Open the Labs and Set Them Free?

Adam Stanford teeters atop a log, studying Jerrard. They gaze at each other through a glass divider--a flaxen-haired 5-year-old boy and his 12-year-old counterpart--as if assessing a possible playmate. Adam is wearing a modish blue shirt, pressed khaki shorts and sneakers. Jerrard is wearing no clothes at all, because that’s not required of chimpanzees living in the Mahale Mountain enclosure at the Los Angeles Zoo.

Jerrard turns, showing off his broad shoulders, lanky arms and a resplendent, hairy, heavily muscled back. Adam turns too, shaking his arms as if working out kinks or comparing physiques, aping the chimpanzee. “You know, we are an ape,” he murmurs. Adam’s father cracks up. “I didn’t put him up to that,” he says.

Craig Stanford, 44, is chair of the anthropology department at USC and an emerging star in a new generation of great ape field researchers. He regularly commutes from Los Angeles, where he teaches at USC and co-directs the university’s Jane Goodall Research Center, to the rolling hills of the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda, where he’s engaged in a long-term study of gorillas and chimpanzees.

It feels a bit surreal to stand outside this enclosure with Stanford. Mahale Mountain, after all, is the name of an actual wild chimpanzee study site in Tanzania. Next to the zoo’s faux mountain is a faux Gombe, a kitsch representation of Jane Goodall’s storied study site in the same country. A tent much like the one she lived in during her early field studies opens over a concrete walkway, and copies of her early notes are on display under glass. Stanford conducted research at the real Gombe, and he only heightens the dissonance by turning away from the captive chimpanzees to say they’re quite unlike the wild creatures he’s studied over the years. “They’re just different animals,” he says. “The chimpanzees I work with evolved in an African forest in response to pressures of an African forest.”

The implication is that you can’t learn what you need to know about chimpanzees by observing them in captive circumstances. This notion has not endeared Stanford to the nation’s zookeepers and their in-house primatologists. But what really rankles some of his colleagues is Stanford’s belief that captive apes are akin to young human children. “Keeping great apes in zoos is morally questionable, and in laboratories reprehensible,” he writes in his latest book, “Significant Others.” “The intellect of a chimpanzee is similar to that of a small child or a cognitively impaired adult.”

In addition to the estimated 200,000 chimpanzees still alive in Africa, there are 1,700 or so chimps in zoos around the world and hundreds in primate research centers for use in everything from behavioral studies to biomedical research. Stanford is challenging not only the most invasive sort of medical research--say, injecting chimpanzees with viral strains and caging them in close quarters to see what happens--he’s also taking aim at behavioral experiments in laboratory settings and even the practice of keeping apes in the country’s best zoos, like this one.

Taking his invocation literally would mean shutting down most great ape research in this country. Monkeys still would be kept in captivity for HIV, malaria and tuberculosis research as well as studies on juvenile aggression. But the four kinds of primates that are most closely related to human beings from an evolutionary point of view--chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans--would be placed off limits, as they are in New Zealand. The debate over the ethics of “imprisoning” great apes has bubbled away among primate specialists for years, often beneath the surface. They’ve fussed with one another about whether likening apes to human children is accurate or fair, about whether brainpower should be the trump factor for figuring out which animals deserve special protection, and whether genetic relatedness to human beings should carry special weight in bioethical considerations.

“Look,” says Stanford, gesturing at the group of chimpanzees gamboling near the enclosure’s waterfall. “From a neurological point of view, these animals are the most complex creatures on earth, maybe in the universe, besides dolphins, whales and us. The only thing that separates them from 2-year-old children is that we’re human, they’re not. Eventually, you have to make a decision about where to draw the line.”

During her first few years at Gombe in the early 1960s, Jane Goodall, an unknown researcher without a college degree, knocked a rather large hole in the idea of the traditional dividing line--tool use--between human beings and apes. Since then, painstaking incremental progress has followed from both field studies of wild apes and experiments with captive animals around the world. These studies have demonstrated that great apes use tools, recognize themselves in mirrors, have diverse “traditions,” manage complicated social lives, engage in sophisticated politics and have the ability to count and use symbolic language. Brilliant apes such as Washoe, the chimpanzee whose expertise in sign language was made famous by Roger Fouts, and Kanzi, the bonobo who communicates complicated messages to Sue Savage-Rumbaugh by pointing at symbols on a board, reinforced the popular expectation that primate research would simply continue to flesh out the similarities.

