By Ed Stoddard JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Humanity's closest relative the chimpanzee could be extinct in around 50 years because it is hunted for meat and threatened by deforestation and disease, researchers said on Tuesday. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20040608/sc_nm/environment_chimpanzees_dc_1 Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Very disturbing. I wonder why they cannot get these people other animals to eat besides chimps? Can't they raise goats, dogs, steers or anything besides killing chimps?
I think the chimp is seen as a sort of status food. I know it's that way for the gorilla. When you have an important guest for dinner, you can't serve them cow or pig, it's gotta be gorilla or chimp.
How ridiculous we are. A great many species of parrots are on the verge of extinction in the wild -- but it's no problem. The reason is that there are thousands of breeding pairs in commercial and hobbyist aviaries. They're spread all over the globe so an epidemic or an asteroid can't wipe them all out. Heck, Sigfried and Roy personally have practically saved the Siberian tiger from extinction. Horses have been extinct in nature for centuries, but there are plenty of them because humans love them. We really love chimpanzees. We love all primates because deep down inside we know they're our cousins, and we especially love the other apes. So why the heck aren't there more chimpanzees living in domestic situations? I know they're a lot more trouble than a horse or a parrot, but imagine how hard it was for the first person who domesticated the horse. As for parrots, even a tame one will occasionally get in a bad mood and practically tear your finger off. How hard can it be to breed chimpanzees domestically until we get a population that is more tractable, the same way we did with wolves and ended up with dogs? I know the scientists and the Greenies make the sign of the cross when you talk like this, but for the goddess's sake, THEIR way just ain't working. If we want to have chimpanzees on this planet two hundred years from now, they're going to be domesticated. Get over it! About 70 years ago a psychologist and his wife who had just had a baby tried an experiment. They got a newborn chimpanzee and raised the two babies together. The chimp kept up with the human and in fact in some ways learned faster. The whole thing started to fall apart only when the human baby finally started learning to talk. So where are all the curious deaf mutes in this country who communicate in ASL? Why aren't some of them raising chimpanzees with their babies? We already know that apes have a surprising ability to learn ASL. Hearing people argue that they aren't really using the language, that they're just imitating gestures. I'd think that a real deaf mute who actually uses ASL every day would be able to tell the difference in a few minutes' conversation with a chimp. Raising one themselves would probably push this experiment to new heights. Perhaps if we taught chimps to talk in ASL, they would learn better manners and they would grow up with human families and be just as clever as we are. They couldn't possibly vote any worse than we do or choose stupider TV shows to make popular or settle for lower quality software.
Interesting possibility, Fraggle. How would you bring chimp's rampant sexuality into a human world? The chimps have sex with each other all day to cement social bonds. Even the babies get in on the action. Might make teaching the kids about sex a little easier if they've been rutting with the chimp already. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Chimps also get aggressive when they mature, possibly due to lack of social sex? Maybe a means of communicating with them would help the aggressiveness. Allow it to have other means of release. An angry chimp could kick your ass in a heartbeat. Plus, their asses are just so damn ugly. Ick... I always wanted a pet chimp, thought it would be cool as hell, maybe even a monkey. But, I wonder if chimps are too smart to take well to captivity. They'd know that something was wrong. That things are supposed to be different. Might create a chimp population with a prison mentality. Anyway, we'd probably just end up making them our butlers anyway.
Chimps are disgusting. Have you ever seen them at the zoos? They stick their fingers up their asses and then suck on 'em. I don't need to remind you of that video where that chimp sticks his finger in his butt, sniffs it, and falls over lol. They throw their feces when angry. They EAT their own feces. They're canibals, they steal eachother's babies and eat them in the wild. I would NOT want to be around a chimp for an extended period of time, much less have one as a pet, it would probably try and wipe it's butt on me lol.
To the above: wow, so just because they're so disgusting, let's kill them off and forget all the research we can do with them. A thought struck me. Many species went extinct before we started feeling sorry for the animals that are disappearing off the face of the planet. And what? Nothing. So, unless there's some disaster that will take place if the chimps die out, let them die out.
It's mainly about "profit"--people are hunting and killing the chimps in order to make a profit from selling the meat. As for the people who buy the meat, well, they're basically starving over there, so many people will take whatever they can get, plus they may have different cultural values regarding what's considered "meat fit for humans" and "meat not fit for humans". Hence there's a market for chimp meat. And no, they can't just go out and start raising cattle and goats for meat, because cattle and goats need grass, hay, grain, etc. to eat, and they haven't got any. Africa's farmland is an expanding disaster area. And dogs would need meat themselves, so raising dogs for meat is out. Chimps are wild meat, free for the taking. So people do.
