Hollywood should stop using real chimps

Martin Scorsese's Best Picture-nominated Wolf of Wall Street

For a some time I've been arguing that Jane Goodall is right: the media should stop using real chimpanzees in entertainment and advertising. The 2011 movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes starring the great Andy Serkis in a motion capture suit showed that the technology for digitally simulating chimps on screen is rapidly getting better and cheaper, so the demand for chimps for commercial entertainment purposes should be stopped, just as the NIH announced in late 2011 it was banning medical research on chimps. 

If medical researchers aren't allowed use chimps to save human lives, why should Martin Scorsese get to rent a baby one to lard on more overkill in The Wolf of Wall Street?

But not much seems to be happening on the front of shaming the entertainment industry into not demanding more infant chimps. For example, although a few animal rights groups protested The Wolf of Wall Street, I hadn't even heard of the tiny ruckus. Hollywood went on to honor the film with a Best Picture nomination, and give Oscar nominations to Scorsese, writer Terence Winter, and star Leonardo DiCaprio.

Chimps are extremely cute from birth to six years. 

But then they live a long, long time (nobody seems to know for sure how long: online estimates range from 40 to 60 years and seem to be going up over time as old TV chimps don't die). Chimps are extremely expensive to care for humanely and safely in captivity because, to be frank, the adult males are vicious brutes: they'll rip your face off.

During the behaviorist era it was widely assumed assumed that chimps could be raised to be better-behaved just by exposing them to human role models: see Ronald Reagan's impassioned speeches denouncing pseudo-scientific hereditarian bigotry in the 1951 Bedtime for Bonzo. Unfortunately, when a chimp was raised alongside a human infant in a remarkable experiment, it turned out that the human wound up acting more like the chimp than vice-versa.

Then, in the 1970s and 1980s it was universally assumed that chimps could be taught to converse in sign language. But the failure of the Nim Chimpsky Project (and others) showed Noam Chomsky was right about humans having some special knack for language.

The business of providing exotic animals for the entertainment industry is a low rent one. The people in it typically can't make enough money to fund a half-decent retirement for themselves, much less their animals.

But even though they are sons of bitches, by importing or breeding them for use in the American entertainment industry, but now the ones in America are our sons of bitches and thus we have a moral responsibility not to, as so often happens, just lock them up in some cage somewhere. We need a stronger sense of stewardship, and a better realization of when things just aren't working out.

When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging. Society should lean heavily against further breeding of chimpanzees in America. I doubt if it's practical to send them back to Africa, but laws against smuggling more in should be strictly enforced.