The Million Dollar Question
July 16, 2000
GRASP™ Position Statement on a Planned Cross-Fostering Chimpanzee Experiment
The McDonnell Foundation has decided to award a million-dollar grant to Daniel Povinelli—a researcher at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette—in order to study differences between the reasoning methods of chimpanzees and humans.
Povinelli plans to raise infant chimpanzees in human homes, a practice termed cross-fostering. Later, after the infants have bonded with these families, they will be taken away and placed in a research environment.
We object to this grant and the suffering it will engender.
Povinelli claims the study will yield benefits for the parents of mentally disabled children. The notion that a chimpanzee raised in a bizarre environment is somehow equivalent to a mentally disabled child can only offer false hope to disabled human children and their families. And chimpanzees raised in a research environment are denied the opportunity to develop their own social lives, naturally rich and complex.
After 40 years of studying the emotional and social lives of chimpanzees in their natural environment, Dr. Jane Goodall explains that the suffering of chimpanzees is comparable to our own suffering. This compels us to intervene for the purpose of eliminating or reducing it. There is no morally relevant difference that could allow us to exploit young chimpanzees, but protect young humans.
Povinelli proves that a troubling belief in the moral neutrality of science is still held by some of its practitioners. Restrictions on the use of human research subjects provide evidence to the contrary. It is crucial that informed consent be obtained from the subjects themselves.
Such restrictions on science acknowledge the moral worth of human beings, a moral worth that is not superseded by medical crisis, the number of suffering humans, or the value attached to new knowledge.
Currently, New Zealand is taking legislative measures to ban experiments on non-human great apes except in the rare case where a study might benefit the apes themselves. This parallels the respect we accord human beings who are unable to give informed consent.
Povinelli points out that his research subjects will, after a time, be kept in a leafy observatory. But as the New Zealand legislators have indicated, merely providing an improved research environment for the apes is not ethically sufficient. These intelligent, social beings simply do not belong in experiments for the benefit of others.
That chimpanzees will suffer as a result of Povinelli’s studies is incontestable. Dr. Roger Fouts, after working with cross-fostered chimpanzees for more than 30 years, notes that even with the best possible care, cross-fostered chimpanzees typically experience severe depression for over a decade after the research, and suffer from neurotic symptoms throughout their lives.
He states:
“Povinelli’s project is clearly not original and appears to be redundant with previous cross-fostering studies… In the end, we will be responsible for creating a child who will never be integrated into human society, and at best will become a misfit in chimpanzee society.”
While people perform Nero-like research on chimpanzees artificially perpetuated in research environments — the better to provide us with a new class of slave, or lab animal — the approaching extinction of chimpanzees in their own territory is a clear and present international emergency. For the benefit of everyone — human beings and other great apes — we believe the McDonnell Foundation could better spend its money on research into ensuring that the natural culture of the great apes shall endure.
News Update
Chimp Cross Fostering Study Cancelled - news update on the David Povinelli grant situation, article originally published in The Times (“Academia’s Weekly Newspaper”) by Penny Brown Roberts, September 13, 2000