Take a bunch of chimps and mate them forcefully(or artificial insemination). Then we can "farm" them to further biomedical technology. I dont give a damn about the chimps(few hundred chimp experiments could save millions of people) I dont think they will become extinct any time soon however i think they shouldnt.
We could genetically alter them and give them some body fat and gills and let them loose in the oceans. Finally, we'd have our aquatic ape. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Seriously, it's easy to point fingers at third world nations and say you shouldn't do that. It's a shame that no one was around to point their fingers at us while we were destroying our ecosystems. (Depending on exactly where you live. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! )
If it comes down to the last few pockets of wild chimps facing extermination within a few years, surely SOMETHING more will be done. Too many people care for them - even if only as a novelty animal to have a picture taken with - for mankind to let them disappear altogether. A captive population with a prison mentality is better than no population anywhere. If all the zoos in the World, or even a quarter of them, made a concerted effort to keep a viable number of chimpanzees alive, it could be done: maybe 1000 individuals would ultimately be enough to avoid terminal inbreeding, if they were mated according to a careful plan and the familial relationships strictly recorded. And yes, people who have sufficient time, patience and resources should be allowed to keep chimps as pets. A chimp raised from birth by humans ought to feel like a member of the family, perhaps more so than a dog. Of course, it will be infintely better if there remain a good few thousand chimpanzees in the wild. Some suitable habitat should remain inside national parks and nature reserves, even if it is eventually destroyed everywhere else. In the face of rampant illegal hunting: the only permanent solution would be to raise local peoples' standard of living until they no longer require bushmeat. Political stability is more important here than foreign aid.
Humans have instincts very much like that. They are reined in by the way we're socialized as infants. I submit that if a baby chimp were raised by humans the same way they raise humans, he would grow up to be a much different adult. A deaf-mute household using American Sign Language would be the perfect environment, he wouldn't be held back and frustrated by his inability to learn our speech. Humans have an amazing capacity for aggression. One could say that the entire institution of civilization has a single goal: to find a way to breed and raise less aggressive humans. These days it's difficult to say with a straight face that it's working. But if we can keep the missionaries from having access to the humanized chimps and teaching them about religion, we'd have a better chance of teaching them not to act out their aggressive feelings. So can a wolf. Yet humans and wolves learned to live together in harmony. This isn't exactly captivity that I'm talking about. Raising a baby chimp as a member of the family and finding out how much potential he has isn't the same thing as treating him like a hamster. Besides, we've got a number of highly intelligent species living with us and they have all made the tradeoff. Obviously the wolves that didn't have the right instinct to live with humans were not the ones that joined our hunting parties. The same can be said for the African jungle cats that came to live with humans and keep the rodents out of our granaries versus their cousins who preferred to stay in the jungle. Domestication of companion animals as opposed to food animals was largely voluntary. Cats and dogs could easily run off if they wanted to, and the cats, at least, could fend pretty well on their own, because they haven't diverged so much in physiology from their wild ancestors as dogs have. Yet very few of them do. They'd probably be more like parrots. Parrots are intelligent enough to understand what's going on. But they're also intelligent enough to understand what a sweet deal it is not having to forage for food and and not being an insignificant member of a flock of 500, none of whom can talk. You have to give parrots quite a lot of attention and intellectual stimulation, but it works if you do it right. A chimp might be different in degree, but if he could talk in ASL there'd be a lot more opportunities for him to "self-actualize" than there are for parrots and dogs. Well, many of our ancestors did just that to many of our other ancestors. The species survived. I definitely believe that if "talking" chimps come to join our multi-species community, we're finally going to have to give up the word "pet" in favor of the more politically correct "companion animal."
It's plain lamentable that our meteoric rise to dominance of planet Earth has directly led to the impending doom of our lesser (intellectually-evolved) cousins. The reign of mankind seems to be imposing an era of artificial and compulsory extinction upon all the other indigenous inhabitants of the planet. It also doesn't help that some of the world's richest biodiversity and biological gemstones are located in regions where people have to pillage and plunder them as means of survival. Even amongst urban dwellers like us, the proative quotient is low. How many people would dedicate their lives - or at least sufficient attention - to saving primates? Not many people can empathise with the plight of these creatures like Dr. Jane Goodall or Dian Fossey, lest willing to fight against the overwhelming odds to keep them thriving in their wild habitats. Noble they are, but fervour does not automatically translate into political will. Their influence is sadly limited as the vast majority of world leaders choose to remain indifferent to the fates of these Great Apes. Am I right to say that there's a lack of leadership or representative regarding such issues on the world stage? (....now if only Gore had won the 2000 elections... ) In fact, what we can only talk about is really damage-control. The impending onslaught of extinction for our primal cousins seems inevitable. As nicely mentioned by Starthane, the only best option(s) for them (or for any other fauna) lies in reserve parks. Or cryogenically suspension. Or even domestication if all else fails.
