Below is an article from Britain's Spectator magazine. Chimpanzees are often glamorised, but people should realize that these are large wild animals which can present dangers to people whether they have been pets, used in entertainment, kept in zoos, or observed by scientists.
FROM THE SPECTATOR-dated 2002/06/29
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Me Frodo, you Jane
Dr Jane Goodall thinks apes are almost human, so why, asks Aidan Hartley,
doesn't she punish one of her chimps for killing a boy?
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Dr Jane Goodall, the chimpanzee expert, wants legal human rights to be
extended to great apes, because she claims that they are so similar to us.
Why, then, has Frodo, the alpha male of her chimp study group in Gombe
Stream National Park in Tanzania, just got away with the macabre murder of
a human child?
The Story of Frodo, a famous Gombe chimpanzee
The story begins on a morning in May. The wife and toddler son of Moshi
Sadiqi, a park attendant, were collecting firewood in Gombe, on the shores
of Lake Tanganyika. Like many staff families, they lived inside the park.
The pair ventured into the rainforest. Frodo struck without warning. He
swung out of the jungle, snatched up the boy and, as the distraught mother
looked on, retreated into the trees. Here, Frodo flung his prey against the
branches repeatedly, until the boy was as limp as a rag doll. The mother
ran for help and park rangers rushed to the scene. Frodo had by this time
disembowelled the boy and eaten part of his head.
Goodall, who arrived to study Gombe's chimps in 1960, departed from
scientific convention by christening her apes with human names rather than
with serial numbers. She conferred on them all the characteristics of
people, creating in her films and books the world's longest-running animal
soap opera. With her trademark grey ponytail, she ascended to become a
queen among animal-rights activists. She calls for some kind of fundamental
rights within the legal system for chimps, based on the common heritage
with Homo sapiens of 98 per cent of genes, together with chimp cognition,
emotions and games-playing. The line between humans and the rest of the
animal kingdom, once thought to be so clear, has become blurred, she says.
Her position is widely supported, though not in Africa, where leaders have
been too busy exterminating their human populations to ponder animal
rights. Rather, her support comes from fans in the rich world and the
United Nations. Jane Goodall, CBE, has this year won the Mahatma
Gandhi/Martin Luther King Award for Non-Violence, at UN headquarters. The
UN also appointed her a "peace ambassador," praising her for "fostering
human rights and the liberation of the human spirit." On her travels,
Goodall carries a soft-toy "peace chimp" holding a banana, which she claims
two million people have stroked.
If chimps deserve basic legal rights, then I assumed that, by the same
argument, Frodo should face justice for murdering Moshi Sadiqi's son. I
asked the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) what action was being taken. Would
he face some sort of chimpanzee trial? "The Tanzanian authorities have
decided not to punish Frodo for behaving like a chimp in his own
territory," replied Dilys MacKinnon, executive director of JGI in Britain.
"The child's family have said that they do not blame Frodo.... Government
officials came to talk to those involved and to express condolences. It
appears that all concerned have been very understanding."
Even if Frodo were merely a wild animal in his own territory, one might
expect him to be put to sleep like a dangerous dog. In Tanzania, if
elephants plunder peasants' crops, the state game department responds by
shooting the offending herd's ringleaders. This is despite the wide
acceptance that pachyderms are, together with chimps and whales, the most
sentient of creatures after humans.
But Frodo is no mere animal; he's a global celebrity. If Hello! had a beast
edition, Frodo would feature on the cover in a tuxedo. He's a star of the
silver screen with a filmography dating back to the 1970s. His latest
billing is in "Jane Goodall's Wild Chimpanzees," an Imax movie premiering
around the globe this year. The JGI's website publicises the film, but not
Frodo's recent behaviour.
Born in 1976 to mother Fifi, Frodo grew up to become Gombe's heavyweight at
120 lbs. He seized power as alpha male of his Kasekela clan in 1998, after
his elder brother and former don, Freud, contracted mange. Frodo rules as a
dictator, assisted by his vizier, the dastardly Goblin. He chews his upper
lip when psyching himself up for violence. He rolls boulders down hills. He
throws stones with deadly accuracy. The visitors he's beaten up include the
Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson. He once pummelled Jane's head so hard that
he nearly broke her neck.
Forget the PG Tips adverts; chimps are hardcore. They hunt and eat primate
meat. They practise cannibalism. Killing excites them. They mutilate prey.
Females copulate with all-comers. Bloodletting between clans can be so
systematic that one feud was dubbed the Four Years War.
What is more, the murder of Moshi Sadiqi's son was not unique in terms of
attacks on human children. Two incidents involving children occurred
quite a few years before research in the park started in 1960, MacKinnon
told me. A baby was taken for food [and] a seven-year-old boy was wounded
when he rescued his infant sister. Goodall's own son, Grub, was terrorised
by a chimp called Flint in the 1970s. Grub spent much of his childhood in a
cage for protection and grew up loathing chimps so much that today he's a
shark fisherman.
There are scientists who reject Goodall's idea of our consanguinity with
chimps. In his recent book What it Means to be 98% Human, the molecular
anthropologist Jonathan Marks reveals that we share 40 per cent of our
genes with fish and 25 per cent with dandelions. Should rights be extended
to goldfish? Marks argues that the 2 per cent that divides us from chimps
is what makes all the difference.
Some conservationists criticise Goodall for establishing a string of
orphanages for rescued baby chimps. They believe her time would be better
spent focusing on the protection of wild chimps' remaining habitat, which
is vanishing fast. In Africa, there are now 150,000 chimps, compared with
two million a century ago. "The ape trade for bush meat, pets and
laboratory-testing is not so much to blame as is the loss of habitat.
There is a very high level of deforestation causing massive soil erosion,
landslides, reduced fertility," says MacKinnon. JGI aims to address the
habitat problem by helping 33 villages around Gombe. MacKinnon says that
conservation is impossible unless the basic needs of humans in the area are
met.
"Community" conservation is a touchy-feely policy, but we don't know
whether it works long-term. Zimbabwe, testing ground for the idea, is
witnessing mass destruction of its parks thanks to Robert Mugabe. Habitat
isn't sacred if local communities and politicians have a direct stake and
when dangerous animals live among villages, Africans justifiably kill them
to defend themselves and their crops. There's no fail-safe answer, but the
best solution may be for private foundations to buy up conservation areas
and register them in the West. African dictators, even Mugabe, are
financial-aid junkies, so the idea is to tie the inviolability of private
conservation areas to aid packages, thus preventing governments from
stealing the land. Humans will be on one side of an electrified fence,
animals in their own territory on the other. The plan needs substantial
funding, but most of us now agree that rainforests and chimps are part of a
global heritage, and are not "owned" by local people.
For now, the tiny remaining forest inside Gombe is a magnet for employees'
camp followers. "It is not safe for small children to be in the park, as
has been stressed repeatedly," MacKinnon told me. Why, then, do such large
numbers of children inhabit the park to justify a school built, indeed,
with money from the British High Commission? "It was not a good idea to
build a school in the park," replied MacKinnon, whose organisation opposed
the plan. Nevertheless, construction went ahead on the say-so of Tanzania
National Parks (Tanapa), the state body that officially runs Gombe.
MacKinnon said that Tanapa is compensating Moshi Sadiqi's family. The
figure is unknown, but it isn't likely to be much in a nation, which,
thanks to years of Afro-socialism, has a lower average annual per capita
income than the price of a box of decent Cuban cigars.
To me, the moral is that Frodo is wild, and he should be given the space to
be wild. He's no human. If he were, he'd be sent to Broadmoor. Instead,
this ape's on his way to Broadway.
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