To me this is the same question as: Do people belong in factories and living in cities?
The likely answer is: "NO!" But, this isn't the way things are either. So, since nothing is as it should be the question is strange to me. No. Gorillas belong in Africa in a forest but they can't be because poachers will kill them and cut off their hands and heads. People don't belong in cities or factories but they are because they like to have food to eat so they don't die or go homeless.
Do Gorillas Even Belong in Zoos? Harambe’s Death Spurs Debate
Photo
Harambe, the gorilla who was shot dead at the Cincinnati Zoo after a 3-year-old boy fell into his enclosure.Credit
Jeff McCurry/Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden
Harambe, the 17-year-old Western lowland gorilla shot dead at the Cincinnati Zoo
late last month after a 3-year-old boy fell into his enclosure, may be
physically gone, his tissues harvested for research and his sperm
extracted to help diversify the captive breeding gene pool.
Yet
the 440-pound silverback leaves another metaphorical gorilla in the
room, raising questions that extend far beyond the particulars of the
case, including whether the zoo or the boy’s mother were more to blame for Harambe’s death.
For
primatologists and conservationists who devote their lives to studying
the great apes and to doing what they can to help protect the rapidly
vanishing populations of the primates in the wild, a linked set of
ethical and practical dilemmas looms almost unbearably large.
As
research continues to reveal the breadth of our genetic, emotional and
cognitive kinship with the world’s four great apes — gorillas,
chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans — many primatologists admit to
feeling frankly uncomfortable at the sight of a captive ape on display,
no matter how luxe or “natural” the zoo exhibit may be.
“When
I visit zoos, I have to turn off my feelings and just tell myself that I
am at a museum admiring nature’s masterpieces,” said the primatologist
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, professor emerita at the University of California,
Davis. “Otherwise, I can’t really justify keeping great apes in cages.”
By CINCINNATI POLICE00:46
Mother's 911 Call From Cincinnati Zoo
At
the same time, researchers acknowledge that apes in today’s zoos, at
least in the industrialized world, were all born and raised in
captivity, and could no more survive being “set free” into the forests
of Africa or Indonesia than could the average tourist on safari.
Catherine
Hobaiter of St. Andrews University in Scotland, who studies chimpanzees
in Uganda, described the reaction of zoo gorillas that had been raised
in indoor enclosures when the zoo finally added an outdoor annex to the
exhibit.
“It
was heartbreaking to see,” she said. “The gentlest specks of rain, and
the gorillas were drumming on the door to get back inside. They were
afraid of getting wet.”
Yet
while primatologists concur that people have a moral obligation to care
for the thousands of apes who are now in captivity and may live 60
years or longer, they differ on what that care should look like.
Barbara
Smuts, a renowned primatologist at the University of Michigan, recently
distributed a petition asking that the other gorillas at the Cincinnati
Zoo be relocated to a sanctuary far from the ogling, screeching crowds
of their clothed relations.
Researchers
also disagree on whether we should continue breeding apes in captivity,
and if so, to what end. Some experts believe that well-designed zoos
play an essential educational role, and that exposure to a
flesh-and-blood ape can be a transformative experience, especially for
children.
“I
remember going to the Milwaukee zoo when I was a kid and seeing the
gorilla,” said Peter D. Walsh, a biological anthropologist at Cambridge
University who works on gorilla conservation in Africa. “I was rapt.
It’s like a drug. You don’t get that emotional bond from an IMAX movie.”
Others deride most zoos as little more than amusement parks with educational placards that few people bother to read.
“There’s
no good evidence that captive apes are having any positive effect on
their wild relatives,” said Marc Bekoff, a behavioral ecologist and
professor emeritus at the University of Colorado. As for education, he
added, “one of the most wonderful and educational lessons in
biodiversity I’ve ever seen was a snail exhibit at the Detroit Zoo.”
Photo
Gorillas live on average 10
years longer in zoos than in the wild. Colo, the first gorilla born in
captivity, will turn 60 in December at the Columbus Zoo.Credit
Grahm S. Jones/Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, via Associated Press
Peter
Singer, a bioethicist at Princeton University, said, “Our primary
concern ought to be the well-being of gorillas, but zoos are constructed
the other way around: The primary concern is that humans can see the
gorillas.”
No matter their feelings about zoos, primatologists despair at the shocking statistics on wild apes.
According to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species,
all species and subspecies of wild apes rank as endangered or
critically endangered, and in all cases, the trends point implacably
downward. Apes are being lost to poaching, the bushmeat trade, habitat
destruction and disease.
In
Sumatra and Borneo, forests have been pulped to make way for palm oil
plantations, with devastating consequences for orangutans. Since the
1990s, 80 percent of Eastern lowland gorillas in Central Africa have
died of Ebola.
Even
among Jane Goodall’s celebrated chimpanzees of the Gombe forest in
Tanzania, human activities have lately slashed the population by almost
40 percent.
By
the Red List reckoning, the planetwide total for all wild apes amounts
to 350,000 individuals, down from premodern figures estimated in the
millions.
Nor
does it help, said Dr. Walsh of Cambridge University, that the public’s
concern for the environment is now focused almost exclusively on climate change:
“I feel like shouting, ‘Hey, guys, you could end climate change
tomorrow and we’d still be facing the greatest extinction crisis we’ve
ever seen.’”
A Meeting of Relatives
There’s
a reason humans and the great apes are bunched together taxonomically
in the family Hominidae. We split off from chimpanzees and gorillas only
about six million to 10 million years ago. The DNA of a chimpanzee is
about 98 percent analogous to ours.