Stories about these breakthroughs have filled gee-whiz columns in newspapers and fueled decades of National Geographic broadcasts. Less visible from a general reader’s point of view are the often fierce critiques by contrarian scholars who feel their colleagues downplay deep differences between humans and other primate species. “They’re trying to make chimps into human beings, trying to mold them in our image!” one scholar has complained to me.

It’s a minor irony that Stanford wound up in the midst of this debate after backing into chimpanzee research in the first place. In 1988, as a graduate student in anthropology studying a monkey called the capped langur in Bangladesh, he wrote to Jane Goodall, asking if he could come to Gombe. He was curious not so much about the chimpanzees but about the colobus monkeys that were hunted by the chimps.

For six years in the early 1990s, Stanford followed both the hunted colobus monkeys and the hunting chimps through a series of bloody encounters. He documented 120 of these chimpanzee hunts in a novel way, recording them from the point of view of both predator and prey. “Everybody told me I wouldn’t be able to do this,” Stanford remembers. “What I did is comparable to standing in the middle of a herd of zebras and watching the lion attack--from the prey’s perspective.”

Stanford made his mark with the hunting study. In a series of scholarly journal articles and two books (“The Hunting Apes” and “Chimpanzee and Red Colobus”), he fleshed out his view that the acquisition and sharing of meat is a kind of proxy for power in chimp society. He also drew a fair share of critics, particularly those who thought his theory was sexist for placing too much emphasis on the males, who do most of the hunting. One noted scholar, Adrienne Zihlman, calls Stanford’s research “a throwback” to anthropological studies that overemphasized the dominance and status of men.

Once hooked on great ape research through his exposure to chimpanzee hunting, Stanford didn’t let go. For the past dozen years he’s been shuttling regularly from a quiet academic life in this country to field work in Africa. In his office at USC on the day before our visit to the zoo, we screen videotapes of wild chimpanzees from the early years at Gombe. These aren’t images for the squeamish.

“Oh, my gosh, that’s the one of Frodo killing Apricot,” Stanford calls out as we watch an adult male chimpanzee snatch a tiny monkey infant from its mother’s arms, swiftly bite the baby in the brain and rend its flesh. A few reels on, we view a scene more amenable to a soft heart. A group of chimps stumbles across a dead bushbuck, its carcass already hollowed out. The chimps hoot, screaming as if in protest. They run their hands along the antelope’s skin. Then Gigi, an adult female, caresses the antelope’s head, draping its legs over her shoulders as if wearing a stole.

“She’s not treating it like food, that’s for sure,” Stanford says. Perhaps Gigi was putting herself in the other animal’s place for a moment. Many cognitive psychologists don’t believe that great apes have what they call “theory of mind,” the ability to put oneself in another’s shoes. Stanford is quick to point out that Gigi’s play provides only anecdotal evidence, the suggestion of a possibility. But who’s to say for sure whether great apes in the wild can place themselves in another’s skin?

Stanford also pulls out pictures of his study site in the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. He’s excited about several new discoveries. On a trip in the spring of 2001, he came across a group of chimpanzees spending long periods of time standing upright in the trees. Since “bipedality” is among the key differences between early human beings and the great apes, such observations could help flesh out an understanding of how early hominids developed the ability to stand on two feet for extended periods.

During that visit, Stanford and John Bosco Nkurunungi, a Ugandan researcher who works with him, also chanced upon a group of chimpanzees and gorillas feeding peacefully side by side in the park. The encounter was surprising; wouldn’t the two species compete for scarce food resources or seek different foods to avoid conflict?

