When
several items concerning the same subject cross one’s consciousness at almost
the same moment, what are you supposed to do? Except take it all as sign that
you must write about it – which
usually means needing to fill in one or two little gaps, which leads inevitably
to a welter of extra reading, which reveals that the gaps are actually rather
large, which necessitates yet further reading ... until you’re in a dizzying
vortex of wondrous information – disguised as cumulative ignorance – from which
you can scarcely extricate yourself.
In this
case, it was the loan of a novel, the purchase of a book, a snatch of TV documentary,
a student presentation – all about experimentation using chimpanzees.
Why do
we conduct experiments on animals – some undeniably fruitful, too many
revoltingly gratuitous, all in some way damaging to the animal, and all too
often fatal? Because we can. Because we
are in the last analysis a self-serving species that can, whenever convenient,
derogate other species to some ‘lower’ order, deny them a requisite degree of
feeling, rationalise away their self-evident terror and pain. We have the
physiological, technological, and psychological power to do it, so we do.
Or at
least, certain highly specialised sections of certain societies do – essentially
the scientific elite of the world’s most technologically advanced nations: the
Europeans, the British, the Americans. And because chimpanzees and other great
apes, already familiar from menageries, zoos and related prisons, came from the
colonised corners of the globe, the animals found themselves shackled in an
unholy alliance of experimental science and imperial power.
Donna
Haraway, one of our most trenchant, idiosyncratic and penetrating writers on
human-animal relations, sums it up this way in her magisterial history of
primatology, Primate Visions (1989):
Monkeys and apes have a privileged position to nature and
culture for western people: simians occupy the border zones between those
potent mythic poles. In the border zones, love and knowledge are richly
ambiguous and productive of meanings in which many people have a stake. The
commercial and scientific traffic in monkeys and apes is a traffic in meanings,
as well as in animal lives.
Haraway’s
book unpacks in detail some of the sundry laboratories and enterprises set up
over decades to study chimpanzees and other simians, often in cruel
behaviorist ways, in order to ‘prove’ things that any observant field worker
would find perfectly obvious. Haraway includes Henry Harlow’s infamous photograph
of a tiny chimp clinging to a wire frame draped with a towel. Wow: an orphaned
infant cleaves to anything that might resemble its mother – what an insight! Decades
of traumatic experiments
involving disease infection, toxins, forced organ transplant, crash dummy
testing, and more, demonstrably yielded little of value to humans.
Less
invasive ‘social’ experimentation tried to divine similarities between human
and ape in terms of language acquisition, cognition, and socialisation – an
obsession so pervasive that it can only evidence a deep-seated insecurity in
ourselves, a defensiveness about the extent to which our language, our vaunted
rationality, and our capacity for co-operation does or doesn’t transcend our
“animal origins”.
The
protagonist of the aforementioned borrowed novel, Karen Joy Fowler’s We are All Completely Beside Ourselves
(2014), expresses a healthy scepticism about the intrinsic limitations of
laboratory experiments. I won’t disclose more about the story, which is doubtless roughly based on the monumentally
botched case of trying raise the chimp Nim in a human family in the 1970s. The
novel has a couple of nifty twists. I’ll just quote the protagonist on how
pervasive is the presence of the ape in academic circles:
Take Introduction to Classical Chinese and find yourself
devoting a week to Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, and the chaos he wreaks in
Heaven. Take a European literature class and find on the syllabus Kafka’s “A
Report for an Academy”, with its ape narrator Red Peter ... Take astronomy and
maybe there’s a section devoted to exploration, to those pioneering dogs and
chimps of space...
It was
just such footage on a TV documentary about abandoned engineering projects that
got me going on this jag. The project in focus was the Barcroft space research
station, out in the California desert, about as alienating an environment for chimps as
you could imagine – but there they are, being crammed into 44-gallon drums in
order to simulate life in a space capsule. I found it almost unwatchable; but
there was a scientist stating that the US space programme could not have
succeeded without these tortures – “sadly”. And did chimps themselves benefit
from these advances? Not one jot.