At least we’re not biased, we do the same to the plant kingdom. (Sorry, there’s no smiley for sarcasm.) I live in a place where people have to chain themselves to trees to stop them from being turned into cereal boxes. It’s only since the dawn of civilization and its acceleration of technological progress that man’s power to affect the environment has become so dangerous. As I’ve posted before, I simply dismiss the accusations that Neolithic humans hunted species to extinction. Humans with guns riding horses couldn’t kill off the elephants. There’s no way that humans on foot with flint weapons could have wiped out the larger, faster, meaner mammoths. Capricious nature did that to herself. It’s the failure of the civilized tribes to deal properly with the ones that remained in the Stone Age that turns them into cultures of pillage and plunder. We gave them just enough medicine and other technology to increase their rate of population growth, without giving them the secret to the prosperity that invariably reduces family size. Not that we personally have done that, we’re so enlightened. (Where’s that sarcasm icon?) But we inherit the sins of our forefathers, that’s a big part of the deal when you accept civilization. But can’t we take comfort in the fact that it is growing exponentially? How many members of Mesopotamian civilization cared about – or even understood – their environment? None, or they wouldn’t have turned it into a desert by overfarming. Ditto for the Aztecs. The Mayas’ trick was to cut down all their trees for buildings. Even two hundred years ago, virtually no one in America even thought about sustainability, pollution, and other environmental issues. The fact that the Green Party doesn’t win any national elections does not detract from its victories at the city level. (The city nearest us has a Green majority on its city council.) Nor from the successes of the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and other less politicized organizations. Nor from the glimmer of hope offered by debt-for nature swaps and eco-tourism. Or in my own avocation, dog breeders sending free 150-pound Anatolian Guardians (that fetch $2,000 per puppy in American cougar country) to African farmers, so the lions can be simply chased away from their herds rather than being shot. Again, a whole lot more than would have done it when I was the average age of the SciForums community. You have to see the hope in the journey to enlightenment, rather than the despair in not having reached it yet. Yet Fossey and Goodall have a huge base of supporters and are regularly featured in the media, making enlightenment available to any American who can read and also to the much larger number who depend on TV for their news. Paradigm shift. Paradigm shift. The way the world is run is changing dramatically. It’s not easy to take solace in that at the moment because the change appears to be for the worse. But that’s what happens at the end of any great era. The people and institutions in power turn into desperate scavengers, attempting to consolidate power by killing off the weaker and using their power despotically. But they can’t put off the inevitable. The Cold War is over, the internet exists, telephony doesn’t require telephone poles cluttering up the landscape, women are beginning to rise up and fight patriarchy, the world’s average per-capita GDPis rising as its average birth rate is dropping. . . . You younger people will live to see a mighty change in the way civilization is managed and for the most part it will be a healthy change that empowers you all and levels the disparities between the haves and have-nots. Including the non-human have-nots. You have to stop seeing everything in absolutes. There is a tremedously greater focus on these issues throughout the industrialized, soon-to-be-deindustrialized-by-computer-technology nations than there was in my own childhood. I witnessed first-hand the changes that brought about that focus, so forgive me if I see the glass as one-quarter full as opposed to your view of three-quarters empty. He did. (Insert appropriate smiley here.) The fact that that election was so blatantly rigged was an example of how desperate the powerful leaders of the Industrial Era are to hang onto their slowly vanishing power. Besides, Gore is no Clinton or Carter or Kennedy. Just because he said a lot of things that we like the sound of, that doesn’t mean that he would be either an honorable politician or an effective one. Take my word as an IT expert, Gore doesn’t understand one damn thing about the internet. Take my word as the world’s oldest rock-and-roll fan, he doesn’t respect the principle of freedom of speech. He’s not the bright, dedicated, honorable man with outstanding “people skills” that the job requires. Not to deny that we probably would be at least somewhat better off with him in the White House, but the difference would be nowhere near as dramatic as what you’re all dreaming of. Damage control is a really good thing, don’t put it down. We’re left with the world that our ancestors made for us. We can only do our best. We can’t undo all the results of their hubris. We’ll accomplish a lot more by concentrating on what we can do, rather than lamenting what we can’t. The universe is not fair, and it’s totally deaf and indifferent to our entreaties and supplications. But it’s not evil. We can bring about change if we use our intelligence to figure out how to get along with the universe. Domestication is fine. It’s worked for dogs, cats, horses, and many other animals. If your dogs and cats could be granted a three-digit IQ and the ability to understand language for a couple of days, I guarantee that they would almost unanimously vote to keep the lives they have rather than being sent back into the wilderness with no blankets, kibbled food, squeaky toys, or relationship of mutual love between their entire species and ours. I know I can speak for my parrots. The life they live in our home is vastly more intellectually challenging, medically comfortable, and full of exciting, rewarding relationships with members of about four different species, than the lives of their ancestors. Never forget that dogs and cats volunteered to be our “domestic partners” (to give the term a much different meaning from the one it carries in health insurance legislation ^_^). They saw the life that humans had made for themselves and said, “I gotta get me a piece of that.”
