward, but i have always followed this up with a discussion about how these kinds of behaviors can not and will not continue or our relationship will end. this is not “ableist” or refusing to support survivors’ trauma, it is setting strong boundaries within the context of supporting each other and providing the community in which we all can heal. what is important here is that these are isolated incidents – learned defense mechanisms arising in times of panic and stress – and not consistent grabs for power. these are not people following the deliberate, overarching pattern of actions abusers use to isolate and control victims, and their actions are easily distinguishable from such.

my point is that this discourse has allowed people to blur the line between these behaviors and abuse when it comes to community support. we should support abusers in our communities as well, they say, because otherwise we would be isolating vulnerable marginalized people who are just struggling with their own trauma. this is exactly what abusers want. this is not a radical attitude. abusers depicting themselves as helpless victims of emotions and circumstances out of their control has pretty much always been the abuser party line. there is nothing productive or useful or valid about carving out community resources for “accountability” in ways that perpetuate bad abuse politics and logics that have been used to silence survivors for years and years. you cannot support survivors and also support their abusers by continuing to welcome them in the same community spaces, period, and it takes some ridiculous mental gymnastics to pretend otherwise.

koryos:

Kind of an interesting question here, though you must be careful with words like ‘purpose’ when describing the way animals have evolved- there’s no purpose about it, it’s literally what randomly came together and worked.

The life cycle of the crane fly only seems confusing if you look at it from a human standpoint. Certainly it seems to us that the most proper life cycle includes a short nonreproductive juvenile period and a much longer reproductive-capable adult period. This, after all, is how most the lives of most vertebrates are structured. For example, a dog lives perhaps an average of twelve years, and only spends about six months of that time growing to sexual maturity.

And it does confer advantages from an evolutionary standpoint: having most of your life available to find mates seems like a pretty good way to maximize the number of offspring you produce. Here’s a really lazy timeline of that strategy, which in scientific terms is called an iteoparous lifestyle:

But there’s a danger in assuming that the juvenile period is wasted time, which it isn’t- otherwise it wouldn’t exist. Evolution rewards species that can successfully propagate themselves, and the timing of the nonreproductive period hinges on this. You see, there’s a slight problem with being ~READY TO BONE~ 24/7. Sexual organs, sexual secretions, and sexual behavior are all extraordinarily expensive. I’m not just talking about being sweaty and tired after a netflix and chill marathon. I’m talking about the biological costs incurred by producing eggs, sperm, secondary sex characteristics like giant antlers on deer and gaudy tails on peacocks, building nests for eggs, competing for opposite-sex attention and fighting off other suitors, and heck, even finding the dang object of your attraction. Think about how successful dating sites are, for goodness’ sake. In the US alone, about $80 million each year gets spent by horny people on dates.

Knowing how expensive all this can get, perhaps now it’s less surprising that some species want to make sure their offspring are as prepared as possible before they’re thrust into the Lust Pit. This may mean that they have proportionally longer juvenile periods than reproductive periods- however, when Fuck Time comes, they have a much better chance of finding a partner than you do on OkCupid because the entire species has synchronized their genitalia to develop at the same time. They may not even eat or sleep- they spend their last few weeks, days, or hours in a furious haze of lovemaking. Sometimes until they literally fall apart, in the case of the antechinus, a little marsupial that has such furious sex that he’ll lose all his hair and bleed internally (and then die). Which you wouldn’t expect when you see one:

This type of get-fucked-or-die-trying lifestyle is called semelparity, in contrast to our own iteroparity. Here’s another lazy timeline of that:

Semelparous animals sync up their breeding cycles to maximize their chances of finding a mate. This means it’d be pointlessly expensive to be reproductively primed during the off-season. Instead, they focus on preparation: growing as large and strong as they can so that when the time comes, they have the best chance possible. One of the best examples of this is the cicada, which is likely the longest-living insect- some species live up to 17 years. However, of those 17 years, only 2-4 weeks are spent as sexually mature adults. Emerging en masse after such a long absence not only makes it much easier to find a mate, it also overwhelms potential predators. Yes, cicadas are delicious, but you can only eat so many in two weeks compared to how many you could eat if they spent all seventeen years not buried deep underground.

