Education to Help Save Great Apes – Part 2 of 2

This is a summary of the second part of Sarah Etheridge's presentation at Pierce College in the Great Hall of the Student Community Center on Wednesday, March 9, 2011.

In the second part of Ethridge’s presentation, she focused on education where we live—what she is doing at College of the Canyons. Every semester when the topic of primates and bushmeat hunting came up in her Anthropoly classes, because people didn’t know much if anything about either, she decided to add information into the curriculum. She felt information was left out about the real world and how it affects us every day. When students come into an Introduction of Anthropology class, she feels they should leave with this knowledge.

Etheridge developed a ten question anonymous survey on conservation. Eleven out of one-hundred-seventy-four high school and college students in the Southern California region did not know of bushmeat. The reason most students knew about chimpanzees was through television, film, or medical testing. Many of them did not make the connection that primates would benefit through ecotourism. Almost everybody thought apes were intelligent, but, they did not make the connection that apes would probably suffer if they were kept in a cage because of that intelligence.

In Etheridge’s findings from the survey, she felt people did not understand the information. She had an informal discussion with her students about the results and why this might be the case for their thinking.

In the survey, Ethridge shared, she used ten common animals in Africa and Asia, all of which could benefit from conservation, but specifically targeting great apes. Chimpanzees are the animals most pursued for food, yet people put water buffalo because they think it is the closest thing to a cow. (Two out of one-hundred-and-seventy-five said chimpanzees.) The question asked, “What animal comes to mind for animal testing?” Everyone answered, “Chimpanzee.” On the topic of ecotourism, people wanted to see elephants and lions in the wild. People were not automatically connecting ecotourism with apes and other primates.

Another question asked, “What animal would you think of suffers being in a cage?”

The typical answer was a very large body animal.

She questioned, “When you think of a gorilla or chimpanzee, what kind of cage do you see?”

The response was, “The ones with the bars.”

She then asked, “If you’re putting a giraffe in a closed cage that‘s open, it’s just kind of boring, or the most intelligent animal in a little tiny steel cage, what doesn’t sound right about that?”

Etheridge concluded her presentation with, “It was that question that led them to realize that if they realize chimpanzee are intelligent, it’s that intelligence that is going to lead to problems if they are in those conditions.”

As a result, Etheridge feels there’s a benefit to push for a change in the curriculum—present current issues facing primates thus bringing primates into our real lives.