October 13, 2011
Chimps Shouldn’t Be Entertainers
It only took five tries, but his version of Hamlet is much better. Image courtesy of Library of Congress.
You’ve probably laughed at a commercial or television show featuring a chimpanzee dressed like a little kid. They’re cute animals, so how could you resist? But a new study in PLoS ONE provides startling evidence that turning chimps into entertainers makes us care less about them as a species.
Researchers at Duke University had human participants watch a series of television ads (for products like tooth paste and soda) in which they included either a commercial for chimp conservation featuring Jane Goodall, a bit of footage of chimpanzees in the wild or a commercial that had a chimp dressed like a human. The participants were then given a questionnaire that asked about the suitability of chimps as pets, their presence in the media and their status in the wild. They were also asked if they would like to purchase a soda or a tube of toothpaste or to donate to the Red Cross or a conservation organization.
People who saw the chimps dressed as humans were more likely to view the animals as being suitable as pets or in entertainment and were the least likely to donate to the conservation organization. The researchers write:
Advertisers only use easily manageable young chimpanzees in commercials but based on our survey viewers believe these chimpanzees were adults—leaving them unaware of how dangerous these animals can be when fully grown. Such a frivolous use of chimpanzees also leads those watching chimpanzee commercials to overestimate their population size in the wild. Clearly, chimpanzee commercials violated participants’ expectations about how perilously endangered animals are treated. This confusion likely explains why those watching commercials including entertainment chimpanzees donated the least of their experimental earnings to a conservation charity.
“Nobody has measured this sort of thing before, but [our study] clearly shows that the portrayal of endangered species on television can alter viewers’ behaviors and decrease one’s willingness to donate,” says graduate student Kara Schroepfer, the study’s lead author. “This is a clear indication that we need to reevaluate media practices and conservation priorities.”
And the impact of using chimps as entertainers goes beyond the money issue. If people think that chimps make good pets—which is seriously misguided—then more young chimpanzees may be captured in the wild, their mothers killed, so they can be sold into the pet trade. And there is a sad history of chimps being abandoned or killed when they get too old and too dangerous to be cute.
Sign up for our free email newsletter and receive the best stories from Smithsonian.com each week.
8 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
As someone who’s been around “entertainment” chimps before, I ask this: If they’re not for entertainment, then what else are you proposing? In Africa they’re bushmeat. They’re too dangerous as pets, zoos are depressing and most so-called santuaries are little more than goverment funded animal hoarders acting as if they’re “saving” chimps.
It’s a human’s world now. We’re post-Africa. Chimps as pets and entertainers are where they’re valued most. I’m thinking long-term, about eventual full domestication.
Are you serious? These are deadly animals that shouldn’t be pets, shouldn’t be kept in homes. Domestication takes thousands of years, and then there are no guarantees that it would be successful. So should we just let them go extinct? Give up? That’s an incredibly depressing conclusion for our closest living relatives.
I’m asking what are you proposing then? Where do you put these ex-entertainer apes?
After the Charla Nash incident (got her face ripped off by a pet chimp 2009), seeing that recent TV commercial with a chimp makes me ill. Animals are fascinating, not merely cute.
David O, I worked in a sanctuary for retired chimps many of whom were former entertainment animals. Some of them quite famous really, had been in big name movies and people knew their commercials.
Most of them had gotten so large and strong they could no longer be safely “worked.” The caging they were being housed in was adequate but hardly engaging. Because of the fact that many of them could no longer “earn their keep” keeping them was becoming costly, especially since it was getting harder to sell the offspring if the trainer didn’t want to keep them and train them himself since he was looking to retire from the business.
The catch? Chimpanzees in captivity can live to be into their 60s. The orangutans he had can live to be into their mid-50s. Kind of expensive to care for such animals long term if they are no longer viable for work.
THIS is the plight of chimpanzees in “acting” roles. They are worked feverishly for as long as it is safe and then they become liabilities that cost more and more money the older and larger they get. Many of them get sold into roadside zoos that have no business trying to house such animals, or they end up in research laboratories.
Not using chimps in entertainment doesn’t many anything has to be “done” with them. Get them out of entertainment and private ownership, let that route of existence go the way of the dodo. Let them live out their lives in zoos participating in SSP (if the zoo will take them being that they are overly humanized, or even let them participate since it has been in my experience many actor animals are rather inbred) or to sanctuaries whose only purpose is to try and maintain a happy, fun lifestyle for them the rest of their days.
Let me tell you, David O, I am less than impressed with some of the things chimps in entertainment are taught. To “smile” they are taught to fear grimace on cue. Try to introduce a chimp that has been taught to “smile” to a chimp that has not. There is an instant disconnect in the communication because one is doing something unnatural. It makes integration with other “normal” chimps much more difficult. Even when they are with other actor chimps, there is a very large learning curve to understand concepts like social hierarchy and appropriate communication since most actor apes are seldom group housed.
I loved my job working with those apes. I miss them dearly, but I also know that the mental state of many of them could have been avoided had they never been forced to work in entertainment. With today’s age of computer generated animation, we’ve already seen several advertisements that didn’t use a real chimp but CGI. Even then, I’d rather they have more natural behaviors rather than be dressed up like cute little dolls and add to people thinking that they are just like little kids.
And to the Chandra Nash situation, the only person to blame in that is Sandra Herald who had been told numerous times by numerous people and experts, including my own former boss, that Travis was getting too large and dangerous for her to keep. She should put him in a sanctuary where she could visit and he could be with other chimps. She refused. Travis was her surrogate child. Her own arrogance is what maimed Chandra Nash and led to Travis being killed. It never had to happen.
[...] Chimps shouldn’t be entertainers. Sure it’s adorable when a chimp gives a dog a bath, but could having chimps on TV too much [...]
[...] for Your Neurons, Surprising Science and The Thoughtful Animal covered, Use of “Entertainment” Chimpanzees in Commercials Distorts [...]
Tracy I appreciate your reply– it has given me a lot to think about. I should also point out I have only been around female chimps, never males.