Education to Help Save Great Apes – Part 1 of 2

Sarah Etheridge, currently a teacher at College of the Canyons, California, did her in-the-field research in Africa and Borneo. Her lecture was the second anthropology lecture of the 2010-2011 academic year at Pierce College in the Great Hall of the Student Community Center on Wednesday, March 9, 2011.

Etheridge’s presentation was in two parts. The first part she defined bushmeat hunting and her work in-the-field regarding the concerns towards primates. The second part covered her research on the current curriculum at College of the Canyons regarding the education of bushmeat hunting. (Refer to Part 2 of 2 to posted at a later date.)

Through her research, Etheridge has discovered, more often than not, people do not know what bushmeat hunting is and how it affects primates (specifically great apes, chimpanzees and orangutans) and what can be done do to stop it.

Bushmeat hunting is humans killing any animal in the forest for food consumption. However, humans no longer hunt primates primarily as bushmeat for food but for profit. Because there is little supply of these primates in the forest, they are in high demand. Plus, hunting primates means a higher return for (little) time and energy expended.

How does this impact primates? Unlike other animals, primates take a long time to mature (as many as fifteen years) and they have long interbirth intervals—one offspring every five years. Bushmeat hunting is the number one threat to great apes. Often times the mothers and their offspring are targeted, because babies can be sold to pet trade, biomedical facilities or zoos. This is why we may see these animals become extinct.

Etheridge emphasized that we were not judging people who hunt. Often people do not hunt because they love to hunt but are forced to because of their economic situation.

Another concern regarding bushmeat hunting is the logging industry by Westerners. Sometimes primates are hunted just to make a statement to warn loggers that they will do what they want in their own community. This makes conservation of the primates much harder.

A few other issues are the entertainment, pets, and biomedical industry. First, she emphasized that primates used for movies and commercials are usually infants and cannot be trained with positive reinforcement. Therefore, they are trained with negative reinforcement (which is basically abusive). Case in point, an audience thinks it sees the look of a smiling, happy chimpanzee, but in reality, it is an unhappy, fear-driven, threatened animal. Next, those who keep chimpanzees as pets (because they are cute) have trouble because they are hard to control and they are strong. In their natural environment, a chimpanzees want to jump, climb, rip and scream. This behavior is not good in a home. In the end, they spend most of the time living in a cage or wearing a shock collar to be controlled. Lastly, the primates used in biomedical facilities come from the wild or are breed at the facility: often twenty to thirty to a cage or kept in a cage the size of a closet for their entire lives. They are not enriched with toys because they need to be kept in a sterile environment. Genetically, chimpanzees and humans are ninety-nine percent the same but that one percent is very different. Ultimately, that one percent difference creates all sorts of problems. Plus, there are other factors such as fear, stress, previous testing, and previous diseases.

The point of sharing this information, Etheridge explained, is to open your eyes and see primates in a different way and be informed. As consumers, help the cause. If you are buying furniture, ask if the wood is from a sustainable forest? Do not buy products that use primates—pictures of primates on greeting cards, in entertainment or for advertisements. A possible solution is to work with sanctuaries and eco-tourism to see these animals, where the profits of such visits generates money for conservation. But, the biggest solution Etheridge asserted is education.

In Etheridge’s in-the-field research, she learned that with the increase of “quality of life” (age, education and income) in an area, the more chimpanzees in the area. Therefore, she feels we should help the people where the primates are indigenous so they are our allies.