To be
fair, even laboratory scientists expressed affection for their kidnapped
primate charges – yet I find the photo of two young chimps clinging to
primatologist Robert Yerkes as heart-wrenching as Harlow’s. Yerkes claimed to
have loved his chimps, but they were still a thousand miles from the homeliness
of coherent chimp society. (The Yerkes primate research centre in Atlanta
continues to house more than 50 chimps.) Even that lucid and humane researcher,
Frans de Waal, author of the ground-breaking Peacemaking amongst Primates (1991) and Are We Smart Enough to Know how Smart Animals Are? (2017; my recent
coincidental purchase), troubles me a bit in his own move from ethology
(observation in the wild) to experimentation on captive apes – despite his own
scepticism: “One can train goldfish to play soccer or bears to dance, but does
anyone believe that this tells us much about the skills of human soccer stars
or dancers?” And he let his chimps socialise amongst themselves. Jane Goodall et al have had their impact.
On the
other side of the coin, fiction – especially after Darwinian theory placed
humans and apes ever closer in evolutionary development – obsessed equally
about the possibility of humanising apes – which is to say to eradicate that
troubling closeness/difference border-zone. As Virginia Richter shows in her
survey Literature after Darwin: Human
beasts in Western fiction (2011), these tales ranged from the homicidal
gibbon of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Murders on the Rue Morgue” (1841) and
the Darwinian experiments conducted in H G Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), through Edgar Rice Burroughs’
ape-raised Tarzan to Franz Kafka’s seminal “A Report to the Academy” (1917) -
all evincing what Richter calls the “anxiety of simianisation”.
Almost
no subsequent imagining of the speaking ape can fail to refer back to Kafka’s
“Red Peter” and his eloquent academy address about his transition from ape to
(sort of) human. Like both Haraway and
Fowler, Will Self uses an extract as epigraph to his 1997 novel Great Apes:
When I come home late at night from banquets, from social
gatherings, there sits waiting for me a half-trained little chimpanzee and I
take comfort from her as apes do. By day I cannot bear to see her; for she has
the insane look of a bewildered half-broken animal in the eye; no one else sees
it, but I do and I cannot bear it.
Self
imagines a whole literate, quasi-human chimp society, complete with chimp
artists, doctors and academics, with one deranged individual suffering
delusions of becoming human (humans are endangered in the wild). These chimps substitute “huu” for
question-marks, “pant-hoot” for phone, “sign” and “gesticulate” instead of say and discuss, and indulge in
varieties of gross and open sex (perfectly normal for “chimpunity”, of course).
It’s a sardonic, heavy, clever, at times funny but oddly unlikeable novel.
There
is Bernard Malamud’s futuristic novel, God’s
Grace (1982), in which only a human and a chimp (who can speak English as
the result of laboratory training), survive a nuclear holocaust. Malamud’s novel exemplifies Haraway’s
observation that primatology “is a First World survival literature in the
conditions of twentieth-century history”. Except in God’s Grace, it isn’t the human that survives ...
Finally,
the talking apes make their way into South African literature, too. Red Peter reappears in J M Coetzee’s strange
but highly influential meditation on
animal rights, The Lives of Animals
(2009). In this country, of course, the ape of first encounter is not the chimp
but the baboon, with well-known studies ranging from Eugene Marais’ classic The Soul of the Ape (1969) through to
Fransie van Riel’s Life with Darwin (2003;
this Darwin being a baboon, not Charles). Michiel Heyns’ novel The Reluctant Passenger (2003) features Cape
Point’s baboons being captured for an
experimental facility. Most recently, Cape Town’s perennial ‘house-breaking’
baboon issue is revisited in Ken Barris’ new story, in The Life of Worm & Other Misconceptions (2017), in which a
house-owner develops an awkward relationship with an invasive, but
human-talking baboon. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well.
It may
be impossible not to be complicit in animal experimentation: I have little
doubt that some of the medical treatments I have benefitted from would have
been tested on rats or beagles; I know that my cat’s pills have been tested on
other unwilling cats. There are glimmers of relief, at least for chimps: much
experimentation has stopped. The US National Institute of Health in 2013 withdrew
funding for chimp experiments, though loopholes remain, and we know less about
what happens in private enterprises. There are ongoing legal efforts to accord
chimpanzees “personhood”, despite last month’s rejection by the New York
appeals court to free two warehoused chimps on the basis of habeas corpus. Their argument? Chimps
aren’t humans; simple. I agree: but the chimps should be freed because they are chimps. We have a way
to go yet in the task of reversing the tide of human arrogance and exploitation;
yet it’s increasingly accepted that we cannot (as Tennyson wrote in In Memoriam, hoping to become an angel) “let
the ape and the tiger die”.
*****