Periodical cicadas are an extreme example, but many other animals have similar strategies. Calling something short-lived a “mayfly” refers to the fact that the sexually mature form is extraordinarily short-lived- in one species, it lives for less than five minutes. However, it’s often forgotten that this only refers to the adult form; the larvae will live possibly two years in rivers or streams.

It’s not just invertebrates that practice extreme semelparity. I already mentioned the little antechinus- the males of that species, by the way, live less than a year, while the females live for two years and generally die after weaning their first litter. Pacific salmon are another familiar semelparous species, which spend up to five years in the ocean before returning to freshwater to spawn and die within the span of a few days.

Perhaps the most extreme example of a semelparous vertebrate that I know of is Labord’s chameleon. The eggs of this species take roughly 9 months to incubate before hatching. After hatching, the juveniles reach sexual maturity at about two months old- and die another two months later. That’s right: this species of chameleon spends more time in an egg than it does in the outside world. Not only that, but because the mating takes place seasonally, there are long periods of time in which no adult individuals of the species exist. All of them are encased in eggs- silently growing, and preparing for the pinnacle of their lives: the Great Fuckening.

Godspeed, little one.

Further reading:

Dobson, F. S. (2013). Live fast, die young, and win the sperm competition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(44), 17610-17611.

Karsten, K. B.,
Andriamandimbiarisoa, L. N., Fox, S. F., & Raxworthy, C. J. (2008). A
unique life history among tetrapods: an annual chameleon living mostly
as an egg. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(26), 8980-8984.

Koenig, W. D., & Liebhold, A. M. (2013). Avian predation pressure as a potential driver of periodical cicada cycle length. The American Naturalist, 181(1), 145-149.

Williams, K. S., Smith,
K. G., & Stephen, F. M. (1993). Emergence of 13-Yr periodical
cicadas (Cicadidae: Magicicada): phenology, mortality, and predators
satiation. Ecology, 1143-1152.

Young, T. P. (2010). Semelparity and iteroparity. Nat Educ Knowl, 3(2).

koryos:

Oh boy. Oh, oh boy. I’ve hung on to this ask for a while now because the history of apes and language research is a lot of shit to unravel.

It all honestly stems from a weird colonialist mindset (with racist undertones) that by gosh, we can teach these creatures to be human/civilized. The idea that great apes and other creatures like elephants and parrots have some hidden potential that is just waiting to be unlocked by the right scientist is, in my mind, nearly as awful as the mindset of European colonists who “discovered” foreign tribespeople and decided that they could be uplifted with the introduction of proper culture and manners. Not ever quite equal to the Europeans, mind you, but certainly similar enough to be charming.

Image above: The young chimpanzee Gua was one of the first documented cross-rearing experiments with great apes. Gua was returned to a zoo after her handlers’ ten-month-old son began imitating her sounds, not the other way around.

Does this seem too harsh? I’m sorry, but there are cruel parallels there
we can’t ignore. To assume that there is potential inside an animal we
can ‘unlock’ with the right coaxing is to assume that animals in the
wild are too stupid to do it on their own. That’s the crux of it. Other species do not communicate with each other the same way that we do. Of course they are not going to be able to mimic our methods perfectly. It would be ridiculous to me if a gorilla like Koko could speak in flawless sign language, because again, gorillas do not communicate the same way we do.

I should stop and say I don’t mean this as an indictment of you or anyone else who is fascinated by great ape language research. It is fascinating- but it is also rooted in a very, very sad and flawed history, and we cannot forget that. And we have to remember that something like an animal’s emotional intelligence is not proved or disproved by their ability to do human activities like painting pictures.

Again: see the shadiness? “Unless these animals can act like me, they aren’t intelligent.” That’s a messed-up way of thinking.

Until recently, all ape language experiments started with removing the apes from their mothers at birth and rearing them like humans. Unfortunately, as stated before, apes are not human. Koko, still in contact with her handlers as an adult, is a rarity: most of these experiments terminated after three months, when the apes became too strong and unruly to handle. These apes, raised like human children, then had to struggle to socialize with their own species once returned to them.

