Great apes are magnificent animals. They are intelligent. They are closest to us genetically. But they are not us.
I bring this up because a professor (of course!) named John C. Matani undercut a perfectly righteous call for us to work harder to protect the world’s threatened apes by descending into cliche anthropomorphizing. From “Fearing a Planet Without Apes:”
I have been lucky to study all five kinds of apes during 33 years of fieldwork in Africa and Asia. When I look into the eyes of an ape, something stares back at me that seems familiar. Perhaps it is a shock of recognition, or a thoughtfulness not seen in the eyes of a frog, bird or cat. The penetrating stare makes me wonder, “What is this individual thinking?”
Nothing. They aren’t thinking anything. They aren’t rational in the way we are. Apes are magnificent animals in their own right. We don’t need this kind of “apes are people too” pap to be persuaded to fund protection efforts.
That got me to thinking of the other times I have read similar nonsense in our supposedly most learned publications. Take, for example, this surreality about the supposed moral sense of hyenas by professor (of course!) Debra Blum, in a book review published in The New Scientist:
I wish they’d attempted to answer that tricky question that nags at me whenever I study a captive animal. As I stand on the unrestricted side of a fence watching a hyena, and it watches me back with deep, wary eyes, which one of us is really the moral animal?
We are. Hyenas are amoral. Even though they often eat their prey alive, there is nothing wrong with that because they are not moral agents.
And this one in which NYT writer and author of, Charles Siebert, has whales pondering the nature of those strange humans published in the New York Times Magazine:
Somehow the more we learn about whales, the more we’re coming to appreciate the sublimely discomfiting reality that a kind of parallel “us” has long been out there roaming the oceans’ depths, succumbing to our assaults. Indeed, when that baby gray calf bobbed up out of the sea and held there that first morning, staring at me with his huge, slow-blinking eye, it felt to me as if he were taking one impossibly long and quizzical look in the mirror.
No it was not.
And we mustn’t forget New York Times science columnist Natalie Angier ludicrously writing about plant ethics:
It’s a small daily tragedy that we animals must kill to stay alive. Plants are the ethical autotrophs here, the ones that wrest their meals from the sun. Don’t expect them to boast: they’re too busy fighting to survive
Please. Apes are not people. Hyenas don’t have a moral sense. Whales don’t ponder the nature of man. And plant photosynthesis has nothing whatsoever to do with ethics. The cause of protecting flora and fauna is not helped by such—and many other examples I could give—sophomoric anthropomorphic assaults on human exceptionalism.