“I’d just finished identifying most of this community of chimpanzees, when all of a sudden there was this much blacker face in the middle of all the chimps,” Stanford recalls. They watched as a large male gorilla joined the lone gorilla in a group of chimpanzees; the gorillas sat a few feet away, ignoring the chimps. Field assistants working with Nkurunungi and Stanford also have reported that they’ve seen an infant gorilla trying to play with an infant chimp.

These fresh discoveries reinforce Stanford’s feeling for what he calls a “custodial obligation” toward the apes and his deepening belief that chimpanzees, as living links between a primate “common ancestor” and ourselves, deserve special protection. Differences in behavior and cognition, he says, will prove to be matters of degree, not kind. He predicts that human brains will turn out to be “exploded versions of the chimpanzee mind.”

We don’t pen 2-year-old children in outdoor enclosures to educate us, or cage them in laboratories for biomedical experiments to help save us from disease, or train them to act ferocious in feature films such as Tim Burton’s “Planet of the Apes” to entertain us. Why, then, Stanford asks, do our close primate cousins deserve this treatment?

For years animal-rights activists, notably the organizers of the Portland-based Great Ape Project, have campaigned for the preservation of apes’ liberty and their “protection from torture.” And plenty of purists have complained all along that great ape researchers fight only for the improvement of conditions for chimpanzees, not for other animals as well. What is new is the intensity of the argument among primatologists themselves. A wedge has opened between field researchers and laboratory experimenters in a debate now put in increasingly fervent, and personal, terms.

In a panel discussion about ethics at the national convention of the American Society of Primatologists in Savannah, Ga., last summer, this split was on display when a questioner suddenly set off an agitated flurry. “Why do we hold these animals in captivity at all?” she asked. One of the presenters, Joseph Bielitzki, former chief veterinary officer at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Ames Research Center in California, reacted as if he’d been slapped. He launched an impassioned attack on the idea that great apes have inherent rights. Critics were “granting moral authority to the great apes,” Bielitzki said. “I can’t do that. I just don’t think they have the same moral agency as the people in this room!” One zoo primatologist replied flatly that without apes and other exotic animals on display, the drawing power of zoos would disappear. A biomedical specialist pointed out that testing thalidomide and other chemicals on nonhuman primates had protected untold numbers of human beings in this country from illness, birth defects and deaths.

Stanford doubts whether anyone can show that invasive biomedical research on great apes is necessary. He points to the calamitous history of HIV research on chimpanzees. For years federal researchers bred chimpanzees in the search for AIDS treatments. More than 100 chimps were injected with the human version of the virus. But these infected chimps proved to be poor study subjects largely because the disease incubates slowly in chimpanzee bodies. Now the primate research centers have been left to care for 100 infected, and dying, young chimps.

“Everybody asks whether I would feel the same if cancer could be cured through research on chimpanzees,” Stanford says. “But the key word is ‘if.’ How many cases do we have where great apes were actually the critical testing ground in curing disease? The idea that this kind of invasive biomedical experimentation will lead to a breakthrough is just a fallacy. I don’t see any evidence that there is a real prospect for some breakthrough in chimps as opposed to research using rats and rabbits.”

This is all hotly contested territory, including Stanford’s claim that chimpanzees deserve a hold on our collective conscience because they have the intelligence of 2-year-old children. I quickly discovered how tricky the issue is during a presentation by Daniel Povinelli at last summer’s annual convention of the American Psychological Assn. in San Francisco. Povinelli, a psychologist from the University of Louisiana, is the young bete noire of researchers who stress the similarities between great apes and human beings. Introduced by an elderly researcher from Stanford University as “the best scientist in the world on chimpanzee cognition,” Povinelli showed a beautiful shot of an exuberant chimpanzee grinning, a photo you might expect to gin up a lecture about how apes are Just-Like-Us. But for any psychologist in the audience expecting such a presentation, he threw a quick curve. Chimpanzees do not have, he said in a deadpan tone, “a watered-down version of the human mind.”

During the past decade, Povinelli has devoted much of his time to unraveling the core arguments of researchers like Stanford who think that the differences between human beings and great apes are matters of degree. “Cut through all the BS. The more you work with chimpanzees and with human children, the more you start to see that there’s this profound mixture of similarity and difference at every age from birth forward,” he said after his talk. He repeated the phrase a few times, perhaps fearful that I’d miss it: “Similar and different from birth forward.”

