It is always fascinating to see how antivivisection groups jump on the results of animal behaviour research to push their case that animals are morally equivalent to humans. For example, the latest report by the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV), The Use of Primates in Experiments supposedly
‘explains the latest knowledge about the significant capacities of non-human primates - capacities once thought to be unique to humans’.
The report claims, for example, that
‘many primates share with humans the ability to remember past events, to have desires, to anticipate and plan for future events, to communicate, form concepts and have complex emotional and social experiences’.
We have no doubt that much of this is true. But we certainly wouldn’t take the word of the antivivisectionists alone. After all, for over 100 years they have simply rejected all evidence of the medical and scientific benefits of animal research, yet accept uncritically any animal behaviour research which apparently supports their position.
We guess that animal behaviourists would have a strong motivation to make their findings sound impressive. The BUAV report states that
‘even honeybees have now been shown to exhibit learning abilities formerly ascribed only to vertebrates’.
After so many million years of evolution we would expect insects to display complex behaviour and abilities. But doesn’t it sound dull to simply point out that honeybees exhibit honeybee-like behaviour. How much more exciting to ascribe honeybees a new and higher level of learning ability.
We are no experts on animal behaviour, but when it comes to the claim from the BUAV that ‘great apes use keyboards’, they are clearly not talking about apes in the wild. This activity must require a great deal of human intervention, which affects the interpretation of the results.
Once again, it is time for plain speaking to cut through some of the complex language the antivivisectionists used to describe animal behaviour. As Stuart Derbyshire pointed out in a paper for the Institute of Ideas, chimpanzees are doing much the same in the wild now as they were 100,000 years ago. All the research on animal behaviour cannot change that simple fact. As the Guardian Media Guide pointed out in its preamble to the Channel 4 documentary What Makes Us Human,
‘apes cannot ape, which is why they’re hanging from car tyres eating bananas and we’re running the world’.
And Channel 4, in popular style, lists
10 things that make us human. Our guess is that any sensible person could instantly recognise these distinctions between humans and animals.
<Wrap up...>
