SPECIES BARRIER?

On August 16, 1996, at the Brookfield Zoo near Chicago, a 3-year-old boy fell 18 feet onto the concrete floor of a gorilla enclosure. He hit his head and lay unconscious. A 7-year-old gorilla mother named Binti Jua, with her own baby on her back, picked up the child. She carried him and placed him near a door within easy reach of zoo staff. He was then taken to hospital, where he made a speedy recovery.

This act of Binti JuaÆs attracted media attention worldwide, with æexpertsÆ who had never met her and who had little knowledge of her as an individual making statements about what she is like. Some denied that this was æaltruismÆ. It was claimed that she had learned her parenting skills from her human keepers. Although how she had learned to take the boy to the nearest point to human assistance is yet to be explained.

Binti Jua, by taking action to help a defenseless human child in trouble, has awakened a chord of compassion in many of us. BintiÆs act of kindness demonstrated that there is more to her and other gorillas than many of us have thought. Yet when we look in the mirror, it is clear that gorillas have not been treated with anywhere near equal compassion by our own species.

The GAP was formed to change the way humans treat other great apes. Currently, all non-human great apes are treated by human laws as property, as æthingsÆ without rights. GAP is seeking to change the law to give all great apes the right to life, the protection of individual liberty, and freedom from torture.

Can anyone look at Binti JuaÆs actions and still say that this is an unreasonable request?

Scientific Evidence

In recent years the scientific community has accumulated a large body of evidence which shows that our fellow great apes - gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans - are also complex, sensitive individuals, with their own wants and needs, and extensive social structures.

Roger Fouts, Codirector of the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute, Professor of Psychology at Central Washington University and member of the Executive Committee of the Great Ape Project-USA said:

ôBintiÆs behavior has demonstrated what modern biology since Darwin has been trying to tell us, namely that humans are not different in kind from our fellow animals. Binti clearly demonstrates that, just as some humans are capable of compassion, caring and altruistic acts, so too are some members of the gorilla species. Comparable compassionate acts have also been observed in chimpanzees, monkeys, dogs, cats, horses and others.

ôObviously compassionate empathy is an adaptive trait. If it were not, very few infants of any species with long childhoods that depend on their motherÆs compassionate empathy would survive. Emotions have a long evolutionary history, both those that we value and those that we fear.ö

Bridging the Gap

Peter SingerÆs comment was: ôBintiÆs behavior has surprised millions of Americans only because we are brought up to believe that humans are separated from animals by an unbridgeable gulf. In fact, the Great Apes are capable of altruism, and of thought.ö

GAP applauds the national and international recognition given to Binti Jua for her caring efforts. We now ask that humans reciprocate by recognizing in law the importance of all individual great apes.

An Intriguing Person

The American magazine People later declared Binti Jua one of the ô25 Most Intriguing Peopleö of 1996. According to People: ôBinti-Jua became a rallying symbol of her endangered species - and an example to us all.ö She ôreminded her friends up the evolutionary ladder [sic] that behaving like an animal may not be such an ignoble thing after all.ö

ôWhile most people have probably forgotten about Binti the gorilla, who saved the child at Brookfield Zoo, I have not. My name is also Binti. I found it ironic to hear about Binti the gorilla, because my mother Birute Galdikas has spent 25 years studying another great ape, the orangutan. I myself was born in Indonesia, and was raised for the first three years of my life in the jungles of Borneo. I was given a Dayak name which means æa bird that flies highÆ in their language. Binti the gorillaÆs name comes from the Swahili language and means ædaughter of sunshine.Æ

ôAfter BintiÆs dramatic rescue of the child, media interviewers and pundits expressed surprise that a gorilla would rescue a human child. Some of them suggested that the gorillaÆs actions were a result of her being hand-raised by humans. I found it funny that the interviewers could think that humans were the only animals capable of kindness. I find it even more ironic that a gorilla, who shares 98% of her genetic material with us, whose species is going extinct because of human greed, could save one of our children, while we, the so-called compassionate ones, destroy their habitat and children every day.ö