Chimpanzees and humans naturally share basic neural circuitry and cognitive patterns, thanks to a common ancestor, Povinelli says. But he thinks there’s a qualitatively different overlay--a sort of parallel system--operating in humans. This system, which Povinelli believes distinguishes us from all other animals, allows human beings to speculate about the internal lives of other beings and to track the effects of unseen forces. The basis for the difference, Povinelli suspects, is an impulse to construct narrative, to link past, present and future in a story.

Povinelli argues that great ape conservationists are making a big strategic mistake when they liken chimpanzee minds to the cognition of 2-year-old human children. That could boomerang, he says, making the great apes more vulnerable instead. He supports conservation efforts in Africa and improved conditions for captive apes at home. “We should treat chimps with respect and take into consideration their real interests and needs. But all of those things can be taken care of without saying they are the same as humans--that’s one thing I know they’re not.”

In many ways, friction over such disparate theories is rooted in decades-old rivalry between laboratory experimenters and field researchers. Experimenters focused on the intricate workings of cognition tend to dismiss wild ape researchers as irrelevant romantics too enamored of their own anecdotes. “You could do that kind of work for a thousand years, observing natural behavior, spontaneous behavior, and you’d never, ever come closer to understanding whether great apes have a theory of mind!” Povinelli says. Scholars who observe apes in the wild tend to think of those who work with captive animals as narrow-minded dopes focused on neat lab tricks, sophisticated data manipulation and arcane theory that only obscures a deep understanding of real animals. Animals held in captivity, especially highly intelligent and social apes, are invariably impoverished, they argue. If they behave quite unlike animals in the wild, what’s the value of research? “It’s like looking through a cracked window,” Stanford says softly. Like many other prominent great ape researchers, he opposes a proposed Povinelli study in which orphaned baby chimpanzees would be raised in human homes for several years to observe whether they develop more human-like ways of thinking. “What Povinelli does, holding out these animals as normal, it’s absurd,” Stanford says. “Think it through. What would you learn about normal children by studying Bosnian war orphans?”

At stake is the future direction of primate research, which hangs in the balance in the midst of potentially divisive bids for public support. So too does an altered view of human nature, for how we end up thinking about the great apes shapes how we see ourselves.

The two Stanfords and I take seats on a platform overlooking the Mahale Mountain enclosure at the L.A. Zoo to watch the chimps and their primate cousins. Adam’s attention is now fixed on dozens of teenage Homo sapiens held back by a railing. Stanford scuffs his sandals on the ground and shifts uncomfortably as I press him about zoo exhibits like this one. Perhaps he’s torn between increasingly firm opinions and his friendships with the keeper here and a network of researchers who study captive apes in centers around the world.

“So what do you mean to suggest?” I ask, pointing past a crowd of people calling out to the chimps. The 38,000-square-foot enclosure is surrounded by ficus, magnolia and banana trees. Palms and rock promontories shadow a grassy expanse. Faux logs are stuffed with nuts and leaves to keep the chimps active. “Are you saying this enclosure shouldn’t exist?”

Judeo, a formidable senior male in the group, shows off his impressive pectorals, throwing his arms wide. “A few might still exist for education purposes maybe,” Stanford says. But he adds that no more great apes should be bred in captivity, and most of those already held should be released into large sanctuaries where they can live more normal lives. When I reach Cathleen Cox, research director at the Los Angeles Zoo, she listens when I read her the conclusion of Stanford’s book. She asks me to back up and read the paragraphs again in which Stanford calls keeping great apes in zoos “ethically questionable.”

Cox was instrumental in designing the Mahale Mountain enclosure, pressing hard to build and maintain an exhibit that provides naturalistic stimulation for the apes. Recent studies of their social behavior informed its architecture. The chimps are kept in a fairly large group and they’ve been allowed to raise several infants, which Cox thinks will prove key to their ability to “experience a joyful, fulfilling life.”