You don’t have to consider the living conditions of Koko, in particular, to realize that there are some things which seem terribly off about it. A stable gorilla social unit in the wild, as far as female gorillas are concerned, is a group of around five or more females along with their young of both sexes and one adult male. These females are a close-knit group of mothers, sisters, aunts, and cousins that generally stay together for life (unless the group becomes too large and splits). But Koko has lived most of her life alone, with occasional male companions such as Michael or Ndume (who she currently only sees through a fence barrier). Human companions do not make up for other gorillas.

Yes, Koko is overweight. Yes, her diet, as far as I’ve read, is crap. Gorillas almost never eat meat: she eats lots. They don’t eat much salt and refined sugar in the wild: she gets lots. She also apparently receives homeopathic medications, which no legitimately scientific organization should touch with a ten-foot pole.

And as for the scientific legitimacy of The Gorilla Foundation, which houses Koko? Well, how much new ape language research have you read from them in the past ten years? The place is still running, but the only paper I’ve seen concerning Koko in recent times concerns her ability to manage her breathing when playing with wind instruments. Interesting, but not exactly breaking any interspecies barriers. And the research on Koko does very little to help us understand and protect endangered wild apes. In fact, other research suggests that making apes act in humanlike ways reduces the public’s interest in conserving their wild counterparts.

Most of the ‘research’ on Koko is composed of anecdotes, and most of those anecdotes come from Francine “Penny” Patterson, Koko’s primary caretaker and the director of the gorilla foundation. In most videos provided to the public, what Koko signs, Penny interprets to the audience. Koko uses a modified version of American sign language called “gorilla sign language” (GSL), which means that even ASL speakers may not be able to interpret what she’s signing. Right now, a tiny number of people have the ability to interpret Koko, which is not good on the scientific front. It reminds me very much of the facilitated communication scandal that occurred in the 90s, where ‘facilitators’ claimed to be the only ones who could interpret the language of autistic children.

Now, I am not saying that great apes cannot communicate some things using sign language. (Nor am I trying to say that the plight of great apes is equivalent to the autistic children abused through facilitated communication or the people oppressed by European colonizers. Though the Gorilla Foundation apparently doesn’t mind equating apes to humans with disabilities.) There is certainly evidence that great apes can learn to identify objects using symbols, such as lexigrams or signs. Indeed, many wild animals use representative sounds or gestures for specific items, such as predators or types of food. But humans use language in more abstract ways than merely identifying objects- we are able to discuss the past and present and things about people who aren’t in the room. The evidence that apes can communicate things like this through sign language or other forms of symbolic communication isn’t just limited- it’s basically nonexistent. (Notice that I’m only talking about communication here- apes may still be able to understand things like this while not being able to communicate them with others!)

Dressing apes up as humans an trying to teach them to talk the way we do was a research fad that appears to be, thank goodness, in its death throes. You can’t find much research about it in the past ten years that wasn’t published by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, who has an equally problematic history with her captive bonobos as Penny Patterson has with Koko. This is because it’s considered barely scientifically valid by the science community is large. The question, “Can apes communicate just like people do?” is a resounding “No,” as far as science is concerned.

Most research on ape communication is now focused on the study of natural behaviors of apes, such as gestures used by wild chimpanzees. These will teach us much more about chimpanzees than any cross-rearing study ever will. We should be focusing on understanding the apes, rather than trying to get them to use human languages they are poorly equipped to use.

In closing: I haven’t even touched many of the issues with ape language studies, such as the sexual harassment scandal against Patterson and the experiments on Nim Chimpsky because this answer has gone on far too long. It is a tangled goddamn nightmare out there. I know that many people want to focus on the ‘they’re just like us!’ aspect and ignore the rampant abuse heaped on the animals in question- but if you truly love apes, you cannot. Suffice it to say: if you are looking for signs of emotional intelligence and social cognition in the great apes, please look for it in apes acting like apes, not apes acting like humans.

Further reading:

Nim Chimpsky: The Ape Who Would Be Human by Elizabeth Hess (and the related documentary, Project Nim)

What Do Talking Apes Really Tell Us? by Jane C. Hu

Thoughts on Three Famous ‘Language Apes’ by Barbara J. King

Troubled Ape Facility Reinstates Controversial Researcher by Kate Wong

Silent Partners: The Legacy of the Ape Language Experiments by Eugene Linden