![]() The research my colleagues and I conduct isn’t harmful to the animals and, if it goes well, it will help us get a better grasp on the cognitive differences between humans and apes. However, since great apes are both cognitively sophisticated and human-like in their behaviour, they offer a strong test case for evaluating the morality of zoos in general. I’ve come to this view after working with great apes, and it might not extend to all species equally. However, animals have a good quality of life in many zoos, and there’s a strong moral case for why these institutions ought to exist. We’ve seen those terrible videos of solitary apes or tigers stalking barren cages in shopping malls in Thailand or China. Yes, some of them should certainly be closed. Such places ‘are for us rather than for animals’, the philosopher Dale Jamieson has written, and ‘they do little to help the animals we are driving to extinction’.īut I want to defend the value of zoos. Other critics claim that zoos are wrong even if the creatures aren’t suffering, because being held captive for human entertainment impugns their dignity. Even the best zoos force animals to live in confined spaces, they say, which means the animals must be bored and stressed from being watched all the time. Plenty of philosophers and primatologists agree with them. But some people, I’ve discovered, have big problems with zoos. ![]() If they probe any further, I tell them that I work with the great apes at Leipzig zoo. I’m a philosopher who works on the question of how language evolved, I reply. I get apprehensive whenever someone asks me about my job.
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