She explains the prime reasons for keeping well-designed enclosures like hers open. There’s tremendous education potential, she says, and as a result of seeing great apes in the zoo, people may learn and act on a new sense of connection with chimpanzees.

Her argument draws support from a somewhat surprising source: Jane Goodall. “There’s always the gray area,” Goodall says when I track her down between speaking engagements in Washington, D.C. “And here the gray area is the terrible plight of chimpanzees in Africa.” Goodall agrees with Stanford’s comments about the immorality of biomedical research on great apes and shares his qualms about Povinelli’s proposed project. But she bristles at the notion that these positions should be based on his underlying assumption. “What I particularly hate is comparing chimpanzee intellect to a small human child or a mentally impaired adult. They’re way above a 2-year-old child--in the way they can plan for the immediate future, in the way they quickly adjust to the arrival of a new guy in the group who happens to be higher ranking than they are. No 2-year-old child could do anything like that, nor could a mentally disturbed adult.”

Cox offers no opinion about the difference between chimp and human cognition, relying instead on reports of the plight of wild great apes. Since they’re threatened in the wild all over the world, Cox suggests, perhaps captive animals should be valued as the keepers of precious “genetic material.” If they’re wiped out in Africa, future generations of Jerrard’s offspring one day might be used to repopulate the wild.

“I don’t like that argument. It’s too fatalistic,” Stanford replies. “It’s like saying, ‘If I put you in a cell, you’re not going to get hit by an automobile.’ ”

Instead, he says, a new international campaign to protect great ape home ranges is needed. As for the argument that zoos contribute, directly and indirectly, to conservation efforts, the Los Angeles Zoo makes little direct contribution to conservation efforts aimed at great apes in the wild. The Mahale Mountain exhibit, in other words, isn’t used as a vehicle for keeping the real Mahale Mountain chimpanzees alive.

Cox is searching for common ground. “Craig is right on in a way. It is morally questionable to do this work. As you confront the [ethical] question, it ought to move you in the direction of really being sure that you’re protecting them and ensuring the most satisfying life they can possibly have.”

Judeo, the wizened older male at the Mahale Mountain enclosure, sports a white goatee, a broad chest and a domineering manner that dares you to question who’s in charge. Galloping across the grass on all fours, he clambers up the rocks and then rises fully upright, looking as if he intends to spoof that timeworn illustration about evolution that begins with a monkey and gives rise to a man.

Even if you didn’t know that Judeo is a close genetic match for me, our DNA overlapping by more than 98%, going to the railing for a closer look is like observing oneself in a fun-house mirror. There’s the initial shock of recognition that primate researchers always mention. But sometimes, too, there’s a powerful crosscurrent, a kind of visceral shock, even revulsion. Judeo’s eyes are bright, his brow furled in a familiar way, his mouth upturned in what looks like a malevolent grin. Get a load of that gaping mouth, pink gums and sharp canines. His chest is a fireplug of muscles, like the torso of a dwarf bodybuilder. His long arms stretch down past stumpy legs.

Perhaps such push-pull reactions explain why apes and monkeys were used for centuries as symbols of the impulsive or demonic side of human nature. Maybe this deep ambiguity even underpins the tendency of some to see the connection between apes and humans as a lightly graded continuum and others, studying the same animals, to highlight vast differences.

The two Stanfords, one a lively miniature of the other, wander off to look at hippos and giraffes. Along wide concrete walkways on our way back to the zoo entrance, volunteers have brought various other animals out to allow visitors a closer look. We stop to check them out. An attendant offers a bulbous boa constrictor as thick as your wrist for patrons to touch. When it moves, rippling its muscles, the snake’s body shimmers. Adam hesitates, but only for a beat before running his open hand along the leathery snakeskin.

I watch over his shoulder, studying Adam as he scopes out the boa constrictor. He looks up shyly. But he doesn’t try shimmying his own body, doesn’t stroke his own skin, aping the snake as he’d done an hour before with Jerrard. Adam doesn’t lie down on the ground to mimic the snake’s slithering. Neither does he turn back, to me or to his father, to say with quiet authority: “You know, we are a snake.”

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Douglas Foster, a visiting professor at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, writes about science and politics.