Apes
are avid tool users and tool makers. Chimpanzees fashion sticks to fish
termites from a mound and to hunt monkeys hidden in tree holes.
Orangutans can learn to row a boat and flip pancakes on a griddle.
In
observations at the Prague Zoo, Khalil Baalbaki watched gorillas turn
empty crates into a series of household objects: tables, chairs,
stepping stools to extend their reach, trays to carry their food and as
weapons to be thrown in a fight. One young female gorilla extracted wood
stuffing from a crate to fashion a pair of slippers, padding her feet
with the fibers before venturing onto the snow.
Photo
Animal rights activists and others outside the Cincinnati Zoo on May 30 paying tribute to Harambe, who was 17.Credit
John Minchillo/Associated Press
According
to meta-analyses of intelligence studies, the average ape has the
cognitive, quantitative and spatial skills of a 2½- to 4-year-old human
child. Yet Tetsuro Matsuzakawa’s laboratory in Japan showed that an
exceptionally sharp-witted chimpanzee named Ayuma was twice as good as
any university student at recalling numbers flashed on a screen.
The
great apes also exhibit basic temperamental differences. David Watts, a
primatologist at Yale University who has studied chimpanzees and
gorillas in the wild, found that while chimpanzees generally didn’t like
people or show much interest in their affairs, gorillas were deeply
curious.
“I
quickly realized that the gorillas not only wanted to touch me, but to
climb all over me,” he said. In one famous incident, a female gorilla
stuck her hand down the shirt of a female primatologist and started
feeling around.
That
innate curiosity, researchers suggest, may explain some of Harambe’s
behavior seen on the video of his fatal encounter with the boy who fell
into his enclosure — fiddling with the boy’s clothing, taking a quick
peek as he pulled the boy’s pants upward. He tried pulling the boy into a
grotto, perhaps to protect him or to claim the fascinating new playmate
for himself.
The Cincinnati Zoo killed a gorilla to save boy who fell into the enclosure [HD Original]Video by ViralHog
But
with the mounting commotion and screams from the onlookers above,
researchers said, Harambe grew agitated and soon assumed the stance of a
male silverback in dominance display mode.
“It’s
what we used to call strutting, and male gorillas do it all the time,”
Dr. Watts said. “A silverback will stand or walk around with arms and
legs stiffly extended, his hair piloerect, to make himself look bigger
and more impressive. Harambe was definitely doing that when he was
standing over the boy.”
The
behavior is mostly bluster: If Harambe had been intent on killing the
boy, Dr. Hrdy said, as an interloping male gorilla might kill the babies
sired by the silverback he just deposed — the quicker to claim the
resident females for himself — “he would have done it in seconds,”
probably with a bite to the skull.
Nevertheless,
the strut introduced risks of its own, particularly when Harambe began
dragging the boy around the enclosure, as a displaying gorilla will
sometimes drag around a large branch.
Dr.
Watts, who said he had been “punched, knocked over and dragged” by male
gorillas but never seriously injured, wishes he had been at the
Cincinnati Zoo as the crisis unfolded. He would have volunteered to
enter the enclosure and assume a submissive fetal position on the floor
to try drawing the gorilla’s attention from the boy. (He admits he is
engaging in a kind of Monday morning strut-display of his own.)
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A Welcoming, Limiting Captivity
The
look and logic of zoos have changed drastically over time. When the
first apes were exhibited in the West, in the late 18th century, they
were seen as trophies, evidence of imperial victory over savagery. The
unfortunate souvenirs usually died within months of their arrival from
disease or malnutrition.
As
zoos sought to improve the health of their resident apes, the
enclosures often assumed a blandly sterile configuration, devoid of
risky foliage or toys. That approach led to problems of its own, like
boredom, repetitive behaviors and depression.
More
recently, most zoos have worked hard to give apes the mental and
emotional stimulation they need, with tires for swinging, rocks for
climbing, social groups for mutual grooming or bouts of contagious
laughing or yawning.
Frans de Waal
of Emory University and the Yerkes National Primate Research Center
said he was a “big fan” of quality zoos, although perhaps not for large,
gregarious animals like killer whales and elephants. “But for great
apes, the record now is excellent,” he said.
Their
health is good, they reproduce readily in captivity and they live 10
years or more longer than their wild peers. Indeed, the first gorilla
born in captivity, a female named Colo, is still alive at the zoo in
Columbus, Ohio, for which she was named. She will turn 60 in December, a
birthday the great-great grandmother will not celebrate, zoo officials
said, by wearing the adorable pinafore and straw bonnet her caretakers
dressed her in as a youth.
Dr. de Waal said that it was easier than ever to keep apes enriched and entertained.
“They
like to work on computers,” he said. “When you bring in a touch screen,
they get excited about that, and it’s a great way to teach the public
about how smart they are.”
But
what the public must accept, he said, is that the pleasant notion of
zoos as nurseries for restocking wild populations of endangered animals
has proved a fantasy in all but a handful of cases, most notably the
successful reintroduction of zoo-bred golden lion tamarins into the
Atlantic Forests of Brazil.
By
contrast, when the British aristocrat Damian Aspinall released 11 of
his captive-bred lowland gorillas into the wilds of Gabon in 2014, five
were soon violently dispatched, probably by a resident gorilla, while
others disappeared.
Yet critics say that zoo life has its serious downsides, too, as Harambe’s story made plain.
The
captive ape is the designated “ambassador” for its kind, an object
lesson in evolutionary fraternity and shared fate for those of us who
remain on the other side of the glass, proclaiming the primacy of human
needs, desires and lives.
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