How to Save the Chimpanzee (although it’s basically a loser)

Some species of life on earth manage to co-exist with man, and some fail. Successes include the housefly, many kinds of viruses, the cockroach, the domestic cow, and the dog and cat. Failures include the dodo and the carrier pigeon; near-failures include the great whales, tigers, and the great apes, just to name a few.

Let’s take a look at one of these faunal flops through an unsentimental eye. When famous chimp observer Jane Goodall began her career (why are all these famous ape observers women? Goodall with chimps, Fossey with gorillas, Galdikas with orangutans; together they are known as “Leakey’s Angels,” and we can add the lesser known Barbara King, renowned baboon and gorilla expert. I’m no mathematician, but based on the evidence I’ve just adduced, a figure of 100% seems to impose itself. Is it nothing more than the attraction to large, muscular, dangerous, hairy things that look more or less like boxers and wrestlers?), there were close to a million chimpanzees alive in Africa; now there are about 300,000. Why the decline? The answer is simplicity itself, but as George Orwell said, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

In fact, chimpanzees share Africa with an ever-expanding population of human beings, and as Africans progress in terms of civilization and material culture, the amount of land exploited by each, per capita, also increases. More and more of them may live in cities, but the land and its resources are ever more fully utilized, and in new and different ways as greater technological progress allows. New uses are constantly being found to turn everything that walks, crawls, flies, swims, grows, buds, or divides into profitable products for the easily bored, and therefore innovative world markets for exotic food and luxury items; and even the surplus empty land itself is now being put to use — wealthy Asian countries such as China, Japan, and Korea have long been purchasing huge sectors in Africa on which to grow rice and other crops. These farms have signs reading in several languages, “CHIMPS — PUSH OFF.”

So how can the chimpanzee compete? It’s not very bright; it can’t seem to organize protest demonstrations, it does not know how to make weapons, and being evidently incapable of keeping absolutely quiet when humans are around, it can’t even successfully hide itself from harm. The poorest, most backward, spear-throwing loincloth-wearer in the world is easily able to outsmart and defeat the chimpanzee, and does so for fun and profit whenever the whim takes him. No, I’m afraid that as long as human beings insist on living in Africa and running things the way they please, there isn’t much future for such sad-sack players as the chimpanzee, not to mention all the other animals who make such a poor showing against mankind.

The great apes have many other shortcomings which will probably ensure their continued reduction in numbers. It’s extremely difficult and often mortally dangerous to keep them as pets, so we can’t dream of setting up a worldwide market in pet chimps, gorillas, and orangutans. They can’t support themselves on, say, large farm-reservations, like the American Indians managed to (however badly). They can’t swim, so it’s no good simply dropping them all into the sea. They would be hopeless as laborers of any kind. Their skins and fur seem to be undesirable and useless. Finally, the world seems to have had just about enough of their Jerry Lewis level of humor, so any thought of employing more than a very few of them at a time in the world of entertainment is completely vain. Even those who claim to like chimpanzees wish only to see them VERY infrequently, on television and behind very solid steel bars in the zoo, but they certainly wouldn’t want families of chimps to move in next door, or even at the end of the block.

I suggest that a valuable use of current resources would be to gather and preserve the DNA of as many individual endangered great apes as possible, in the hopes of resurrecting them some day and moving them to a future depopulated area of the world. Japan and South Korea look promising; if their fertility rates do not undergo a truly enormous AND permanent change, both these countries will indeed be almost totally empty in the surprisingly near future, and perhaps the world could be convinced to allow a few great apes and other by-then extinct species to be grown and released there.

But in our own time, all ideas still have not yet been exhausted. Now it is obvious that if a species is very desirable to humans in some way, resources and motivation will automatically appear to protect, cultivate, and enhance that species. The ordinary domesticated cow gives us the best of milk and meat, and so is helped to breed and live in its hundreds of millions; can you imagine what its numbers would be nowadays if the milk it gave was always sour and the meat incurably tough? (And if it hadn’t been lucky enough to become the eternal romantic obsession of a certain liberated and progressive Hindu god.) Clearly, some USE must be found for chimpanzees; as in the case of the cow and the sheep, it must be worth more to people alive — and in healthy numbers — than extinct, which is clearly not the case at present.

So I would like to propose that celebrity chefs such as Jamie Oliver cook up and give us their opinion on chimpanzee meat; if it were found to be spectacularly delicious, the continued existence of the chimpanzee would be secured in a flash. If some chef like Oliver gave it the thumbs-up, I myself would try it provided a) there were no illustrations on the package and b) it was made up to look like fish fingers. Perhaps I’ll live to attend my first wine-and-chimp party.

As a large, active, agile and fast-moving forest-dweller, intelligent enough to be taught to flee in terror at the sight of man, the chimpanzee could certainly make for an exciting big-game hunt. Entrepeneurs getting into this field would be required only to finance scientifically-enhanced breeding and reproduction, upon which they would be allowed to keep, as their incentive, as much surplus revenue as they could generate from the sale of (no doubt highly expensive) hunting licenses. Because the game-species takes a considerable period of time to come to maturity, the hunt would take place at a moderate but steady and controlled rate, and profit would be maximized and stabilized by taking a truly long business view; in other words, the private-enterprise chimpanzee hunting industry would be SUSTAINABLE. “Good Green Hunting.”

Unfortunately, after much racking of my brains, these are the only two really feasible ideas (both with plenty of real-world precedent, I might point out) that I can come up with; huntin’ and eatin’ the hairy little bastards. But that’s just me, unimaginative, realistic and practical. I wonder what a female mind could invent towards the practical, profitable survival of the great apes? It’s important to consider this, because females control a large and rapidly growing amount of domestic spending. How on earth could the chimpanzee, or any of its body parts, be transformed into something as psychically necessary to women as cosmetics? Solve that problem and you save the chimpanzee for all time.

I suppose these kinds of proposals won’t go over very well with the Jane Goodall crowd, but it should be perfectly obvious by now that such people would kill every last chimpanzee on Earth with their own teeth rather than see them used in any way they considered the least bit tasteless or embarassing (for which their code word is ‘exploitative’). They’re much more in love with their idea of themselves as saint-like animal saviors than they are with any really workable idea of actually increasing the chimpanzee’s odds of survival in a human-dominated world where it is basically a loser.

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