Ahhh... Fraggle, thanks for pointing out that I was depicting such a bleak outlook. In the part of the world where i live in, there never seems to be enough good news (on eco-issues) to soothe or mitigate the emotional distress garnered from all those inevitable bad news copiously generated by the Bushies. And you're right about the quarter-full glass of water, I've got this chidish tendency towards being whiney and sore. Forgive me. It seems lamenting never did help to solve any problems, did it? Alas.. alas... =) Well, now that you've mentioned that "We’ll accomplish a lot more by concentrating on what we can do, rather than lamenting what we can’t." That'll lead us to instropection. And questions asked. What can we really do to help? As nature-loving individuals... as intelligent sentient lifeforms... and as privileged members of society who can discern and judge and empathise, what tangible contributions can we individuals make? That's for micro-perspective. And as for macro, you mentioned about Sierra Club and Greenpeace... would the political power and clout wielded by these NGOs be ever be substantial, given the amount of opposition they face from the governing parties? And wouldn't their focus alter slightly as they themselves - albeit inevitably - become increasing embroiled in commercialisation and, ugh, capitalism? Some say that the only avenue for environmental salvation lies in the path to spreading eco-awareness. And that meaning environmental-friendliness being a moral obligation and - more importantly - as a shared value . Amongst global leaders; amongst developed and developing countries; amongst producers and consumers; and amongst fellow men. Awareness breeds proaction. Am I right or just painting the picture too bright and rosy this time round?
A minor point: it can't have been entirely due to climate change, since the mammoths & other megafauna lived through well over a dozen previous climatic swings of similar intensity at the end of previous ice ages. Though some mammoth species were indeed more formidable than modern elephants, they still reproduced slowly - in fact, they may only have bred fast enough to keep the population level ticking over at the best of times. During rapid global warming, they would have been reduced to a few isolated groups by habitat degradation, and left in severe risk of dying out. Perhaps, this time round, the added pressure of human hunting was enough to push them over the brink. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! It might be partially our fault. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! And if modern man really wanted to, we could certainly wipe out the remaining elephant species pretty fast.
I don’t know that to blame the indigenous peoples of Africa for the demise of the chimp has real value. It could be that the peoples of these countries have always eaten a number of chimps. I could place equal blame on zoos, on private collectors, on any number of sources of monetary value on captured chimps or even dead chimps. I could put blame on any country that imports wood from these forests. I could blame myself for my desire for chocolate. And so on. After speaking to a number of African immigrants, one on one, their input into how things are there adds to the big picture. Lots of countries in Africa do understand the value of their natural resources. But the battle is really about education for the people who live there, the battle against poverty, and the battles of political idealism. All to often things there erupt into some kind of a civil war, negating all progress while the people living there fight for their own survival. If you ever have had to flee for your life, the value of chimps will not be foremost in your mind. A man from Ethiopia told me about how different his country is from that of Kenya. Specifically we were talking about the wild life. While he said his country was trying to invest in its wild life to promote tourism, they had fallen so far behind Kenya he was not sure they would ever be able to get it up to what we demand as tourists. He advised me if I wanted to go see wildlife in Africa, go to Kenya and I would not be disappointed. He saw the value, but then he had to flee Ethiopia as a matter of survival. That is why he was talking to me in America that day before class. What can you do? There is much. Writing letters helps. Promoting tourism is a big issue. When countries can make money off people wanting to see live chimps, they begin to comprehend their value alive and well. So save your money up and take a trip to Africa on a tourism junket that will show you what a chimp looks like in the wild. Spend your money there and promote the idea of the value of living animals. Research what things are exported from Africa that are destroying the chimp habitat. And stop supporting corporations that profit from the demise of chimp habitat. Write them letters and tell them why you are switching to product B vs their product. It took years and years but the tuna boycott, which was going strong when I was a kid did have an impact. I missed tuna fish sandwiches, but I did what I could. Now who here would buy tuna without a “dolphin safe” stamp on its side? Is this a perfect harvest method? No. But it is a real attempt by commercial fishermen to compromise. http://www.elephantcam.net
